California lawmakers announced the nation’s first set of reparations bills on Wednesday, with legislation that would require the state to recognize and apologize for systemic racism against Black residents for nearly two centuries.
The 14 proposed bills tackle a wide range of areas of discrimination, from mass incarceration to housing segregation, but do not include any financial compensation for descendants of longtime Black residents affected by the legacy of slavery, the most controversial recommendation to emerge from California’s previous reparations taskforce report.
“While many only associate direct cash payments with reparations, the true meaning of the word, to repair, involves much more,” Lori Wilson, a state assemblymember and the chair of the California Legislative Black caucus (CLBC), said in a statement announcing the legislation. Wilson said the reparations package offered “a comprehensive approach to dismantling the legacy of slavery and systemic racism”.
California’s reparations taskforce, formed in the wake of the nationwide racial justice protests in 2020 that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, released a 500-page report in 2022, documenting more than 170 years of state-sanctioned racism against Black residents, and followed it with a 1,100-page final report in 2023, that included a long list of potential ways the state could redress and repair these historic wrongs, including individual cash payments.
The reports attribute the enduring wealth gap between Black and white Americans to generations of “atrocities in nearly every sector of civil society” including “segregation, racial terror, [and] harmful racist neglect”.
The CLBC said the “first step” of its reparations package would be a resolution, ACR 135, that recognizes “how laws in California were crafted to directly cause harm to its Black residents”, and that it would be followed by a bill requesting a formal apology by California’s governor and its legislature for the role California played in human rights violations against African slaves and their descendants.
The CLBC’s other bills include some sweeping measures and many smaller ones. Responding to the increased attention to how Black Californians’ property was repeatedly seized by local governments without proper compensation, one bill would “restore property taken during race-based uses of eminent domain to its original owners or provide another effective remedy where appropriate, such as restitution or compensation”. Another would “amend the California Constitution to prohibit involuntary servitude for incarcerated persons”.
Other bills would prohibit discrimination against natural hairstyles in competitive sports, require that grocery stores in underserved communities provide public notification before they close, block the state’s prison system from banning books without review, and create grant programs to expand access to career technical education in Stem fields and to fund “community-driven solutions to decrease community violence” in African American communities.
The proposals, only some of which have been released with the full text of the legislation, have been met with both praise and skepticism.
Jonathan Burgess, a Sacramento firefighter who has been a prominent supporter of reparations, told CalMatters that the legislation was “phenomenal” and that “it’s a monumental, profound time”.
Erika Smith, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times,called it “one of the most half-baked package of bills that I’ve ever seen”, adding, “I hope this gets better.”
California’s first-in-the-nation state reparations effort has inspired individual cities, including San Francisco, Boston and Detroit, to form their own taskforces to consider reparations for Black residents. But it has also sparked thorny debates over who should be eligible for reparations, as well as major rightwing backlash, particularly with the 2023 taskforce recommendation that descendants of both enslaved and free Black Americans who lived in the US in the 19th century should receive financial payments as compensation for generations of discriminatory treatment.
While a majority of California voters believe the “legacy of slavery continues to impose a toll on Black residents”, reparations through cash payments to individuals are unpopular among most voters, according to an August 2023 poll.
The poll found that 75% of Black California voters supported reparations payments, but majorities of white, Asian and Pacific Islander and Latino voters opposed them.
