A California taskforce on reparations voted this weekend to approve recommendations on how the state may compensate and apologize to Black residents for generations of harm caused by discriminatory policies.
The committee, the first of its kind in the United States, gave final approval to a hefty list of proposals, including cash payments to descendants of enslaved people.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who is co-sponsoring a bill in Congress to study restitution proposals for African Americans, said the work of the taskforce could be a national model, and called on states and the federal government to pass reparations legislation.
“Reparations are not only morally justifiable, but they have the potential to address longstanding racial disparities and inequalities,” Lee said.
Here’s what you need to know:
What is the taskforce?
The taskforce was formed in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, after the approval of a state law requiring the study and development of reparations proposals.
The nine-person team, which includes civil rights leaders, attorneys, lawmakers and academics, spent more than two years listening to expert testimony, hosting public meetings and considering proposals. It held 15 public meetings and interviewed more than a hundred experts.
What did the taskforce approve?
In the draft of the final report that was approved on Saturday, the panel gives a detailed account of historical discrimination against Black Californians in areas such as voting, housing, education, disproportionate policing and incarceration and others.
The draft recommends lawmakers craft an apology on behalf of the state that must “include a censure of the gravest barbarities”.
The panel also recommends creating a new agency to provide services to descendants of enslaved people, and it advises the state makes cash payments to people eligible for restitution. The group also suggests criteria for eligibility and a model for calculating the amount of those payments, if lawmakers were to approve them.
The taskforce recommends two avenues for compensation: cumulative compensation for an eligible class and particular compensation for individuals for provable harms. The panel suggests the cumulative compensation would take into account several categories of community harms, including health disparities, mass incarceration and over-policing, and housing discrimination. Unlike particular compensation, cumulative compensation would not require any member of the eligible class to provide evidence documenting their harm.
And the group proposes a host of police changes, including declaring election day a paid state holiday, restoring voting rights to all formerly and currently incarcerated people, and implementing rent caps in historically redlined neighborhoods.
Who would be eligible for payments?
The taskforce voted in Mach 2022 to recommend limiting reparations to Californians who are descendants of enslaved or free Black people who were in the US by the end of the 19th century.
Supporters of that decision argued that reparations should be available to direct descendants of slaves along with descendants of Black residents who were free and migrated to the country in the 19th century, given the challenges in documenting genealogy and the risk at the time of becoming enslaved.
Some on the taskforce had pushed for reparations for all Black Californians, regardless of lineage, arguing that they continue to suffer from inequality in areas such as housing, education, employment and criminal justice. They raised concerns about the difficulties of proving lineage, noting that enslavers often shipped people to work in various plantations across the US and outside of the country.
What happens next?
The proposals are far from implementation. The panel will meet one more time, and send its final report to the legislature by 1 July. Lawmakers will then need to weigh its recommendations. Two state lawmakers who sit on the panel are expected to lead that effort.
Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, one of two lawmakers on the panel, told the Cal Matters news site the deliberations will take time: “Giving the impression that funds will become readily available – or that cash payments are recommended by the taskforce to rectify marginalization caused by generations of reckless policies and laws – is not focusing on the real work of the taskforce or the report itself. There is a process by which the legislature will look at and discuss all recommendations, and that will take some time.”
Among the most difficult issues for lawmakers to decide on is the amount of cash payments if they were to be approved. Some estimates from economists have projected that the state could owe upwards of $800bn, or more than 2.5 times its annual budget, in reparations. The figure in the latest draft report released by the taskforce is far lower.
Lawmakers’ decisions would then have to be approved by the California governor, Gavin Newsom.
What is California’s legacy?
California joined the union as a “free state” in 1850, 11 years before the civil war, but it did not enact any laws to guarantee freedom for all, the draft recommendation notes.
In fact, the state supreme court enforced the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed for the capture and return of runaway enslaved people, until for over a decade until emancipation.
Experts testified to the commission about the years of discrimination that followed after slavery was abolished, from environmental racism to the state’s history of redlining, discriminatory housing practices and segregation in schools.
In June 2022, the commission released a 500-page report that detailed 170 years of state-sanctioned discrimination through housing policies, political disenfranchisement and environmental injustice. The report extensively described “segregation, racial terror, harmful racist neglect” inflicted on Black people across the US and in California.
The report concluded that “atrocities in nearly every sector of civil society have inflicted harms, which cascade over a lifetime and compound over generations, resulting in the current wealth gap between Black and white Americans”.
