California has created a reparations task force that is estimating a compensation package for housing discrimination for Black citizens to total $569 billion. The money is to be paid to state residents who identify as “Black” or “African American.”
After Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation in 2020 which issued a study on reparations the nine-member task force was created. Recently, the assembled task force recommend different ways to educate the public as well as recommend remedies for past offenses.
“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” Jovan Scott Lewis, Ph.D., a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and member of the task force.
The task force released a 500-page interim report this past summer that detailed what it called badges and incidents that “remain embedded in the political, legal, health, financial, educational, cultural, environmental, social, and economic systems of the United States of America.”
Most know reparations packages as compensation to black Americans for chattel slavery, however, California’s task force focuses heavily on government policy enacted post-Reconstruction.
“In California, federal, state, and local governments created segregation through discriminatory federal housing policies, zoning ordinances, decisions on where to build schools, and discriminatory federal mortgage policies known as redlining,” the report says.
The task force’s final report is due in June 2023. At this time it is unclear if lawmakers will adopt any of the panel’s recommendations into law. “That is why we must put forward a robust plan, with plenty of options,” explained Dr. Lewis.
At a public. meeting a task force member told the audience that it would be a “major hurdle” to get state legislators to pass a reparations plan.
“For a state that didn’t have slavery, don’t think they’re going to be quick to vote on this final product of this task force,” said California State Sen. Steven Bradford. “We need to stay unified, we need to be together. We aren’t always going to agree, but we have to put forth a unified front.”
