California reparations task force sends ambitious plan to Newsom

The California Reparations Task Force sent its landmark report to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state legislature Thursday, leaving it to elected officials to decide whether taxpayers should pay hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits to Black descendants of slavery.

At a final meeting that turned into a reparations rally, task force members urged the cheering crowd to pressure lawmakers to approve the recommendations in the 1,100-page report, which include a host of government programs, free services and cash payments of up to $1.2 million per eligible resident.

“This state has committed a crime against Black folks, and it’s time for them to pay their crime bill,” declared Amos C. Brown, task force vice president, as the packed crowd in Sacramento roared.

The task force has avoided putting a price tag on the report’s recommendations, but economists estimated the cost during a March meeting at more than $800 billion, or almost three times the size of the state’s annual $300 billion budget.

Even so, panelists rejected arguments that the proposals are financially unrealistic in a state grappling with a projected budget deficit of nearly $32 billion.

“Don’t come telling us that you don’t have the money,” Mr. Brown said. “Where I come from in Mississippi, they had what you called a layaway plan. And if you can’t pay it because of deficits — deficits don’t last always.”

The nine-member task force, which has been working for two years, officially disbands Friday, but state Sen. Steven Bradford, a Democrat, told the audience that the “final report is not the end of the work. It is really just the beginning.”

“It requires each and every one of us to stay engaged in this process,” said Mr. Bradford, a task force member.

“The job of the task force was not to implement anything. It was simply to recommend and to advise. It’s now up to the state legislature, which I’m part of, and the governor to implement, but you guys have to stay engaged,” he said.

The report’s more than 100 recommendations include a formal state apology and a state agency to administer reparations programs, as well as tangentially related proposals to end the death penalty, limit rents in formerly red-lined areas, and overturn Proposition 209, which bans public affirmative action programs.

Those eligible for compensation are Black residents who are descendants of American slaves or of free Black people who lived before the end of the 19th century.

Those criteria would exclude about 20% of California’s 2.6 million Black population.

The compensation would be based on formulas calculating a person’s years of residency during periods of discrimination in housing, health care, unjust property takings, business devaluation, and “overpolicing” and incarceration during the “war on drugs.”

California entered the union in 1850, when the slavery issue was tearing the nation apart, as a free state.

Yet it erected discriminatory practices in housing, business, policing, education and the legal system that kept Black residents at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, according to the massive report.

“People often say, why California? California was a free state, but in name only, not in practice,” Mr. Bradford said. “The first governor of this state owned slaves and was proud of it. If you were brought here as a slave, you were treated as a slave. If you gave birth here as a slave, that child was born a slave.”

Wedging the report’s ambitious recommendations into a viable legislative package looms as a herculean political task even in California, a virtual one-party Democratic state known for taking the national lead on liberal issues.

In 2020, Mr. Newsom signed legislation to create the task force, but he gave a less-than-enthusiastic response to the initial recommendations in May, saying that dealing with the legacy of slavery was about “much more than cash payments.”

The governor did not attend the task force’s final meeting, which was held at the Secretary of State building in Sacramento, but several Democratic lawmakers and Attorney General Rob Bonta pledged their support.

“Reparations for African Americans are appropriate. They are warranted, they are necessary, they are needed,” Mr. Bonta said.

“It’s my hope that the legislature, as I know it will, takes these determinations seriously and carefully and considers how to lift the proposals before them from the page to reality, into action,” he said.

Whether California taxpayers are willing to pick up the tab is another question. Polls show that reparations aren’t popular with the voters, including those in California.

A Pew Research Center poll posted in November found U.S. adults opposed to slavery reparations by 68% to 30%.

An Emerson College/Inside California Politics survey released June 12 found that 50% opposed giving $1.2 million payments to descendants of slavery, while 28% supported it.

Hoover Institution fellow Bill Whalen suggested that the governor and legislature could sidestep the political heat by placing a reparations proposal on the ballot for voters to decide.

“But why would Newsom and lawmakers leave it up to voters to decide reparations’ fate? Again, a cynical political take: they know a majority of voters won’t sign off on the plan,” Mr. Whalen said in a May 18 op-ed.

He noted that the voters rejected a 2020 opportunity to overturn Proposition 209, the affirmative action ban passed in 1996, by 57% to 43%.

Supporters of reparations argue that other groups have received compensation. President Reagan signed a bill giving $20,000 each to surviving Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Critics point out that those checks were given only to the living victims, not to their descendants.

Despite the shaky polling, other blue states have jumped on the reparations bandwagon.

Illinois launched a state reparations commission earlier this year, and the New York legislature approved a bill this month to form its own commission on slavery reparations.

A San Francisco reparations panel issued a draft proposal in January that included $5 million cash payments for eligible residents, as well as a guaranteed income of $97,000 for at least 250 years, which would effectively bankrupt the city.

In California, supporters of reparations have suggested a piecemeal approach, such as giving eligible residents down payments or credits until the funding becomes available.

Mr. Bradford broached the idea of an annuity, saying that putting away 0.5% of the state’s annual $300 billion budget would generate $1.5 billion a year.

He argued that California has thrown away money on projects such as high-speed rail, which has yet to operate despite being a money pit for more than 15 years.

“No one asked how we paid for high-speed rail that many in the legislature called the train to nowhere,” Mr. Bradford said. “That is now beyond $100 billion, but we find money to do that. This is our priority.”