After groundbreaking slave reparations report, what next?

Reparations experts and advocates largely welcomed a move by California to publicly document its role in perpetuating discrimination against African Americans but wondered if the slew of recommendations in its report released this week will result in measurable change.

“The danger here is that everyone reads it and nods their heads and waits on the task force to initiate the response,” said Justin Hansford, a longtime reparations advocate and professor of law at Howard, who called the report an exciting development. “We need to have universities, local governments, businesses and others working together to do their part to address some of the recommendations,” said Hansford, who also serves as the director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center in Washington, D.C.

The 500-page document released Wednesday details the harms suffered by descendants of enslaved people and how federal, state and local laws, public officials and the courts were active in sustaining systemic racism in all facets of life for African Americans, despite the abolition of slavery in the 19th century.

The California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, which was created by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020, recommended a long list of actions the state can take to address the racial wealth gap, including housing reforms, reducing mass incarceration, creating a state-subsidized mortgage program for qualifying African American applicants and by offering free tuition to California colleges and universities and expanding scholarship opportunities.

“This country has ignored the harmful history the African American community has faced in this country and the inequities the community continues to face for far too long. This is a monumental moment not only for the State of California but the United States,” said Rick Callender, president of the California Hawaii State Conference NAACP in Sacramento, California.

“When reports such as these are created for the first time in the nation’s history, they are a compelling model for other states to address the same issues. As California goes, so goes the nation,” Callender said in a statement to The Associated Press.

The task force, which began meeting in June 2021, will release a comprehensive reparations plan next year. The committee voted in March to limit reparations to the descendants of African Americans living in the U.S. in the 19th century, overruling advocates who wanted to expand compensation to all Black people in the U.S.