California’s first-in-nation reparations taskforce releases final report
California’s first-in-the-nation reparations taskforce released its final report with recommendations for how the state should atone for its history of racial violence and discrimination against Black residents on Thursday.
This document, which could serve as a national model for how governments can attempt to right the wrongs of the past, marks the end of a nearly three-year effort that began in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing reckoning around systemic racism and anti-Blackness in the US.
The nearly-1,100-page document includes detailed examples of historical discrimination against Black Californians that have persisted for more than a century and affect nearly all areas of life. The taskforce recommended that the state legislature make a formal apology to Black residents for “the atrocities committed by California state actors who promoted, facilitated, enforced, and permitted the institution of chattel slavery … incidents of slavery that form the systemic structures of discrimination”, the report reads.
The report suggests more than 100 ways to repair the harm, including paying descendants of enslaved people for having suffered under racist actions such as over-policing and housing discrimination.
“This book of truth will be a legacy, will be a testament to the full story,” said Lisa Holder, a civil rights attorney and taskforce member. “Anyone who says that we are colorblind, that we have solved the problem of antiBlack ... racism, I challenge you to read this document.”
To reach these demands, taskforce members had to distill input from hundreds of experts and deliberate on who exactly would qualify for reparations and which areas of society, like housing and education, were the most pressing to address. Over more than two years, the nine-person team of civil rights leaders, attorneys, lawmakers and academics held 15 public meetings to gather information and hear expert testimony about California’s history of discrimination.
Though California became a free state in 1850, 15 years before the emancipation proclamation was signed, it did not enact any laws to guarantee freedom for all. For over a decade, the state supreme court enforced the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed for the capture and return of runaway enslaved people. In the decades after slavery was abolished, Black Californians experienced redlining, discriminatory housing practices and segregation in schools.
The reparations taskforce in June 2022 released a 500-page report that detailed 170 years of state-sanctioned discrimination and described “segregation, racial terror [and] harmful racist neglect” inflicted on Black people across the US and in California. “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,” the report concluded.
Since California codified its taskforce at the end of September 2020, cities including San Francisco, Boston and Detroit have established their own committees to explore what atoning for injustices suffered by Black Americans could look like. And while California was the first state to form an official committee, the effort is part of a broader decades-long collective campaign by racial justice activists and scholars to get the US to not only acknowledge historic harms but put money behind righting wrongs.
Fervor around reparations has swelled to unprecedented levels since 2020. There is no universally agreed upon standard for what reparations for Black Americans should look like. Actions from direct cash payments to returning land to Black families are all being pursued in various capacities across the nation.
California’s taskforce also recommended that state legislators create a new agency, akin to the freedmen’s bureau, which was established in 1865 to support formerly enslaved Black Americans. In this present context, the new agency would handle the implementation of the reparations plan, oversee direct payments and determine the eligibility of those seeking reparations.
Thursday’s meeting coincided with the US supreme court striking down affirmative action in higher education, programs that have disproportionately helped Black students. The ruling will not affect public colleges or universities in California because its voters eliminated state and local government affirmative action in 1996.
Taskforce members said their suggestions will pass legal muster because the benefits suggested would only go to descendants of enslaved people, not to all Black residents.