California reparations panel OKs apology, payments to Black residents
OAKLAND, Calif. — California’s reparations task force voted Saturday to approve recommendations for how the state may compensate and apologize to Black residents for generations of harm caused by discriminatory policies.
The nine-member committee, which first convened nearly two years ago, gave final approval at a meeting in Oakland to a hefty list of proposals that will then go to state lawmakers to consider for reparations legislation.
US Representative Barbara Lee, an Oakland Democrat who is cosponsoring a bill in Congress
to study restitution proposals for Black Americans, at the meeting 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.
The panel’s first vote approved a detailed account of historical discrimination against Black Californians in areas such as voting, housing, education, disproportionate policing and incarceration and others.
Other recommendations on the table ranged from the creation of a new agency to provide services to descendants of enslaved people to calculations on what the state owes them.
“An apology and an admission of wrongdoing just by itself is not going to be satisfactory,” said Chris Lodgson, an organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, a reparations advocacy group.
An apology crafted by lawmakers must “include a censure of the gravest barbarities” carried out on behalf of the state, according to the task force’s approved draft recommendation.
Those would include a condemnation of former governor Peter Hardeman Burnett, the state’s first elected governor and a white supremacist who encouraged laws to exclude Black people from California.
After California entered the union in 1850 as a “free” state, it did not enact any laws to guarantee freedom for all, the draft recommendation notes. 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.
“By participating in these horrors, California further perpetuated the harms African Americans faced, imbuing racial prejudice throughout society through segregation, public and private discrimination, and unequal disbursal of state and federal funding,” the draft says.