California task force recommends reparations to descendants of slavery

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California slavery reparations overview: 

• Who: California’s nine-member reparations task force has voted to approve draft recommendations on how to compensate Black residents over generations’ worth of discriminatory policies. 
• Why: The draft recommendations would compensate Black residents who the panel agreed have been harmed by discriminatory policies in areas such as voting, housing, education and policing, among other things.
• Where: California.

A slavery reparations task force in California has voted to approve recommendations on how the state may apologize to and compensate generations of Black residents who were subjected to discriminatory policies. 

The nine-member committee, which was assembled almost two years ago, gave its OK to a list of proposals that will now be put in front of state legislators deciding whether to make them official legislation, The Associated Press reports. 

Before approving the recommendations, the panel also reportedly approved a comprehensive account of historical discrimination against the state’s Black residents, in areas such as voting, housing, education and incarceration, among other things. 

The approved recommendations, meanwhile, included, among other things, creating an agency that would provide services to descendants of enslaved people, and calculations for the amount of compensation Black residents are owed, reports the AP. 

Lawmakers must reportedly apologize to Black residents — per the approved recommendations — on behalf of the state and condemn the state’s first elected governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett. 

Additionally, the state reportedly must not only acknowledge the past wrongs perpetrated against its Black residents, but also promise not to repeat them. The apology, which must be public, will be done in front of descendants of enslaved individuals. 

California must pay reparations to eligible Black residents in ‘cash or its equivalent,’ draft recommendations say

Also approved was a section of the draft recommendations that said Black residents eligible for reparations should be paid in either “cash or its equivalent,” with some economists estimating the state could end up owing more than $800 billion in total, the AP reports. 

The draft recommendation reportedly notes that, upon entering the union in 1850 as a so-called “free state,” that California did not enact any laws guaranteeing all residents would have freedom. 

Instead, the state’s Supreme Court would enforce — for over a decade before emancipation — a federal law called the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it legal to capture and return an enslaved person who had run away, according to the draft recommendation. 

California has previously apologized for both violence and mistreatment committed against Native Americans and for interning Japanese Americans in camps during World War II, the AP reports. 

In March 2021, Jesuit priests belonging to the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States pledged to raise $100 million to pay reparations to descendants of persons the order had formerly enslaved.

What do you think of the California reparation task force’s decision? Let us know in the comments. 

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