The reparations debate is just beginning. Come July, the controversy will accelerate as the California Repairs Task Force sets a price for the repairs and lawmakers and Governor Newsom debate how to pay for them. Despite the label shock, other blue states and some congressional Democrats may follow.
“California repairs will be the norm,” says board member Reginald Jones-Sawyer. “They will take our plan and start with that to determine what the national reparations will be.”
In a 500-page interim report, the 9-member California task force details what it sees as 300 years of repression and discrimination for which African-Americans deserve compensation. He cites government policies, Jim Crow laws, and red lining as causing the wealth gap between black and white communities.
“America must admit its sin,” says the Rev. Amos Brown, a member of the San Francisco committee proposing to pay each black resident up to $5 million in reparations. “Atone it and act in terms of providing concrete measures that pay for the wrong that was done.”
SAN FRAN REPAIRS COMMITTEE PROPOSES $5 MILLION TO EVERY BLACK LONG-TERM RESIDENT, FULL DEBT FORGIVENESS
The solution: Comprehensive repairs to prevent African Americans from being trapped in substandard housing, polluted neighborhoods, and substandard schools.
“Repairs are promised and due,” says committee member and state senator Steven Bradford.
The state commission, created by legislation Newsom signed in 2020, has yet to put a price on reparations, but the recommended remedy for housing discrimination alone topped $560 billion, or $223,000 for each offspring. qualified as a Negro living in the US prior to 1900 now residing in the state of California.
Eligibility for the San Francisco payment is slightly different. You must be 18 years old, identify as Black or African American for at least ten years. Alternatively, he could have been born in the city between 1940 and 1996. A connection to slavery is not necessary. You may qualify for reparations for being “personally or a direct descendant of someone imprisoned for the failed drug war.” The plan also calls for the city to supplement the income of low-income recipients to reflect area median income (AMI), about $97,000, annually for at least 250 years.
California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks during a press conference in San Francisco, California.
((Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images))
“The idea of reparations in California is nuanced,” says a member of the San Francisco task force.
Prof. James Taylor of the University of San Francisco. “This is not Georgia, this is not Alabama, where black people were put in chains. Black people came here because it was a free state, but when they got here, the contradiction is that there was still racial prejudice.”
Some argue that California’s reparations have more to do with social justice than slavery, since California was not a slave-owning state during the Civil War. The militias here were multi-ethnic, and the regiments fought on behalf of the Union, driving Confederate soldiers from Arizona and New Mexico back to Texas. It is also complicated when it comes to separating black Afro-descendants from the Caribbean or from nations complicit in the slave trade. Still, several progressive cities — Boston, Providence, Amherst, Massachusetts, Evanston, Illinois, St. Louis, and St. Paul, Minnesota — have appointed task forces exploring how to pay reparations to black Americans.
“Repairs are not charity, they are not a gift,” says Trahern Crews of the St. Paul Repair Advisory Committee in Minnesota. “It is something that is owed, it is a debt for 400 years of slavery.”
BURGESS OWENS CRITICISMS SAN FRANCISCO’S $5 MILLION REPAIR PLAN: ‘CONDESCENDING, COUNTERPRODUCTIVE, ILLOGICAL’
How to pay for it and what is politically realistic is another matter.
San Francisco is facing a $728 million deficit, yet its repair committee is also proposing to forgive home mortgages, student loans and credit card debt because “black households have more expensive or riskier debt.”
The city has 44,000 black residents, if even half qualify for repairs, experts put the price tag at more than $100 billion. Blacks make up just 5% of San Francisco, compared to 34% Asian and 15% Latino; neither group is likely to acknowledge that they experienced less hardship in the US than African-Americans. Nationwide, black households have a median wealth of $24,100 and Hispanics $36,000 compared to median wealth for white households of $188,200, according to the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
View of San Francisco from the Golden Gate Bridge. The Bay Area was hit by a 5.1 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday.
(Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
The city is 45% white. A Pew Research poll in November found that nationally 80% of whites oppose reparations, though Democrats are nearly evenly split on the issue.
“This isn’t about black people trying to get something from white people in terms of begging and borrowing. This is about the injuries and disadvantages that these states have imposed on people for decades and centuries,” Taylor says. “Locally, it’s about… not slavery at all. It’s about discrimination, housing, other forms of discrimination around work and jobs.”
Financially, California isn’t much better off, facing a $25 billion deficit. Is it politically realistic to hand out billions when the state hasn’t built a dam in 40 years, its public schools rank 48th in the nation, it’s home to 1/3 of the nation’s welfare recipients, and it ranks ranked number 1 in homeless population? I posed that question to State Assemblyman Reginald Jones-Sawyer, who is on the state’s repair task force. He doesn’t expect a one-time payment, but rather a bonus, new taxes, or a new source of income that builds income over time.
Los Angeles, California – September 22, 2022 California Repair Task Force Chair Kamilah Moore speaks as the task force meets to hear public input on repairs at the California Science Center in Los Angeles on September 22, 2022.
(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
“I think justifying the number is a really important step,” he said. “And then coming up with a methodology of how to pay it off that makes sense to most, if not all Americans, will trump that. As long as you can not only justify it, but also come up with a credible plan that makes sense over a period of time, that could alleviate a lot of what you call etiquette shock.”
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Jones-Sawyer believes the California debate will be enough to stimulate other states. Democrats in Congress considered a bill last year for Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas seeking reparations and a national apology for slavery. He would have set up a commission to “examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies, but he died in committee. With Republicans currently in control of the House, that effort is probably over.” dead”. .
