The California reparations taskforce released 115 recommendations. Will any become law?

The California reparations task force met for its 16th and final hearing Thursday, passing a report to state legislators with 115 policy recommendations spread across its 1,100 pages.

Now, lawmakers will decide whether to codify the panel’s work into law. But recent votes by the Legislature, waning public support and the Supreme Court decision ruling affirmative action unconstitutional signal an uphill climb.

“The final report is not the end of the work. It is really just the beginning,” said state Senator Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, one of the two state legislators who served on the task force.

“This is going to be the start of another lengthy process. We won’t do it in one legislative cycle. We won’t do it in one bill,” he said. “(Reparations) could include cash payments. It could include free tuition to our UCs and CSUs. It could be first-time homebuyer assistance down payments, Interest-free loans, state tax relief, free healthcare — on and on and on,”

The 12-member legislative Black Caucus received the report and will lead the effort to turn its contents into laws when the next session begins in December.

Bradford’s cautionary comments referenced past opposition the Legislature had shown to the kinds of policies the task force favors. He pointed to the failure of ACA 3 last year, a measure to remove “involuntary solitude” as punishment from the state constitution.

Hundreds gathered in March Fong Eu Secretary of State Building’s auditorium for the four-hour hearing, just after the U.S. Supreme Court released a decision effectively ending affirmative action. Task force Chair Kamilah Moore said that the panel anticipated this decision and that most of the recommendations are based on harm or lineage, not race. In other words, descendants of the enslaved, or those harmed by racially discriminatory policies and practices, would be the recipients of reparations.

The final hearing included public comments, personal testimony and delivery of the final report to Attorney General Rob Bonta, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and the Legislature’s Black Caucus.

The task force was created by AB 3121, authored by then-Assemblywoman Weber and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. For the past two years, its nine members — lawyers, scholars, civil rights activists, a psychologist and elected officials — have convened with the public to develop recommendations for the atonement of slavery and racial discrimination.

Task force asks for formal apology, 115 reparations proposals

The final report was the second produced by the task force. Its recommended policies range from direct cash payments to property tax relief for African Americans living in formerly red-lined neighborhoods.

“Chattel slavery, sharecropping, convict leasing, de jure and de facto segregation, redlining, educational funding discrepancies, predatory financial practices, unfair labor practices, chronic unemployment, medical experimentation, intellectual property degradation, environmental racism, brutality, anti-African American hate crimes, vigilante violence, extra-judicial terror, War on Drugs, mass incarceration, unfair sentencing, the school to prison pipeline, extreme poverty, homelessness, gentrification — we have been relegated to the bottom of the caste system,” said Chair Kamilah Moore.

“We are resiliently surviving the after-lives of descent-based chattel slavery. In fact, African Americans have been historically burdened with confronting the lingering incidents of slavery without significant government aid or private action.”

The panel recommends that the state issue a formal apology. Nine states — Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia — have officially apologized for their involvement in the enslavement of Africans.

The report also included work by economists to quantify the economic harm from discriminatory policies and practices in California. They determined that the average Black Californian lost $161,508 in homeownership wealth due to redlining and $13,619 per year from health harms caused by environmental and medical racism. An estimated $152,222,903,022 in Black California business wealth is missing, per the report.

“Let’s be clear and honest: the cost of reparations will be high,” said Bradford. “People say, how can we pay for this? We just passed a $300 billion budget in California. If we just put .5% of our budget into annuity annually, that’s $1.5 billion a year we can pay for.”

Newsom, in an interview earlier this month with Fox News host Sean Hannity, struck a more tentative tone about cost.

“I put out a statement saying reparations is more than just about money,” Newsom said. “That implies a deeper rationalization of what is achievable, what’s reasonable and what is right, and that’s the balance that we’ll try to advance.”

Californians’ opinions on racism have changed since 2020

The number of Californians who say racism was a serious problem has decreased since 2020, when the nation was stunned by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

In July 2020, 60% of residents surveyed said racism was a big problem, according to surveys by the Public Policy Institute of California. By November 2022, that proportion had dropped to 39%. Eight in ten surveyed that month still said racism is at least somewhat of a problem.

Over half of Californians surveyed said the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in American society today, and 59% supported a formal apology for human rights violations and crimes against humanity from the Legislature and the governor.

But the task force’s analysis of opinion data, collected from oral histories, statewide surveys and public hearings, concluded that over 60 percent of Californians support some form of reparations, whether financial compensation, community investment or non-monetary remedies like an apology and monuments.

Only one other state in the nation, Illinois, has commissioned a reparations task force. Cities including Evanston, Illinois; Province, Rhode Island; and Asheville, North Carolina, have passed reparations policies.

The task force hopes their report is a blueprint for other states to follow. The interim report urged state officials to elevate the recommendations to Congress and the President so it can create a federal Reparations Commission for African Americans/American Freedmen.

“I have no doubt that this will be the most impactful policy and public service work I will do,” Bradford said.