California Governor Gavin Newsom is under increasing pressure to use his authority to unilaterally implement proposals that would hand out billions of dollars to black residents in reparations as a way to make amends for slavery if the state legislature fails to act.
The California Reparations Task Force, established by state law in 2020, is considering a proposal to give just under $360,000 per person to about 1.8 million black Californians whose ancestors were enslaved in the US, bringing the total cost of the program at approximately $640 billion.
The reparations task force’s final recommendations will be presented to the California legislature, which will then decide whether to implement the measures and send them to Newsom’s office to be signed into law.
However, according to an expert and leading reparation activist, Newsom, a Democrat, should be willing to use his own power to enact such measures for the black residents of the state if the legislature does not.
California Governor Gavin Newsom pauses during a press conference following a tour of Barron Park Elementary School on March 2, 2021 in Palo Alto, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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“The task force does the grunt work of preparing final recommendations, but at the end of the day these recommendations are non-binding and still require uncompromising political will to enact remedies that will begin to address centuries of compound damage,” Dreisen Heath told me. Fox News digital. “Governor Newsom has the authority to implement these recommendations, if they are in fact consistent with the wishes of the entire descendant community, after the release of the final report on July 1, and should do so if state legislatures do not to trade.”
Heath, who has testified before Congress and spent years as a researcher at Human Rights Watch, noted that activists have similarly “put pressure on the Biden administration to use its executive power to immediately create a federal reparations commission.” given the deliberate delay at the congressional level.”
Racial justice groups and some Democrats in Congress have been urging President Biden for months to establish a national reparations commission by executive order. The White House has indicated that Biden, who has been largely silent on the matter, supports studying possible reparations for black Americans, but has not said he would support a bill introduced in Congress that would create such a committee.
However, as far as California is concerned, the recovery process is well underway.
Last year, the state working group made several preliminary recommendations in an interim report. A final report containing the panel’s official recommendations must be submitted to the state legislature no later than July 1.
March and rally for reparations, child protection and human rights advancement, June 17, 2021 in St. Paul, Minn. ((Photo by: Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images))
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The commission was created amid the turmoil following the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. None of the panel’s nine members are white.
The task force had initially proposed $220,000 per person for black Californians last year, but recently increased the figure by more than 60% to $360,000 as one of several ideas being considered for reparations.
Economists and scholars who consulted with the task force arrived at the latest proposal by using a model that evaluated California’s racial wealth gap, calculating the harm associated with injustices such as housing discrimination, mass incarceration and harm to health.
“We know that black Californians have suffered not only economic harm, but also psychological, emotional and political harm, and so additional compensation and targeted remedies must be developed if this is to be considered a true recovery program,” said Heath, who currently works for the advocacy group Where Is My Land. “Final recommendations must include a full calculation of this cumulative damage.”
It’s unclear how California would pay for such a massive project. Newsom, who signed the bill establishing the task force and appointed most of its members, announced in January that the state is facing a budget deficit of $22.5 billion for the upcoming fiscal year.
Supervisor Shamann Walton, member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, speaks in San Francisco, California on February 15, 2022. (Scott Strazzante/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
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The figure represented a notable drop from last year, when the state enjoyed a surplus of about $100 billion due to federal COVID aid and rising capital gains.
To make matters worse, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), a government agency that analyzes the budget for state legislatures, estimated in a subsequent report that Newsom’s forecast fell short of target by about $7 billion, thanks to about $10 billion. billion less tax revenue than expected.
Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
On a more local level, some California cities, such as Oakland, Los Angeles, and particularly San Francisco, have made their own reparations proposals.
On Tuesday, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors expressed “unanimous” support for a draft plan with more than 100 reparations recommendations for the city, including a proposal to pay out $5 million each to eligible black residents. The $5 million lump sum proposal would cost non-black families in the city at least $600,000, according to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Dreisen Heath, a leading expert and activist pushing for reparations.
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The city government also expressed interest in other forms of reparations for San Francisco’s approximately 50,000 black residents, such as a guaranteed annual income of at least $97,000 for 250 years and a home in the area for as little as $1 per family.
Another idea being considered is a “comprehensive debt forgiveness” program that would clear all personal, educational, and credit card debts of low-income black households.
Like California, San Francisco is also facing a huge deficit, estimated at $728 millionmaking it unclear how the city would pay for such a recovery plan.
However, according to Heath, the cost is justified given the historic injustices inflicted on black people and the value they have added to the economy without receiving proper compensation.
“Each of these recommendations should be considered in equal measure,” she said. “The $5 million proposal has to come with analysis, and the reparations committee has time to do that work. But if we want to have a real conversation about what is owed to us, we have to be real about the value that black people contributed to the global economy.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a news conference following a meeting with students from James Denman Middle School on Oct. 1, 2021, in San Francisco, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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Heath added that local efforts in San Francisco or other cities to pay reparations should not absolve any state, including California, or the federal government from paying their own reparations.
“San Francisco’s work at the local level must function to address local damage and does not deny the U.S. government or the state of California for reparation for their crimes,” Heath said. “It is not a city’s job to repair damage caused by the federal or state government.”
Another hotly debated issue in the reparations debate is determining who is eligible for payments. At the state level, California is considering eligibility for the 1.8 million black Californians who had an ancestor enslaved in the US, potentially excluding hundreds of thousands of other black residents. At the local level, the San Francisco commission wrote in its draft plan that a person must be at least 18 years old and identified in public records as “Black/African American” for at least 10 years. Eligible people must also meet two of eight other criteria, such as living in San Francisco for a period of time or being descended from someone incarcerated for the police war on drugs.
Pastor Robert Turner of Vernon AME Church holds a reparations sign after leading a protest from City Hall to his church in the Greenwood neighborhood on November 18, 2020, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Photo by Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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However, Heath disagrees with placing restrictions on who is eligible as long as they are black.
“Racial violence doesn’t discriminate by race — it happens to all black people,” she said. “To deny that fact is to deny the reality and the lived experience of many people of African descent. Any task force attempting to qualify for their “lineage” recovery program runs the dangerous risk of underestimating the magnitude of the ubiquitous and structural anti-blacks. racism in the US, both historically and currently.”
San Francisco never allowed slavery, and California joined the union as a free state in 1850. Reparation opponents generally argue that it makes no sense for people who have never owned slaves to give money to people who have never been enslaved as a way of atoning for slavery.
Reparation advocates, however, counter that blacks continued to suffer systematic discrimination even after slavery was abolished.
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“While neither San Francisco nor California formally adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy, and systematic oppression and exclusion of black people were codified through legal and fringe actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement,” the San The Francisco commission’s draft recovery plan stated. “A lump sum payment would compensate affected populations for the decades of damage they have suffered, and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have collectively endured, due to both deliberate decisions and unintentional damage perpetuated by the city .” policy.”
Aaron Kliegman is a political reporter for Fox News Digital.
