Here I would like to dissect four issues the new Full Interim Report completely misrepresents: the so-called 1619 project, K-12 education, housing, and the minimum wage. The report’s authors seem not to even know what’s going on in California politics today, nor the conditions that have brought us here.
The 1619 Project
The Full Interim Report rightly says we need to study more of the history of slavery in America. Unfortunately, it relies on the totally discredited 1619 Project of the New York Times. If we can’t even get the history right, then everything else is distorted. The report writes:“There is continued opposition to discussing the truth about slavery in public K-12 schools. Republicans in multiple states and in Congress have introduced bills to cut funding from schools that choose to use curriculum derived from the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 series of essays challenging readers to think about slavery as foundational to the nation’s origin story. They argue inclusion of this history delegitimizes the idea of the U.S. as a nation founded on principles of liberty and freedom and creates racial divisions.”
“The paragraph covered subjects of unsurpassed importance and it was historical gibberish. As I would later confirm with the foremost scholars of the subject who know far more about the Revolution than I, there is no evidence of a single colonist expressing support for independence in order to protect slavery. The 1619 Project’s claims were based not on historical sources but on imputation and inventive mindreading. … At the time of the Revolution, there was considerably more in the way of anti-slavery politics in the colonies than in Britain proper. These are elementary facts.”
And consider this sentence from the Full Interim Report: “Historians have found that United States history textbooks published from 1839 to the 1980s taught that white people were superior to Black people and downplayed, minimized, or justified slavery.”
School Funding
The Full Interim Report’s Chapter 6 is “Separate and Unequal Education.” No question things were bad in the past. But they write, “Today, in California many Black students continue to attend unequally funded, under-resourced, and highly segregated public schools due to government policies that continue to segregate many schools and school funding by neighborhood. Recently, California has tried to provide a more equitable funding system by providing more state money to school districts that serve our poorest students. However, the system does not ensure that the money is actually spent on those students, many of whom are black children, and there is some evidence that this is a reason that Black students continue to be the lowest performing sub-group in California.”Minimum Wage
In the section “Stolen Labor and Hindered Opportunity,” the report urges: “Raise the minimum wage and require scaling-up of the minimum wage for more experienced workers, require provision of health benefits and paid time off, and provide other missing protections for workers in food and hospitality services, agricultural, food processing, and domestic worker industries.” And, “Invest in institutions that reduce the likelihood of criminal activity such as care based services, youth development, job training and increasing the minimum wage.”Once again, the authors seem not to have noticed current conditions in California. The current minimum wage is $15 an hour for companies with 26 or more employees; and due to inflation will go up to $15.50 in 2023. But all around Southern California I see signs promoting jobs at $16 or higher. That may change should a recession hit.
I summarized: “He noted how black youth unemployment in the 1940s and early 1950s actually was less than for white youth. In 1948, it was 9.4 percent for black kids, but 10.2 percent for white kids.
“But then in the late 1950s, the minimum wage was increased by 33 percent, to $1 an hour. That pushed black youth unemployment above that for white youth, and it never has gone the other way since.
CEQA Reform
Briefly, in Chapter 5 the report includes 44 pages on housing, but nothing on the major problem affecting not just blacks, but everybody: The California Environmental Quality Act and stymied attempts to reform it. Even Govs. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom have said it needs to be reformed because CEQA makes building new housing, even for the poor, ludicrously expensive.The report writes, “[W]herever African Americans settled and prospered throughout American history, federal, state, and local governments, along with private actors, used numerous mechanisms: park and highway construction, slum clearance, and urban renewal to destroy those communities. … These harms have never been adequately remedied.”
Conclusion: What a Waste
In sum, the Full Interim Report is not just a waste of time and 492 pages, but a gigantic missed opportunity to deal with the state’s most critical problems. It doesn’t deal with union power and environmentalist power that prevents reform. It has no conception of how free markets work, especially by lifting up those at the bottom by giving them opportunities. It also doesn’t take into account some of the realities of California’s unique situation, especially the difficulties of a state with one-party hegemony, impossibly high real estate prices, and the dominance of liberal delusions such as those advanced in its text.The report’s solutions are a mishmash of socialist utopian thinking, biased history, and a failure to take up the ideas of conservatives, libertarians and even liberal reformers. The final report coming out next year promises to be even worse. That’s foolish in a state that’s the most diverse in the world. What’s needed, instead, is a lessening of tensions and resentments and workable solutions that benefit everyone.