SACRAMENTO—To repay African Americans in California for the “ongoing and compounding harms” of slavery, a state task force on June 1 recommended lawmakers create 10 new offices to oversee reparations.
One of the new state offices recommended in the report would be designed to help black Californians file for monetary reparations, while another office would help prove their eligibility for compensation through genealogical data.
The proposed Office of Freedmen Education and Social Services would also offer free tuition for black students in private K-12 schools and students wanting higher education in the state. A higher minimum wage and housing grants would be offered, too, though the details are unclear.
The 9-member task force is made up of five members who are appointed by the governor, two members are appointed by the president pro tempore of the Senate, and two members by the Speaker of the Assembly.
“It has been an honor and a privilege to supervise the release of this monumental interim report,” Task Force Chair Kamilah Moore said in a statement.
“[I]t is my hope that people in California and across the United States utilize this report as an educational and organizing tool, as this interim report exceeds expectations in substantiating the claim for reparations for the African American/American Freedmen community on the municipal, state and federal level.”
The report claims all levels of government in the United States have “historically criminalized African Americans for the purposes of social control, and to maintain an economy based on exploited Black labor.”
It states this has led to over-policing black neighborhoods, mass incarceration, “a refusal to accept African Americans as victims,” and other inequities.
The report also alleges that the current child welfare system in the U.S. and California operates on false stereotypes of Black Americans, which has resulted in high rates of the removal of children from their families, “even though Black parents do not generally mistreat their children at higher rates than white parents.”
Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 3121 (AB 3121) to create the task force to identify the current effects of slavery on black Californians. At the time, only three Republican lawmakers—James Gallagher (R-Yuba City), Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin), and Jay Obernolte (R-Hesperia)—voted against the bill in the judiciary committee, arguing the conversation would better fit at the federal level.
Other opponents of the bill include the Blexit Foundation headed by conservative activist Candace Owens and Brandon Tatum.
“I think it’s a joke. It’s a sham. It’s a way to continue the victim narrative of black America. We do not need reparations. Nothing happened to us, so we don’t need to make people to pay who had nothing to do with slavery. It’s ridiculous, in my opinion,” Pierre Wilson, national director of the Blexit Foundation, told The Epoch Times in a previous interview.
In March, the task force voted to limit any government compensation to Black Americans whose ancestors were in the U.S. in the 19th century.
The group’s official recommendations are slated to be presented to the state legislature in June 2023.
“I commend the Reparations Task Force for their commitment to this effort and for being a model for partners across the nation,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. “I urge every American to read the task force’s report and join with us in recommitting ourselves to justice.”
