Reparations Task Force Again Actually Hurts Black Californians

A crowd listens to speakers at a reparations rally outside of City Hall in San Francisco, on March 14, 2023. Jeff Chiu/AP Photo

Commentary

If America is going to survive—and, yes, its existence is not certain—we’re going to have to start uniting our people instead of dividing them. As I have written in previous Epoch Times articles, the California Reparations Task Force is doing the opposite. My articles are here, here, here, and here.

That deleterious pattern was continued Monday, when the Task Force released voluminous documents and studies in preparation for its next meeting Saturday in Oakland. It is jogging toward a July 1 deadline for recommendations to the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The main problem is this Task Force is only going to increase expectations among black Californians that they’ll get payments of some kind. Yet the state now faces a budget deficit of at least $22.5 billion for fiscal year 2023-24, which begins on July 1. When no reparations are forthcoming, resentment only is going to rise, increasing the division in our already splintering body politic.

The Task Force also is a diversion from real policies that could help black Californians. It looks backward, instead of forward. It seeks revenge, instead of promoting opportunity. As I have written before, positive policies would include reducing housing costs through reform of the California Environmental Quality Act; enacting Arizona-style state educational vouchers; and reducing taxes to promote business and jobs creation. Such polices also, instead of dividing us by race, would lift up all boats. Everyone would benefit, which would unite us.

Let’s just look at the final report on the list, which has a bureaucratically labyrinthine title: “PART IV/Chapter 17: Final Recommendations of Task Force Regarding Calculations of Losses to African American Descendants of a Chattel Enslaved Person, or Descendants of a Free Black Person Living in the United States Prior to the End of the 19th Century, and Forms of Compensation and Restitution.”

For “atrocities and harms,” they employ numerous complicated formulae that, together, amount to a farrago of nonsense. Here’s one:

Scroll down in Chapter 17 to p. 31 if you want to know what all the symbols represent. Maybe you can figure out what the final formula means. I can’t, even though I’ve read thousands of government reports, and in school was good at math. But here’s the study’s conclusion for that formula:

“$152,222,903,022 in missing African American business wealth in California. On a per capita basis, using the African American population as of 2020, that would amount to roughly $77,000 per African American in California.”

But that’s just a down payment on overall reparations demands. According to an estimate by the San Francisco Chronicle, the total would be “up to $1.2 million” for each black Californian over a lifetime. The “up to” depends on numerous complicate factors. But suppose it’s $1.2 million each. There are about 5 million black Californians. Blacks are 5 percent of the 39 million Californians, or about 2 million. So 1.2 million multiplied by 2 million = $2.4 trillion. An absurd number.

Earlier calculations from March, according to AP, were “more than $800 billion ... more than 2.5 times California’s $300 billion annual budget and does not include a recommended $1 million per older Black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average life span.”

Death Penalty Sideshow

In Chapter 19, the Task Force says the death penalty in California needs to be abolished as part of reparations. It writes: “The Task Force recommends the Legislature amend the California Constitution to abolish the death penalty in all cases.” But it also notes, “In 2019, Governor Newsom declared a moratorium on executions in California. In 2020, Assemblymembers David Chiu and Marc Levine introduced Assembly Constitutional Amendment Two, which would have abolished the death penalty, but the bill died in committee.”

But it didn’t note the death-row inmates all were put into the general prison population. And, like Newsom, future governors will not allow anyone to be executed, because it’s likely they all will be liberals. So the policy basically is mute.

Moreover, the Task Force did not note that, even if ACA 2 had been passed, it would have required a vote of the people of California to become law. And recent attempts to outlaw the death penalty were defeated in 2012, 52 percent to 48 percent for Proposition 34; and in 62, 53 percent to 47 percent for Proposition 62. This shows the Task Force’s first task out to be more careful in what it recommends. Perhaps hire somebody who knows these things?

Backing Affirmative Action

The battle over affirmative action is an old one. Most people, including blacks, oppose it because it violates the American sense of treating everyone equally. Instead of affirmative action, what’s embraced is equality of opportunity, as enshrined in Dr. Martin Luther King’s well-known words, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, banning affirmative action by the state. In 2020, Proposition 16, which would have repealed Prop. 209, was defeated heavily, 57 percent to 43 percent.

Despite that, the Task Force, in Chapter 10, attacks the retreat from 1960s-style racial affirmative action and demands reparations for the supposed harm done. Several times it blasts President Reagan, who in his life actually, from his childhood, did nothing but have good relations with blacks. The chapter claims, “By the early 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, the federal government began to restrict its enforcement of affirmative action requirements, halting the progress made during the preceding administrations.”

This shows how, again, the task force is backward-looking. Affirmative action did nothing to help blacks achieve, but instead pointed them away from such real solutions as improving school achievement through more school choice.

School Busing Disaster

The task force even backs school “busing,” even though it’s long been discarded by everyone, including blacks. That’s where children of one race are “bused” long distances away from their own neighborhood school, to another school to meet some complicated racial quota system. The Task Force writes in Chapter 6:

“Then, from the mid- to late-1970s through the 1990s, courts removed or limited desegregation orders in many California districts, as the Supreme Court and Congress further restricted the use of remedies like busing and school reassignment to integrate schools. In a few cases, such as in Berkeley, schools remained relatively integrated because school districts continued busing students and using school-selection processes designed to achieve integration, even without a desegregation order.”

You might remember Berkeley’s busing program came up in the Democratic presidential debates four years ago. At the June 28, 2019 debate in Miami, Sen. Kamala Harris, now the vice president, blasted former Vice President Joe Biden, now the president:

“You also worked ... to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

But as even a 2014 article in the left-wing Slate noted:

“As nationalist sentiments rose with the Black Power movement of the 1970s, parent groups in Harlem and elsewhere began demanding community-based control of their own schools to implement Afrocentric teachings and curricula. Resentment festered on both sides of the racial divide. In the end, once all the blacks and whites with the means to bail on busing did bail on busing, all you were left with was an ever-diminishing pool of lower income black kids and white kids being shuffled around the map in order for America to pretend it was solving a problem.”

Some busing attempts continued through the early 1990s. Then in 1995 the U.S. Supreme Court finally canceled it all in the case Missouri v. Jenkins. Slate continued:

“White liberals screamed injustice. White conservatives declared victory. Over on the black side of the aisle, there was a mix of rejoicing, relief, and resignation—integration fatigue. “We’re tired of chasing white people,” one black Kansas City resident told Time. Freed from the mandates of the court, the black community was happy for the opportunity to assert greater control over the district and focus its resources on their needs—and they did.”

Conclusion

I lived through the whole busing controversy, which started when I was a high-school student in a Detroit suburb in the early 1970s. But it was worst in Boston, where in 1974 Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered massive busing, supposedly to advance integration. In 2016 WBUR ran a recap:

“But as the 1974 school year wore on, there was no peace.

“By October The Boston Globe wrote: ‘What we prayed wouldn’t happen has happened. The city of Boston has gotten out of control.’

“A group of whites in South Boston brutally beat a Haitian resident of Roxbury who had driven into their neighborhood. A month later some black students stabbed a white student at South Boston High. The school was shut down for a month.”

That the California Reparations Task Force would bring up busing as something good, and want us to relive that nightmare, shows it has gone badly off track. But, typical of most government bureaucracies, it just keeps going on and on, and even wants to set up a new state bureau to implement its recommendations. Then the folly will continue.

Instead, what’s needed is forgiveness, kindness, real reforms that work, and moving on.

John Seiler’s email: [email protected]

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.