California task force on reparations reaches first hurdle: Who should qualify?

The nation’s first working group on reparations is at a crossroads, with divided members in which black Americans should be eligible for compensation as atonement for a system of slaves that ended officially with the Civil War but that resonates to this day.

Some members want to limit financial and other compensation to the descendants of enslaved people, while others say all blacks in the U.S., regardless of lineage, suffer from systemic racism in housing, education, and employment. The working group could vote on eligibility on Tuesday after postponing it last month.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation creating the two-year repair working group in 2020, making California the only state that moves forward with a study and a plan, with the mission of studying the institution of slavery and its damage and educating the public about its findings.

The committee has not been in its two-year process for even a year and there is no compensation plan on the table. But there is widespread agreement among proponents of the need for multifaceted remedies for related but separate harm, such as slavery, Jim Crow’s laws, mass imprisonment, and urban redevelopment that led to the displacement of communities. black.

Potential forms of compensation

Compensation could include free universities, government assistance to buy housing and start a business, and grants to churches and community organizations, advocates say.

However, the question of eligibility has haunted the group since its inaugural meeting in June, when viewers asked the group of nine members to make specific proposals and cash payments to make all descendants of enslaved people in the States United.

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Lawyer Kamilah Moore, chair of the committee, said she expects a solid discussion at Tuesday’s meeting, which will include the testimony of genealogists. She favors lineage-based, rather than race, eligibility, saying she will have the best chance of surviving a legal challenge in a conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

A race-based reparation plan would attract “hyperaggressive challenges that could have very negative implications for other states seeking to do something similar, or even for the federal government,” he said.

“Everyone is looking at what we’re going to do,” he said.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, author of the legislation that created the task force, passionately argued in January to prioritize the descendants of generations of forced labor, broken family ties, and police terrorism. Daughter of sharecroppers forced to flee Arkansas in the middle of the night, she recalled how the legacy of slavery shattered her family and hampered her ability to dream of anything beyond survival.

Opening compensation to black immigrants or even slave descendants from other countries would leave American descendants with a few cents, he said.

But members of the February meeting, almost all of whom can trace their families to enslaved ancestors, questioned the need to rush into a key issue aimed at shaping nationwide reparation deliberations.

Lisa Holder, a member of the task force, shared a touching story about the loss of her child during childbirth, because the medical staff did not take seriously the concerns of a young black woman who knew something was wrong with her. baby, he said. In the United States, black mothers are more likely to have a pregnancy-related death than white women.

“No one asked me if my ancestors were enslaved in the United States or in Jamaica or Barbados,” said Holder, a civil rights lawyer. “We have to accept this concept that black lives matter, not just a part of those black lives, because black lives are in danger, especially today.”

Critics say California has no obligation to pay because the state did not practice slavery and did not enforce Jim Crow’s laws that segregated blacks from whites in southern states.

Echoes of the slave system in contemporary law

But the testimony provided to the committee shows that California governments and locals were complicit in the removal of their wages and property from blacks, preventing them from generating wealth to pass on to their children. Their homes were razed for redevelopment, and they were forced to live in predominantly minority neighborhoods and were unable to obtain bank loans that would allow them to buy property.

Today, black residents make up 5% of the state’s population, but they are overrepresented in prisons, prisons, and homeless populations. And black homeowners continue to face discrimination in the form of home appraisals that are significantly lower than if the home was in a white neighborhood or the homeowners are white, according to the witness.

Nkechi Taifa, director of the Repair Education Project, is one of the longtime advocates who are delighted that the discussion has become widespread. But she is baffled by the idea of ​​limiting repairs to people who can show a lineage when ancestry is not easy to document, and slave owners often move people between plantations in the U.S., the Caribbean, and South America.

“I guess I tend to be more inclusive than exclusive,” he said, “and maybe it’s a fear of limitation, that there’s not enough money to go.”

California MP Reginald Jones-Sawyer, a member of the task force, said there was no doubt that the descendants of slaves were the priority, but said the task force must also stop the ongoing damage and prevent future damage from racism.

“It’s in the system, it’s in our laws. It’s how we treat each other, it’s how we talk to each other,” he said. “And no amount of money will make that go away.”

A report is due in June with a proposal for repairs to be submitted before July 2023 for the state legislature to consider becoming law.