CA Task Force to Consider Reparations
By Shelby Matsumura
A Juneteenth (2020) protester in St. Paul, Minnesota advocating for reparations from the US Government. Photo by Fibonacci Blue on Flickr. This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
California makes history as the first state to form a task force assigned to study and develop reparation proposals for Black Americans in the state.
On September 30, 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 3121, which was authored by Assembly woman Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), who also serves as the chairperson of California’s Legislative Black Caucus. Although the reparations are not limited to slavery, the task force will give special consideration to those who are descendants of slaves.
This bill has effectively made California the first state to adopt a law requiring a study of reparations for its Black residents and the descendants of slaves. Although numerous city councils across the country have passed their own reparations plans, California is the only state Legislature to do so.
However, AB 3121 is not the first attempt at getting such bills passed at a state or federal level. A similar proposal was introduced in Congress in 1989 by former Democratic Representative John Conyers of Michigan. Representative Conyers reintroduced the bill, H.R. 40, every session until he retired in 2017. Despite last year’s congressional hearing of the proposal, the bill has not been passed.
Although H.R. 40 has struggled to gain traction with Congress, California’s AB 3121 is already in motion. The task force is required to submit its recommendations to the state Legislature no later than June 2022.
Charles P. Henry, Professor Emeritus of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, believes that the timeliness of AB 3121 goes back to the discussions of post-racialism during Barack Obama’s presidential election in 2008. Post-racialism is the idea that society has moved beyond racism and that racial prejudice no longer exists.
“I think after the euphoria around Obama's election and the discussion of post-racialism, reality set in with the Tea Party movement and this kind of backlash culminated with Trump in 2016,” Henry said. “And that combined with all the murders of Black men and women, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, has shifted public opinion to be polarized, where those on the left support reparations and those on the right are, of course, opposed to it.”
Henry said he hopes the commission is composed of scholars who are not either Democrats or Republicans.
“I think it's important to avoid that kind of politicization of the commission and try to have a variety of objective scholars,” Henry said.
Although AB 3121 places emphasis on descendants of slaves, the proposal could also address reparations to correct current racial disparities.
Margalynne Armstrong, Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University, envisions a reparations plan that could rehabilitate discrepancies in the value of properties that are associated with race.
“A home in a Black-majority part of the Bay Area is worth about $164,000 less than an equivalent home—same size, same quality of school system, same access to parks and other neighborhood amenities—in a neighborhood with very few Black people,” Armstrong said.
Armstrong said she does not think land transfers alone are enough since it requires money to maintain interest in the property.
“There might have to be something like land transfers and tax reductions for those properties until people can be in a position to really maintain ownership of the property. So, the details would be fairly complex,”Armstrong said.
It is worth noting that the U.S. government has provided reparations for past ills before. Most recently, the government compensated victims of Executive Order 9066 through the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which allocated $20,000 to each survivor of Japanese internment during World War II.
Thomas Oshidari, Co-President of the San Jose Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was born at the concentration camp of Rohwer, Arkansas. As a survivor, he received a formal apology and $20,000 compensation.
“Monetarily, I don’t think it meant that much. But, it’s really the admission that the government was wrong, it was wrong. Japanese Americans could finally feel like people could recognize that what happened to them was really wrong and the Government was willing to admit that,” Oshidari said.
William A. Darity Jr., a leading expert on slavery reparations and economics professor at Duke University, attempted to estimate what would be an appropriate amount for monetary reparations.
“Black Americans are approximately 13% of the nation’s population, but only possess about 2.5% of the nation’s wealth. So if you were going to bring the Black share in wealth into proportion with the Black share of the population, it would require somewhere in the vicinity of $10-12 trillion. But if you take all of the state and local government budgets and you combine them, this will amount to about $3.1 trillion. So, at best, if you were to appropriate all of those funds and put them towards reparations, which would eliminate the capacity of state and local governments to provide any services whatsoever, you still would fall $7 trillion short of the threshold that would be required to produce a full reparations project,” Darity said.
In addition to determining what forms reparations could take, the task force must also decide who will be eligible for this compensation. In a paper written by Darity Jr. with two other experts, two criteria are set forth to establish eligibility for African American reparations.
“The first criterion is what we refer to as a lineage standard. An individual would have to demonstrate that they have at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the United States,” Darity Jr. said. “The second criterion is what we refer to as an identity standard and this means that for at least 12 years before the enactment of a reparations plan in the United States–or the enactment of a study commission for Reparations, whichever comes first–an individual would have to self-identify as Black, Negro, Afro American, or African American,” Darity said.
Darity Jr. said establishing concrete eligibility standards will serve the purpose of ensuring that reparations will actually support Black Californians and descendants of slaves.
In contrast, Armstrong does not think every descendant of slavery would benefit from reparations.
“Should Oprah Winfrey get reparations? No. Certainly she’s overcome an incredibly deprived history, her childhood was awful but she’s not going to benefit from reparations. So, I think people have to really try to not have a blanket reparations policy because we just want to try to help the people who are suffering the most from the continuing discrimination and we're not going to be able to help everyone. That would really take huge changes in our society,” Armstrong said.
In response to these discussions over possible eligibility standards, opponents of AB 3121 argue that too much time has passed to discern the appropriate recipients and effectively distribute reparations to them. Darity Jr. is the fourth generation of his family out of slavery, and he disagrees with that sentiment.
“A national act of procrastination is not a justification for eliminating the debt that’s owed,” Darity Jr. said.
Henry also said he rejects these arguments, saying reparations do not just account for slavery.
“We’re talking about reparations for Jim Crow and we’re talking about reparations for contemporary injustice,” Henry said.
Even if California’s modern society and its current citizens were not directly responsible for the institution of slavery, Henry said these reparations are still needed.
“There are intergenerational institutions that exist today that slavery was an important part of their founding and their beginning, but that’s why we’re not just talking about reparations for slavery,” Henry said.
Another criticism of the bill concerns the concept that California does not need to address reparations because it entered the Union as a free, non slavery state due to the Compromise of 1850. However, Armstrong challenges this idea.
“During the Gold Rush...people brought their slaves to [California]...when it was admitted in 1850; [although] the state constitution prohibited slavery...in reality, people still had slaves and sold slaves within the state,” Armstrong said.
As AB 3121 makes California the first state to assemble a task force to discuss reparations, some wonder what such a bill could inspire on a national level. Darity Jr. said he is concerned that state reparations plans may divert responsibility from the federal government. He referred to state or local level reparations as “low hanging fruit.”
“The federal government is the culpable party for the atrocities that are associated with the full trajectory of American racial injustice. And this is because it’s the federal government that maintains the legal framework that supported slavery, that supported nearly a century of legal segregation in the United States, and that continues to support the conditions that sustain ongoing discrimination in employment, credit, and housing in this country,” Darity Jr. said.
Nevertheless, as California works to construct a reparations proposal for its Black residents, Henry would like to see the task force act as a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that will establish a set of historical facts that a strong majority of people can agree on.
“If half the population is adamantly opposed and is operating from the notion of the lost cause or that it’s great to have Confederate statues around to remind us of the Confederacy, then it’s putting the cart before the horse to talk about how much is this person going to get and how much that person’s going to get,” Henry said.
But Henry said he is hopeful.
“California has a different political climate and could serve as a kind of model for states or even local governments that want to address this,” Henry said.
Similarly, Armstrong said she imagines a multitude of forms that reparations could take, but that more will be needed.
“Reparations can only correct problems up to a certain extent. So, the need to eliminate anti-black racism through all strata of society has to accompany reparations,” Armstrong said.
(Editor's Note: This article was originally published in the November 2020 [Volume 51, Issue 2] edition of The Advocate.)