As California considers implementing large-scale reparations for Black residents affected by the legacy of slavery, the state has also become the focus of the nation’s divisive reparations conversation, drawing the backlash of conservatives criticizing the priorities of a “liberal” state.
“Reparations for Slavery? California’s Bad Idea Catches On,” commentator Jason L Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, as New York approved a commission to study the idea. In the Washington Post, conservative columnist George F Will said the state’s debate around reparations adds to a “plague of solemn silliness”.
Roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea of reparations, according to 2021 polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2022 polling from the Pew Research Center. Both found that more than 80% Black respondents support some kind of compensation for the descendants of slaves, while a similar majority of white respondents opposed.
Pew found that roughly two-thirds of Hispanics and Asian Americans opposed, as well.
But in California, there’s greater support. Both the state’s Reparations Task Force – which released its 1,100-page final report and recommendations to the public on 29 June – and a University of California, Los Angeles study found that roughly two-thirds of Californians are in favor of some form of reparations, though residents are divided on what they should be.
When delving into the reasons why people resist, Tatishe Nteta, who directed the UMass poll, expected feasibility or the challenges of implementing large programs to top the list, but this wasn’t the case.
“When we ask people why they oppose, it’s not about the cost. It’s not about logistics. It’s not about the impossibility to place a monetary value on the impact of slavery,” said Nteta, provost professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It is consistently this notion that the descendants of slaves do not deserve these types of reparations.”
In California, notions of deservedness may be tied to a commonly referenced facet of the state’s identity – that it joined the union as a free state in 1850.
“The fact that supposedly serious people in San Francisco are considering a plan that would give $5,000,000 in reparations to every Black resident in their city in a state that never had slavery is a joke,” Republican representative Lauren Boebert tweeted in March.
On Newsmax, Michael Reagan – son of President Ronald Reagan, who signed the 1988 bill apologizing and giving reparations to Japanese Americans for their imprisonment during the second world war – called reparations a “cash grab” and a “scam” that will force non-Black residents to “include the state in their will”.
“No one should be taking this seriously at all. This is hilarious,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said of San Francisco’s proposal on The Five. “They don’t want this. What they want is to divide people, to create another commotion over race … White leftists do worse things to Blacks than the Aryan Nations ever could.”
Under the Fox clip online, a comment with nearly 700 likes reads: “A state that never ALLOWED slaves wants to take billions of dollars from people who never OWNED slaves to give to people who never WERE slaves. Welcome to California.”
But the state’s history is more complicated, said A Kirsten Mullen, co-author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century with William A Darity Jr, professor of public policy, African and African American studies and economics at Duke University. Both she and Darity – who is also her husband – are members of the expert team appointed by the task force.
Even though the state constitution banned slavery, Mullen said, the Fugitive Slave Law allowed slaveholders to use violent measures to return enslaved people who entered California before its statehood. Many Confederates traveled west, too: brothers John and Joseph Le Conte, for example, became prominent early faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. John Le Conte, a physicist who espoused white supremacy, served as its first acting president.
The task force’s final report, which follows last year’s 500-page interim report, lays out the state’s role in detail, from how enslaved people were brought to California during the Gold Rush to how prevalent KKK members were among city officials. It also looked beyond slavery to the harms and ancillary effects of other forms of racism, such as housing segregation, unequal education, medical experimentation and sterilization, mass incarceration and greater risk of death from Covid-19.
“California, though it has this reputation, it’s not necessarily well deserved for being a more liberal place,” Mullen said. “Ultimately, what [the people of that time] learned was there was no place where Black people were treated with respect and had equality.”
That history left a stark economic divide. For every dollar that white families earn today, Black families earn 60 cents, according to a report from the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan thinktank.
“The racial wealth gap is a premier indicator of the cumulative effects of intergenerational racism in this country,” Mullen said.
Those who oppose reparations for the wrongs of centuries past may not think modern recipients deserve compensation, Nteta said, but they also don’t think they deserve to be the ones responsible for compensation.
“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, whose ancestry includes slave owners, told reporters in 2019. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president.”
In recent research that he plans to investigate further, Nteta and his team found greater support for a range of reparations for victims of Jim Crow policies – many of those harmed are alive today, and so are their children.
This recency is also likely a part of why the Civil Liberties Act, which offered $20,000, an official apology and other redress to Japanese Americans incarcerated during the second world war, saw success, Nteta said. It was co-sponsored by Congressman Norman Mineta, the nation’s first Asian American cabinet member, who was incarcerated with his family as a boy. While the legislation encountered its own hurdles, it eventually saw enough bipartisan support to make it to the desk of a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who signed the bill in 1988.
In California, Mullen and the economists on the expert team were tasked with determining dollar figures for specific harms.
The preliminary projection to address housing discrimination, for example, estimated up to $148,099 per Black resident, or $3,366 for each year in California from 1933-1977, the height of redlining practices. The estimate to address these harms could exceed $800bn, more than 2.5 times the state’s budget of $300bn. Restitution over time could take a variety of forms, such as cash payments, community investments, tuition assistance and housing grants, like the city of Evanston, Illinois, introduced in 2019.
Cash payments are less popular than other types of compensation in the UMass polling data, and California governor Gavin Newsom has not endorsed the idea of large cash payments. For many in the reparations movement, Nteta said, the larger conversation goes beyond the payments themselves.
“This is about recognizing one of the nation’s original sins, and the nation as a collective entity atoning for that and doing so substantively,” Nteta said.
But backlash against progress towards racial equality is nothing new. Mullen said this is the human response to change, particularly when any majority’s station is challenged.
It happened when newly emancipated Black people were denied 40-acre land grants, when the black codes restricted their rights following the end of the civil war, through Jim Crow and beyond. Historically, she said, punishments also extended to white allies who aided Black people.
“There are still lots of ways that folks are protecting their hegemony,” Mullen said.
What is new is the pervasiveness of discussion. She credits this to the expanded availability of information – documentation of more than 100 massacres between Reconstruction and the end of the second world war, online archives of Black newspapers, databases through the Library of Congress and more.
“It’s impossible to read it, to learn it without at least having to question what you’ve been taught, what you’ve read, and wonder what the implications are,” Mullen said. “Some of it is our fear of what we stand to lose.”
Both Nteta and state assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a member of the nine-person task force, noted that the size and influence of California – the nation’s largest economy – drives the volume of discussion about reparations.
“As California goes, so goes the rest of the country,” Jones-Sawyer said. “I think that’s why there’s pushback, because people really do understand that if we’re able to resolve this in some fashion, it will start the resolution of a lot of these problems across the nation.”
As the nation enters a presidential election cycle, Nteta expects the potential for political fallout to limit Democratic focus on reparations. Decades of scholarship, he said, makes the case that Democrats tend to lose national elections when they center the interests or experiences of African Americans.
“I think this will go under the broad umbrella of ‘This is where “wokeness” gets you – to a place where you’re sending $5m to individuals simply because of the color of their skin,’” Nteta said. He expects to hear Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech used to make the case that reparations are antithetical to our overarching values – content of character – even though King himself supported reparations.
For decades, the idea of studying reparations found little traction at the federal level. Beginning in 1989, Representative John Conyers opened each session of Congress with HR 40 – named after the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule for the newly emancipated – until his retirement in 2017.
But public attitudes might be changing slowly for a number of reasons, Nteta said, including the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the work of the Black Lives Matter movement and resistance to the ways white supremacy surfaced during the years of the Trump presidency.
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee has since revived HR 40 and, in 2021, Congress voted to advance the bill. It was met with unanimous opposition from Republicans on the House judiciary committee, who saw a panel’s findings as a foregone conclusion.
But if any state could pass legislation, it’s California, Nteta said, since a large percentage of the legislature is progressive, many of whom can avoid fallout because their term limits are approaching, and it has a progressive governor who has sometimes bucked national trends. If it passes in California, it may hit the dominoes of states with similar political characteristics, like Massachusetts or New York.
The task force’s final report makes a significant number of recommendations, including a formal apology, updates to the language of the state constitution, recruitment of more African American educators, declaration of election day as a paid holiday to increase access to the polls, expanded rights for incarcerated people and more.
Jones-Sawyer and state senator Steven Bradford, also a member of the task force, will work to put forward legislation next year. He said he hopes it will serve as a blueprint for other marginalized people, too.
“It is so critically important to do this for the welfare of the economy, the welfare of the social system, the welfare of public safety, the welfare of our educational system,” Jones-Sawyer said. “All of that benefits when we are not kept down.”