In 2020, California’s governor signed legislation to form a task force to study reparations and give “special consideration” to African-Americans who are direct descendants of slaves.
Today, the nine-member panel has concluded that the supposed descendants of slaves who reside in the state of California are due an estimated five-hundred-and-sixty-nine billion dollars in reparations.
“A California task force studying the long-term effects of slavery and systemic racism on black residents in the state has estimated a whopping $569 billion in reparations is owed to the descendants of enslaved people, according to a report.
The nine-member panel concluded that black Californians whose ancestors were in the U.S. in the 19th century are due $223,200 each due to housing discrimination practices utilized from 1933 to 1977.
The work of the Reparations Task Force, which was created by legislation Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2020 — and the potential payouts –represent the largest reparations effort in recent history.
‘We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction’, Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is one of the nine members, told the Times.
The task force hopes to shrink the wealth gap between white and black Californians.
Nationwide, black households have a median wealth of $24,100, which pales in comparison to white households, where the median wealth is $188,200, according to the most recent Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances, cited by the paper.
A history of housing discrimination against black Californians makes up a significant portion of the compensation the panel recommends. Several black communities were bought out or seized through eminent domain to be bulldozed for infrastructure projects, according to the panel’s findings.
The government often offered black homeowners less money than what they paid to purchase their houses and forced them out, the Times reported.
In addition to housing discrimination, the panel has targeted four other areas to study — mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of black businesses and health care.
The Reparations Task Force will release a report with the final dollar amounts next year.
However, the nine members — who have been conducting interviews and compiling data for months — can only make recommendations to the state.
The California legislature must decide what to do with those recommendations and whether to throw political support and funding behind distributing reparations to the descendants of black enslaved residents.
The panel is also evaluating how reparations could be delivered. The options include direct cash payments or tuition and housing grants, according to the Times”. -Allie Griffin, New York Post
You can be sure that your average ghetto-dwelling folk won’t receive a penny from this so-called Reparations Task Force’s money laundering campaign, for this is nothing more than corporate welfare for lawyers whose fees will most likely be funneled back to the California legislature via political donations.
One might expect that over a hundred and fifty years of crime committed disproportionately by the African verity would suffice to pay off any debt incurred by the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade when considering that the African population in the United States accounts for approximately two-fifths of all robberies and burglaries.
If Californians truly are determined to condemn every moral failing of the distant past, then perhaps they should concentrate their outrage on the conquest and dispossession of American Indian tribespeople rather than the treatment of Africans, Asians, or Jews for that matter.