Apology but no cash payments: California reparations for slavery start incrementally

When a California reparations task force released a thousand-page report last year addressing the effects of systemic racism on Black residents, it made headlines with ambitious and comprehensive recommendations, including reforms at every level of government and cash payments with an eye-popping price tag.

Now, acting on the recommended framework, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a package of reparations legislation, including a formal apology to African Americans for the state’s role in perpetuating slavery and its legacy – and budgeted up to $12 million to pay for it. 

State lawmakers touted the handful of bills as significant milestones, but disappointed advocates who have been calling for more aggressive action. The efforts amount to a small fraction of what would have been needed for cash payments to descendants of slavery or other forms of monetary redress, like subsidies for education or homeownership.

Still, California’s effort to mend harms endured by generations of Black Americans as a result of slavery and institutionalized racism is considered a model for the rest of the nation.

“Everyone is looking to California to lead, looking to California to understand what obstacles might be ahead of us, looking for how community and institutions work together and wrap around in this process of reparations,” says Robin Rue Simmons, founder of FirstRepair, an organization leading reparations discussions across the country.

But those hoping to capture momentum around last year’s recommendations say lawmakers missed an important opportunity.

“I think that was a good start,” says State Sen. Steven Bradford, vice chair of California’s Legislative Black Caucus who also sat on the Reparations Task Force. “But I think we could have really done more, especially at this time. And, you know, the urgency of now was here.”

A national model

Out of 14 bills proposed by the Black Caucus at the beginning of the year, eight made it to law at the end of September.

The marquee law is the bipartisan apology. California joins several other states, including Florida, Virginia, and Alabama, which have also issued apologies. Other laws include:

– Requiring grocery stores and pharmacies to notify their communities of any plans to shutter or change ownership. This law is aimed at combating “food deserts” by protecting access to healthy foods through community-based grocery stories;

– Updating the state’s Civil Rights Act, making it a violation to discriminate on the basis of any traits associated with race, including hair texture and style.

– Procedures to enforce laws that require implicit bias training for health care workers, as a way of supporting better maternal health in marginalized communities.

– Creating a designation for California Black-Serving Institutions at state universities.

– Requiring a program that provides grants to students at career technical colleges to report race and gender data to the state department of education as a form of accountability.

– Making it more difficult for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to ban books available to incarcerated people by posting its banned book list online and making public notifications of any changes to that list.

– Preventing counties from repurposing federal benefits owed to children in the foster system and putting it toward the cost of their care.

California voters will decide a ballot measure in November that would eliminate involuntary servitude, which is still allowed as criminal punishment. Missing from the slate: the creation of a California Reparations Fund to establish permanent financial support for ongoing redress, and a new state agency responsible for distributing those funds and determining claims. Both were recommended by the Reparations Task Force, and would be central to implementing harm-based monetary awards.

Direct payment is essential for meaningful repair, says Chris Lodgson, lead organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California. “Nothing works without the return of our economic wealth,” he says. “As a matter of fact, some things will hurt if they don’t have the monetary piece to it. So compensation is at the core of it.”

Mr. Lodgson also noted that he was “pleasantly surprised” by “near unanimous support for all of the most meaningful pieces of legislation that were advancing this year.”

And, echoes Ms. Simmons:  “I'm hearing much more about unity [in California]. We see that some of the bills have passed. Others, we believe will have success eventually. … I'm encouraged.”

Civil rights advocates across the country are watching. Some will call California’s actions historic, says Raymond Winbush, director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore. He sits on Baltimore’s reparations commission and testified before California’s task force – and calls the legislative reforms good but weak.

“It’s not bad,” he says, “but it’s not complete reparations, which would be much more comprehensive, and [would mean] that each Black Californian would receive some form of historical justice through repair.”

California’s steps “transformative”

Before California, there was Evanston, Illinois. The city north of Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan, passed its own reparations law in 2019 – the first of its kind in the nation. Repair in Evanston takes the form of housing subsidies: $25,000 to Black residents who suffered from discriminatory housing policies between 1919 and 1969 and their direct descendants. The funding can go toward home ownership, improvement, or mortgage assistance.

Repair must be tangible in order to be meaningful, says Ms. Simmons, who as an Evanston alderman, led passage of Evanston’s reparations law.

“We as Black communities and our allies are really looking for impact, change, for our quality of lives to be improved, to feel safe, included and so on,” she says. “That will happen with tangible forms of reparations.”

Ms. Simmons, who is also a commissioner on the National African American Reparations Commission, calls California’s steps transformative for the reparations conversation – especially as other states and cities begin to take up their own work on the subject. That process is complex. Politics, infrastructure, and education all play a part. And it takes time.

“California’s a bellwether state,” says Dr. Winbush, from Baltimore. “And you know, what happens there eventually happens in the rest of the country.”