A California committee formed to determine how much in reparations black people should receive due to slavery and past discrimination has determined that each of the 2.5 million California residents who identify as “Black” or “African American” should be paid $223,000 each for “housing discrimination.”
The total cost of reparations just for housing — there are four other causes for reparations the committee will consider — would be more than $569 billion. That’s $40 billion more than the entire state budget.
The committee has also recognized mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses, and healthcare as other causes for reparations.
The committee was created in 2020 after the Democratic legislature authorized its formation. It has until June 2023 to submit its recommendations.
“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, and a member of the task force, told the New York Times.
Californians eligible for reparations, the task force decided in March, would be descendants of enslaved African Americans or of a “free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.” Nearly 6.5 percent of California residents, roughly 2.5 million, identify as Black or African American. The panel is now considering how reparations should be distributed — some favor tuition and housing grants while others want direct cash payments.
That’s the stickiest issue of all. Who is eligible and how do you prove it? How much “black blood” will you need to claim any of the cash? These issues are impossible to adjudicate fairly, but no one on the commission is concerned about “fairness” It’s a punitive form of “justice” and needs to be stopped in its tracks before it gets started.
Here are some of the proposed reparations in the draft proposal.
- Estimate the amount black businesses have lost in stolen or destroyed property through ‘racial terror’ and distribute it back to black Californians
- Adopt mandatory curriculum for all teachers to take anti-bias training
- Recruit black educators for K-12 schools
- Provide scholarships to black high school graduates to cover four years of undergraduate at a choice school
- Compensate individuals who were forcibly removed from their homes due to state action, such as park and highway constructions
- Create funding to invest in environmental infrastructure
- Create equal access to parks and national resources in black neighborhoods
- Compensate families who were denied inheritances they would have received if they were white
- Compensate those who have been discriminated and deprived of rightful profits from artistic, creative, athletics, and intellectual endeavors
- Raise the minimum wage in predominantly black industries, such as food and agricultural
- Require scaling up the minimum wage for experienced workers
- Create a fund to support black-owned businesses and eliminate licensure barriers that harm black workers
- Compensate people whose health has been permanently damaged by anti-black healthcare
For those who suffered a specific injury relating to racism, the U.S. courts are perfectly capable of handling claims. Why create a separate class of supplicants based solely and exclusively on race?
Slavery was an abomination, and the blatant discrimination that existed in the United States until fairly recently was a travesty of the law and the Constitution. There is still discrimination, but the question of how it should be rooted out involves all of us — white, black, yellow, red, and every color in between. It’s an American problem. And the American solution would be to solve it together — not set up committees that demand that money and wealth be transferred to one race.