Column: Reparations Plans Move Ahead. Will the Money and Political Support Be There?

March 20, 2023 By Michael Smolensk 8 Comments

The price tag on recent proposals to compensate Black residents for the sin of slavery and its continuing impacts have heightened debate over reparations

The movement to morally and financially atone for slavery and its related impacts over generations is running into harsh fiscal and political realities.

The concept of reparations has come into sharper focus now that big dollar figures have been attached to it, particularly the proposal by a San Francisco committee that every eligible Black person in the city receive a $5 million payment.

A statewide panel is contemplating payments to a more defined group of Black residents that could total $640 billion, or $360,000 for each eligible person in California.

Such price tags would be controversial anytime, but more so now as California faces a $22.5 billion budget shortfall this year and cities are projecting deficits.

Even before such figures surfaced, polls found that paying reparations did not have broad political support.

But the evil of slavery and subsequent policies that have damaged African Americans both economically and physically have been such that that the question arises: Should politics and costs matter?

Some proponents of reparations have said when judges and juries determine victims must be compensated, the amount is based on an assessment of the harm done, not necessarily the financial wherewithal of who did it.

But the fiscal impact on states and cities and their populations will be an inescapable part of the equation. The Hoover Institution at Stanford University estimated the San Francisco proposal would cost the equivalent of $600,000 for each non-Black family in the city.

On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors embraced the city reparations panel’s report of more than 100 recommendations, which includes the $5 million payment, though some members expressed concern about the costs. The board did not take action on the specific proposals, which it plans to do later this year after further analysis.

The debate over reparations has been wide ranging.

Critics often say people who weren’t slave owners shouldn’t have to pay people who weren’t enslaved. In California, some opponents question why payments should be made in a state or city that didn’t enslave Black people.

Proponents of reparations point to a history that shows long after slavery was abolished in 1865, unfettered freedom for Blacks was hard to come by. Beyond Jim Crow laws in the South, government policies and practices led to imprisonment of Black people at higher rates, denial of home and business loans and restrictions on where they could live and work. That includes California.

Slavery was key to generating wealth in the United States.

“. . . by 1836 more than $600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves,” said Ta-Nehisi Coates, an author who has written about reparations, citing historian Edward Baptist before a congressional committee.

“By the time the enslaved were emancipated, they comprised the largest single asset in America: $3 billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined.”

San Francisco Supervisor Joel Engardio was among those who voiced concern about whether the city can afford the proposals, but supported some form of reparations. He said some of the city’s neighborhoods used to be hostile to potential homebuyers who were Black, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, including legendary Giants center fielder Willie Mays, who had been rejected when he attempted to buy a home in 1957.

“Generations of Black families were denied the transfer of wealth that White families benefit from as their homes increase in value,” Engardio said at Tuesday’s hearing. “Many people who inherit a west side home today could not afford it on their own, but they get to stay in San Francisco because their grandparents were allowed to buy homes when it was cheap.”

That story can be repeated across the United States.

Legislation seeking reparations for Black Americans has been introduced regularly in Congress since at least 1989, but has gone nowhere. Momentum in mostly liberal states picked up amid the Black Lives Matter movement that grew after a White Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a Black man, on May 25, 2020.

Later that year, then-Assemblymember Shirley Weber of San Diego, now California’s secretary of state, carried a successful bill to create the nation’s first statewide reparations panel. In 2021, Evanston, Ill., became the first U.S. city to commit to reparations — using tax money from recreational marijuana sales to pay $10 million over a decade with the distribution of $400,000 to eligible Black households.

Former President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, spoke of the difficulty in enacting reparations nationwide on a podcast with Bruce Springsteen,”Renegades: Born in the U.S.A.,” in 2021.

“So, if you ask me theoretically: ‘Are reparations justified?’ The answer is yes,” he said. “There’s not much question that the wealth of this country, the power of this country, was built in significant part — not exclusively, maybe not even the majority of it — but a large portion of it was built on the backs of slaves.

“What I saw during my presidency was the politics of White resistance and resentment, the talk of welfare queens and the talk of the undeserving poor and the backlash against affirmative action… all that made the prospect of actually proposing any kind of coherent, meaningful reparations program… as, politically, not only a non-starter but potentially counterproductive.”

In 2021, a Pew Research Center survey found that only 3 in 10 U.S. adults said some form of payment should be made to descendants of enslaved people. The concept was opposed by all groups surveyed regardless of age, economic status, education or race — save one: Seventy-seven percent of Black respondents favored such reparations. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were split, 49 percent opposed and 48 percent in favor.

In a surprise, the NAACP San Francisco chapter on Tuesday opposed the proposed $5 million payment and many of the other panel recommendations. Instead, the organization suggested broad and lasting investments in housing, jobs, education and health care targeted to improve the lives of Black residents.

Click here to read the full article at the SD Diego Union Tribune

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California Weighs $360,000 in Reparations to Eligible Black Residents. Will Others Follow?

March 5, 2023 By Karen Breslau and Kelsey Butler 18 Comments

California is moving closer to determining what eligible Black residents are owed for generations of discriminatory practices, a key step toward potentially becoming the largest US jurisdiction to pay out billions of dollars in reparations.

The California Reparations Task Force will meet over the next two days in Sacramento to assess how reparations should be distributed, which could include direct payments and investments in education, health care and homeownership for Black communities. The group is set to deliver its final recommendations to the state legislature by July 1 and it will be up to lawmakers to decide whether to adopt them.

Tackling the issue is a complex task for the group of civil rights leaders, policymakers, economists and scholars appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd. One of the models under consideration suggests the state would owe a total of almost $640 billion to 1.8 million Black Californians with an ancestor enslaved in the US, which works out to roughly $360,000 per person.

California’s task force has yet to say who would pay these sums. After years of budget surpluses, the state’s financial fortunes are turning, with a projected $22.5 billion budget deficit. The technology sector is laying off workers, stock market declines are hurting the incomes of top earners who pay a large share of taxes, and the state already has some of the highest taxes in the nation.

Read More: The Historical Reasons Behind U.S. Racial Wealth Gap

With a federal reparations bill languishing in Congress, how the outcome plays out in the most-populous US state may have implications for other areas that are weighing similar efforts across the country. Evanston, Illinois, in 2021 became the first US city to provide reparations to its Black residents, including giving housing grants, and reparations studies are springing up in places like New York and St. Louis.

“If California can admit its sins and change the narrative, then there is a way forward for states and cities across the nation,” said California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who wrote the bill creating the task force when she served in the state assembly.

One of the most difficult questions the task force faces is how to define the historical period for measuring harms experienced by Black residents in a state where slavery was never legal. And they’ll need to show how the reparations and policy changes will reduce the persistent racial wealth gap, which has left US White families with roughly six times more wealth than Black families. 

Read More: How Reparations Fit Into New Push for Racial Justice

A prevailing method is to use the racial wealth gap as an indicator of the losses that Black descendants of enslaved people suffered, according to an interim report by a working group for the task force. Using that model, a conservative estimate would be the state owed $636.7 billion. 

Another proposed strategy would be to calculate damages related to various injustices, including housing discrimination, mass incarceration, over-policing, health harms, devaluation of businesses, and property seizures.

The chair of California’s panel, Kamilah Moore, earlier this year tweeted a news story recounting proposals to fund reparations that included adding mansion or estate levies or offering tax credits.

Some California cities, including Los Angeles, have started their own reparations task forces outside of the state effort. In San Francisco, one notable proposal involves a $5 million lump-sum payment to each eligible Black resident. In a recent win for repatriation advocates, Los Angeles County returned the deed to a prime Southern California beach front property that had been forcibly taken from a Black couple a century ago. The descendants of the owners have now decided to sell the property back to the county for almost $20 million.

“These local initiatives are extremely important to start a conversation,” said Thomas Craemer, associate professor of Public Policy at the University of Connecticut, who consults with the California task force on economic methodology. “The past is the past. But we can start a conversation about it by making a down payment and then addressing what other injustices happened.” 

The issue of reparations has divided public opinion. About three-quarters of Black Americans say the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid in some way, while only 18% percent of White Americans feel the same way, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

Click here to read the full article in Bloomberg

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Task Force Meets in San Diego, Debates Eligibility for California Slavery and Racism Reparations

January 29, 2023 By Greg Moran 9 Comments

The task force is charged with making recommendations to the legislature by June on reparations for the effects of slavery and systemic racism for Black people in the state

A state task force charged with studying and making recommendations for reparations to Black residents of California who have suffered harm from the effects of slavery and systemic racism met in San Diego Friday and discussed at length who would be eligible.

The meeting, which continues Saturday at the Parma Payne Goodall Alumni Center at the SDSU campus, comes less than six months before the task force is to issue its final conclusions.

The task force of nine members, including San Diego City Councilwoman Monica Montgomery Steppe, has been meeting regularly for the past 18 months around the state. The work is complicated and extensive: an interim report issued in June runs to nearly 500 pages. It is also groundbreaking, the first time any state in the country has tackled the issue of historical reparations for Black citizens.

The task force has already made some key decisions. The biggest, in March, was to determine that eligibility for any future payment would be limited to Black state residents who are descendants of enslaved people, or of a free Black person living in the U.S. by the end of the 19th century.

That standard would exclude some individuals, such as Black people who came to the U.S. after the end of the 19th century.

Among other issues the task force is hashing out, economists are attempting to quantify the economic losses stemming from redlining, mass incarceration, environmental harm, and other categories.

The task force is also expected to recommend non-monetary steps the state should take. These could include issuing a formal apology from the state, and deleting language in the state constitution that prohibits slavery, or involuntary servitude, except to punish a crime. That allows prisoners in the state to be paid low wages, advocates say.

The task force was created under Assembly Bill 3121, a bill authored by then-Assemblywoman Shirley Weber of San Diego. Now Secretary of State, Weber addressed the task force at the start of the meeting, urging them to finish the work on time. “If you don’t push it forward, it loses momentum,” she said.

Click here to read the full article in the San Diego Union Tribune

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Reparations Task Force: State Could Owe Black Californians Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars

September 28, 2022 By Lil Kalish 5 Comments

California’s task force on reparations has begun putting dollar figures to potential compensation for the various forms of racial discrimination, generational pain and suffering Black Americans experienced in the state. 

The rough estimates by economic consultants may mean that hundreds of thousands of dollars could be due to Black Californians who are descendants of enslaved ancestors. However some politicians on the task force indicated the reparations would be a difficult case to make.

Task force member and state Sen. Steven Bradford, a Democrat representing South Los Angeles, told an audience at public meetings in Los Angeles over the weekend it would be a “major hurdle” to pass any reparations plan in the Legislature. 

“For a state that didn’t have slavery, don’t think they’re going to be quick to vote on this final product of this task force,” he said. “We need to stay unified, we need to be together. We aren’t always going to agree, but we have to put forth a unified front.” 

Meeting in the California Science Center Friday and Saturday, the nine-member state-appointed group invited a team of economic experts to describe reparation ideas in financial terms. It was the group’s first gathering since June, when the task force released a 500-page report on the state’s history of slavery and racism.

In March the task force voted to recommend to state leaders that if California makes some form of reparations available, they should go to Black Californians who can establish lineage to enslaved ancestors, rather than to those who are more recent immigrants, or descendants of recent immigrants. The reparations could be in the form of cash, grants, tuition assistance, loans or other financial programs, the task force said.

At this meeting, the task force described several scenarios for which Black Californians could receive monetary compensation.

Reparations calculations

For instance, the task force considered redlining, a practice of denying mortgages to Black homeowners and of devaluing residential property in primarily minority neighborhoods.

The four economic consultants calculated that each Black Californian who lived in the state between 1933 and 1977 experienced a “housing wealth gap” of $223,239, or $5,074 for each year in the period. The experts said that number — which is the difference between the average value of all homes in California and the value of Black-owned homes  — could be considered for reparations.

Such calculations are far from final, the consultants said, and there is no total estimate, though it is based on all 2.5 million Black California residents today, they said. The consultants said they haven’t calculated how many people would qualify for each type of reparation. 

The consultants are William Darity, an economics professor, and A. Kirsten Mullen, a researcher, both at Duke University in Durham, N.C.; Kaycea Campbell, an economics professor at Pierce College in Los Angeles; and William Spriggs, chief economist for the AFL-CIO and a Howard University professor. 

For another example of injustice, mass incarceration, the consultants calculated potential income lost by incarcerated Black Californians from 1971, the beginning of then-President Richard Nixon’s announced “War on Drugs,” until today. The economists pointed to many studies showing Black people were incarcerated far beyond their numbers in the general population.

Without discussing guilt or innocence, the economic consultants estimated that incarcerated Black residents were out $124,678, or $2,494 a year, for unpaid prison labor and years of lost income. The consultants mixed into the calculations the average salaries of California state workers and the $15,000 that some Japanese Americans received in reparations after their internment during World War II, from 1942 to 1945.  

A ‘rough’ analysis

One of the most pervasive forms of racial injustices Black Californians faced is disproportionate health outcomes. The economic consultants noted that Black Californians have the shortest life expectancy of any racial group at 71 years, which is 7.6 years shorter than whites. Black Californians also faced higher death rates from cancer than other racial groups, and Black mothers were four times more likely to die in childbirth than any other group. 

Although there is no actual price tag on a year of life, for statistical purposes some economists use a $10 million valuation for a person’s entire life. This group of economic consultants calculated the dollar amount of the gap in life expectancy for Black Californians to be worth $127,226 per year.

The consultants’ dollar estimates are “rough,” Campbell said Friday.

Click here to read the full article in CalMatters

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Reparations Are For Descendants of Black Slaves, Weber Says

January 29, 2022 By Editorial Board 15 Comments

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California’s secretary of state said Thursday that reparations for African Americans should be limited to people whose forbears were kidnapped from their homeland, stripped of their ancestry and left with nothing after generations of forced labor.

Shirley Weber, the daughter and granddaughter of sharecroppers who authored legislation creating the first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations, said while Black immigrants have suffered from racism in the U.S., they always had a country to return to. Slavery was more than a physical condition, she said, and its psychological impact stunted people’s ability to strive beyond survival.

“The fear my grandfather felt, I remember as a child, was palpable, and it crippled him and his family’s ability to dream beyond the cotton fields,” Weber said at Thursday’s meeting of the task force to study and develop reparations for African Americans. The meeting continues Friday.

She said that Barack Obama likely never would have dreamed of becoming president had he descended from enslaved people. Obama, the country’s first Black president, had a white mother and a Black father from Kenya who came to the U.S. to study. Obama, she said, “did not have limitations and fears drilled in his psyche, and thus aspire to become the president of the United States.”

The nine-member task force, which started meeting in July, is on a two-year timeline to address the harms of slavery, especially given inaction at the federal level. Critics have said that California did not have slaves as in other states and that it shouldn’t have to address the issue, or pay for it.

But expert testimony being heard by the task force overwhelmingly points to large racial disparities in wealth, health and education in California. African Americans make up just 6% of California’s population yet were 30% of an estimated 250,000 people experiencing homelessness who sought help in 2020. Their communities have been razed in the name of redevelopment and Black people remain over-represented in jails.

In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation returning prime beachfront property to descendants of a Black couple who had the land taken away by eminent domain.

Click here to read the full article at AP News

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