OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA (AP) – California’s reparations task force voted on Saturday to approve recommendations on how the state may compensate and apologise to Black residents for generations of harm caused by discriminatory policies. The nine-member committee, which first convened nearly two years ago, gave final approval at a meeting in Oakland to a hefty list of proposals that now go to state lawmakers to consider for reparations legislation.
United States (US) Representative Barbara Lee who is cosponsoring a bill in Congress to study restitution proposals for African Americans, at the meeting called on states and the federal government to pass reparations legislation.
“Reparations are not only morally justifiable, but they have the potential to address longstanding racial disparities and inequalities,” Lee said.
The panel’s first vote approved a detailed account of historical discrimination against Black Californians in areas such as voting, housing, education, disproportionate policing and incarceration and others.
Other recommendations on the table ranged from the creation of a new agency to provide services to descendants of enslaved people to calculations on what the state owes them in compensation. “An apology and an admission of wrongdoing just by itself is not going to be satisfactory,” said an organiser with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, a reparations advocacy group Chris Lodgson.
An apology crafted by lawmakers must “include a censure of the gravest barbarities” carried out on behalf of the state, according to the draft recommendation approved by the task force. Those would include a condemnation of former governor Peter Hardeman Burnett, the state’s first elected governor and a white supremacist who encouraged laws to exclude Black people from California.
After California entered the union in 1850 as a “free” state, it did not enact any laws to guarantee freedom for all, the draft recommendation notes.
On the contrary, the state Supreme Court enforced the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed for the capture and return of runaway enslaved people, until for over a decade until emancipation.
