Advocates watch closely as California's reparations task force signs off on a list of recommendations that will be submitted to lawmakers. It’s uncertain what the state will do with the proposals — which include payments to descendants of enslaved people.
San Francisco resident Pia Harris hopes for reparations in her lifetime. But the nonprofit program director is not confident thatwill turn the recommendations of a first-in-the-nation task force into concrete legislation given pushback from opponents who say slavery was a thing of the past.
Black Californians have watched closely as the state’s reparations task force forged ahead in a two-year study, finally signing off this month on a hefty list of recommendations that will be submitted to lawmakers. It’s Reparations proposals for African Americans date back to 1865, when Union General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered that newly freed people be given up to 40 acres of land. That didn’t happen. In recent decades, Democratic lawmakers in Congress have tried to pass legislation to study federal reparations to no avail.
People react to speakers during a Board of Supervisors hearing about reparations in San Francisco, on March 14, 2023.The task force did not recommend specific payment amounts but estimates from economists say that the state is responsible for more than $500 billion due to decades of overpolicing, mass incarceration and redlining that kept Black families from buying homes in appreciating neighborhoods.
But money isn’t everything, Robinson said, and the task force’s other important work shouldn’t be lost in a fixation on dollar figures alone. He pointed to efforts to retell California history through a different lens — one that examines the state’s role in perpetuating systemic racism despite its label as a “free” state.
Like Robinson, former Black Panther Party member Joan Tarika Lewis has been researching her lineage and was proud to discover several ancestors came to California in the mid-19th century and helped other Black people escape slavery.
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