According to the New York Post, eligible California citizens will get a minimum of $360,000 under a proposal authorized by the Golden State’s reparations task team on Saturday.
“Wealth is sticky and can be passed down through generations. Reparations can break down that stickiness,” Gary Hoover, a Tulane University economics professor who has researched reparations, told the New York Times.
“This focuses on closing the wage and wealth based on race gap in our nation, and it’s a step,” Hoover said.
The proposal that was approved by California’s Reparations Task Group on Saturday includes an official apology from the state as well as hundreds of billions of funds in cash payments to “enact remedies along with compensation for the descendants of African Americans who endured slavery in the United States,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) established the task team in 2020. The commission’s final suggestions will be presented to the California legislature. Legislators will next determine whether and how to adopt the proposals. If the governor signs the recommendations, they will become law.
A tentative overall cost estimate from five economists interviewed by the board is about $800 billion, not considering compensation for “property that the group claims had been taken unfairly or for the devaluing of Black-owned companies,” according to Fox News Digital.
The $800 billion forecast is almost 266% more than the Golden State’s overall yearly budget of $300 billion.
“There’s no way in the world that a great deal of those recommendations will ever make it through considering the inflationary impact,” remarked Roy L. Brooks, a professor and a reparations expert at the University of San Diego School of Law, during the heated discussion.
Inequalities in health care, mass imprisonment and over-policing, and discrimination in housing are among the types of community damage that reparation payments are intended to redress.
Reparations will only be available to “descendants of slaved as well as free Black people who lived in the country by the conclusion of the 19th century,” according to NPR.
“Reparations are not just morally justified, but they also have the possibility for tackling longstanding disparities among races along with inequalities,” said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) during the conference.
Lee and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) are cosponsors of a federal measure that would create a “United States Committee on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation.” The commission’s objective would be to “make sure that reparations are at the heart of this nation’s transformation” and to “confront and oppose the big lie of white superiority.”
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