California Reparations Task Force
The California Reparations Task Force was a non-regulatory state agency in California established by California Assembly Bill 3121 in 2020 to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans, especially those who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States. It was the country's first statewide reparations task committee and was created to study methods to resolve systemic racism against African Americans resulting from slavery's enduring legacy. The task force was designed to recommend ways to educate the California public of the task force's findings and to propose remedies.
Five members were appointed by the governor, two members were appointed by the president pro tempore of the Senate, and two members by the speaker of the Assembly. The members voted to limit their study to exclusively address redress for descendants of antebellum slavery in the United States, rather than a broader application to people of general Black African descent who live in the United States.
After almost three years of fact-finding, reports, and public hearings, California’s first-in-the-nation reparations task force on Thursday, June 29th, 2023, released its final report to state lawmakers with recommendations for how the state should atone for its history of racial violence and discrimination against Black residents.
History
The task force convened in 2021. In 2022, the committee received testimony about segregation, redlining, voter restrictions, and other forms of discrimination and discussed whether it was appropriate to pay reparations to all African Americans in California or only those whose ancestors were enslaved. The committee was presented with calculations for certain scenarios that include figures amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in reparations for each California resident who can prove they are the descendant of an enslaved person. One estimate suggested "just under $1 million for each Black Californian descended from slaves," based on a calculation of $127,000 per year of life expectancy gap between Black and White Californians. Kamilah Moore noted that California could not afford to pay such a debt directly, and that the reparations might not come in the form of cash, but equivalent value, such as free health care programs or medical clinics.California is the first U.S. state to establish a body to study discrimination against African Americans and recommend reparations. Such an initiative is not without precedent, however; Germany made payments to Holocaust survivors and the United States made payments to Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. In one case a family's land was taken through eminent domain and became a state park.