A nine-member Reparations Task Force has estimated that Black Californians could receive more than $223,000 each in reparations for the enduring economic effects of racism and slavery, more than two years on from the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police.
California has become the first U.S. state to require its agencies to present a separate demographic category for descendants of enslaved people.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that the taskforce, which was formed by a law signed by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020, has spent months traveling across the West coast state to learn about the effects of these policies.
Those eligible for the reparations, the taskforce said in a March 2022 report, would be descendants of enslaved African Americans or of a "free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century."
Only people who can prove that they fit under these categories will be eligible for the reparations. California has an estimated 2.6 million Black residents, around 2 million of whom are descendants of slaves.
The five areas identified by the team (housing discrimination, mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses and health care) are the factors it is taking into account when determining the reparations.
The Times reported that, just based on housing discrimination between 1933 and 1977, $569 billion in reparations would need to be paid to African Americans in California–amounting to $223,000 per person. The total amount of reparations suggested, the largest in history, will likely be much higher than that.
Between 1619 to 1865, slavery deprived more than 4 million Africans and their families of freedom, citizenship, cultural heritage and economic opportunity.
The final costing for the reparations will be released in 2023, and then it'll be up to legislators whether to act upon the recommendations and determine how they will be funded. The reparations will have to be approved by Newsom and other lawmakers.
The panel is now mulling over how it will recommend the reparations to be distributed, whether that is through education, health care or housing grants, or cash payments.
"We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction," taskforce member and associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Jovan Scott Lewis, told The Times.
"That is why we must put forward a robust plan, with plenty of options," Lewis added.
The taskforce looks to narrow the economic gap between white and Black Californians. Nationally, Black households have a median wealth of $24,100, compared with white households' median wealth of $188,200, according to the Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances.
In an interim report from June 2022, the taskforce outlined how Black Americans were forced to California during the Gold Rush era and that the state has "historically criminalized African Americans for the purposes of social control, and to maintain an economy based on exploited Black labor."
The taskforce said that government policies helped white Americans create wealth and acted as barriers to prevent Black Americans doing so, resulting in "an enormous" wealth gap between white and Black Americans in California today.
Dr Rashawn Ray, a senior fellow at the Brookings Insitution, said that the reparations should be paid because "it is the right thing to do."
"The California task force has done its due diligence to examine the lasting legacies of enslavement in the state of California and the United States. These legacies extend far beyond wealth and economics, but this is the customary way that the United States has atoned for its transgressions," Ray told Newsweek.
"While I think direct payments are appropriate, my colleagues and I have suggested wealth-building strategies centered on down payment for homes, college tuition and business grants. As expensive as California is, and given the under-representation of Black students in the the University of California system compared to the California state system, these formats will be useful."
Update 12/05/2022, 04:01 a.m. E.T.: This article has been updated to include comments by Dr Rashawn Ray.
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Jack Dutton is a Newsweek Reporter based in Cape Town, South Africa. His focus is reporting on global politics and ... Read more
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