REPARATIONS UNLIKELY TO ADVANCE FAR THIS YEAR

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“REPARATIONS UNLIKELY TO ADVANCE FAR THIS YEAR”

 

As this year’s budget negotiations approached their crunch time in late May and early June, it was fast becoming clear that little would get done toward giving reparations to the unknown number of Californians who are descended from slaves.

 

The number is unknown, for one thing, because California was never a formal slave state and no one knows exactly how many of the enslaved were brought here from the Deep South in the years leading up to, during and immediately after the Civil War.

 

For sure, some towns, especially in the Central Valley, saw former Confederate soldiers play prominent roles in the late 1860s and through the 1870s. But how many of their onetime slaves did they bring along to help in their new endeavors? And should we count descendants of a difficult-to-document number of Native Americans killed or enslaved by white Californians during that same period and through the 1880s when totting up the number of persons whose futures were blighted by an ancestry filled with slavery and persecution?

 

Some other states have been inventive in trying to get around these questions. With a racial history not extremely different from California’s, Washington state, for one, has not yet tried to quantify just how many descendants of slaves are among its 7.95 million residents.

 

Rather, Washington officials have tried to take quick action, realizing that slavery and subsequent racism and restrictive real estate covenants did huge harm to families that would have liked to establish generational wealth. In the last year, that state lent $16 million to help with down payments on real estate by people of color whose families were prevented from buying homes by now-outlawed restrictive covenant laws.

 

But Washington state has not recently encountered nearly as severe a state budget shortfall as the last two years have seen in California.

 

Those deficits, papered over in part with stopgap methods that some believe may not be legal, were one reason for last year’s frustrations among the Black Caucus in California’s Legislature.

 

With difficulty finding the funds to cover even required spending, who was going to get serious about setting up the permanently staffed reparations agency called for by a nine-member reparations task force set up under an earlier state law? Not the legislative Black Caucus, which last year killed some reparations proposals before they came to a vote.

 

That engendered substantial bad feeling among Black voters – who pushed for cash payments to all slavery descendants  while legislators were considering whether to set up that task force.

 

This year, a Black Caucus bill seeks to create a permanent Bureau for the Descendants of American Slavery. It may get some impetus from the fact that state legislators seem bent on setting up several unrelated state agencies to take on at least some tasks previously done by the many federal workers and scientists fired by President Trump and his appointees.

 

The new bureau, should it become reality, would try to create a list of descendants of the enslaved. But as with membership in Native American tribes, disputes appear inevitable over how high a percentage of a person’s bloodline would have to stem from the enslaved in order for them to qualify for possible benefits like eased college admissions.

 

Another bill would give California State University $6 million to develop ways to verify genealogy. It’s unclear how that funding might be divided among the 23 Cal State campuses.

 

All of which leaves the reparations question in a state of confusion and disappointment with some Black voters dissatisfied their demands for cash payments have never gotten serious consideration.

 

With weeks of budget compromises and slashes seeming inevitable in the next month, it’s hard to see how the reparations cause can fare much better than it did last year. Which puts it in obvious danger of becoming passe if its various provisions and possibilities fail repeatedly without ever being taken seriously.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net