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- California's reparations task force releases its report
California's reparations task force releases its report
Kat C.
January 30, 2025
The information below is presented for inclusion in Why reparations?, which, in turn, is part of Racial injustice in American history, part 6 in my series "On microaggressions and racial issues, particularly in the lifestyle: A resource for white people."
California’s first-in-nation reparations task force releases final report, by Abené Clayton, The Guardian, Jun. 29, 2023. (“The 1,100-page document details examples of discrimination and recommends how to address the harms of chattel slavery.“)
For a better understanding of the reparations issue, see Why reparations?" here.
But first, here's more about the California report:
The full report consists of 40 chapters, all of which are linked below. In addition, I’ve included summaries of the first 13 chapters. These chapters explain how California’s history of racist policies and actions hindered its Black citizens from accumulating generational wealth. Chapter 13 is of particular importance, because explains the continuing impact of the wealth gap on African American families.
Although much of the information is specific to California, the lessons can be applied across the U.S., in all 50 states.
Chapter-by-chapter guide:
A discussion of:
* California’s Stories (examples of financial losses to Black families, through denial of their marriage rights, violence, redlining, and housing discrimination)
* The Task Force’s Charge
* Immigration and Migration Patterns* State of African Americans in California
“Insisting that African Americans were less than hu-man made it easier for enslavers and the American government at all levels to deny them the legal rights that many white Americans believed were a basic part of being American. After enslavement offcially ended in 1865, white Americans terrorized African Americans with violence and racist ideas. African Americans lived under violent threats to themselves and their families and did not have the economic opportunities or polit- ical rights of their white peers. Through laws allowing, promoting, and protecting enslavement, federal, state, and local governments were complicit in stealing cen- turies of unpaid wages from African Americans. The racist ideas invented to control enslaved people have echoed through centuries of American laws and policies and inficted physical, mental, and emotional trauma on approximately 16 generations of African Americans. The state and federal governments of this country have never atoned for these harms.” …
“Enslavement was followed by decades of violence and intimidation intended to subordinate African Americans across the United States.1 Racial terror, and lynchings in particular, pervaded every aspect of pre- and post-enslavement African American life.2 African Americans faced threats of violence when they tried to vote, when they tried to buy homes in white neighborhoods, when they tried to swim in public pools, and when they made progress through the courts or in legislation.3 Led and joined by prominent members of society, and enabled by government offcials, ordinary citizens terrorized African Americans to preserve a caste system that kept African Americans from building the same wealth and political influence as white Americans.4 Racial terror also continued the generational trauma that began during enslavement.
"While lynching, mob violence, and other forms of racial terror are no longer socially acceptable, the threat and legacy of terror continue to haunt African American communities.6 Such violence has found a modern form in extrajudicial killings of African Americans by police and vigilantes.7 Racial terror targeted at successful African Americans has contributed to the present wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans. Today, the monitoring of polling places by white supremacist groups evokes a history of violent suppression of Black voters.” …
Chapter 4 - Political Disenfranchisement
“California imposed ... restrictions on African American political participation throughout its history. Though California professed to be a free state when it joined the union, white and African Americans did not possess the same freedoms. California refused to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments for nearly a century, and it built many of the same barriers to African American political participation as those used in the South, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and the disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies. The state also enacted other legal barriers, such as its law banning any non-white person from testifying in any court case involving a white person. While California eventually eliminated many of these restrictions, its adoption of these discriminatory practices has had longstanding effects on Black political participation, representation, and the current inequalities that persist within the state.” …
Chapter 5 - Housing Segregation
"After the Civil War, federal, state, and local government offcials, working with private individuals, actively segregated American land into African American and white neighborhoods. This housing segregation occurred over almost 200 years, and through a variety of different government strategies and policies. These government actions were intentional and they supplemented and intensifed the actions of private individuals. These widespread actions and the resulting segregation of African Americans—both nationwide and in California — are enduring badges and incidents of slavery because they continue to affect African Americans." ...
Chapter 6 - Separate and Unequal Education
"After slavery, governments in the United States required nearly all Black children to attend segregated schools with far fewer resources and funding than the schools white children attended.2 In many schools today, these separate and unequal education conditions continue for African American children. The benefts of a good education—a better job and higher income—build up over generations.3 Just as benefts mount and increase, so too, do the harms. For hundreds of years, governments at all levels in America have inficted compounding educational harm upon African American children, and they have never made suffcient amends." ...
Chapter 7 - Racism in Environment and Infrastructure
"The legacy of slavery, legal segregation, and government policies known as redlining have created environmental impacts that have harmed and continue to harm African Americans. First, government policies forced African Americans to live in poor-quality housing, exposing them to disproportionate amounts of lead poisoning and increasing their risks of disease,2 including COVID-19. Outside of their homes, African Americans are also exposed to far more pollutants than white Americans, partially because redlining explicitly grouped African Americans and other “inharmonious racial groups” with polluting sources.4 Second, government actors developed infrastructure projects, like highways and parks, in ways that destroyed and segregated African American communities, and also failed to provide or repair public services like sewage lines and water pipes. Finally, African Americans and their homes are more vulnerable than white Americans to the dangerous effects of extreme weather patterns like heat waves, disparities which are made worse by climate change." ...
Chapter 8 - Pathologizing the African American Family
"Starting over 400 years ago, the federal and state governments of our country have decimated African American families, both through their own offcial action and inaction, as well as through creating and supporting systems in which private actors enacted racist policies and practices. After the end of the legal enslavement of African Americans, the apprenticeship system and segregation laws denied African Americans the stability and safety of the family unit.1 In the past century, both fnancial assistance and child welfare systems have based decisions on racist beliefs about African Americans.
"As a result, these government-run systems have excluded African Americans from receiving benefts and targeted Black families for investigations of child mistreatment and neglect.3 Further, these structures have placed African American children in foster care systems at much higher rates than white children.4 Meanwhile, the criminal and juvenile justice systems have intensifed these harms to African American families by imprisoning large numbers of African American children, thereby separating African American families.5 All of these actions have systematically worked to deny African Americans the opportunities to form stable, supportive family structures, and have often further stereotyped and blamed African Americans themselves for resulting harms." ...
Chapter 9 - Control Over Creative, Cultural, & Intellectual Life
"At its inception, the United States created a series of laws and policies that denied African Americans the ability to create and own art and engage in sports and leisure activities.1 During the period of enslavement, state governments controlled and dictated the forms and content of African American artistic and cultural production. Following the end of the enslavement period, governments and politicians embraced minstrelsy, which was the popular racist and stereotypical depiction of African Americans through song, dance, and flm.3 Government support of minstrelsy, which was enormously proftable, encouraged white Americans to laugh at, disregard, and reimagine the enslavement of African Americans as harmless and entertaining.
"Federal and state governments failed to protect African American artists, culture-makers, and media-makers from discrimination and simultaneously promoted discriminatory narratives. State governments forced African American artists to perform in segregated venues. The federal government actively discriminated against African Americans during wars, and projected a false image of respect for African American soldiers in propaganda. Federal and state governments allowed white Americans to steal African American art and culture with impunity—depriving African American creators of valuable copyright and patent protections. State governments encouraged segregation and discrimination against African American athletes. State governments denied African American entrepreneurs and culture-makers access to leisure sites, business licenses, and funding for leisure activities. State governments memorialized the Confederacy as just and heroic through monument building, while suppressing the nation’s actual history.10 States censored cinematic depictions of discrimination against and integration of African American people into white society. Today, African American artists, culture-makers, presenters, and entrepreneurs must contend with the legacy of enslavement and racial discrimination as they attempt to pursue creative endeavors that empower and uplift African American communities." ...
Chapter 10 - Stolen Labor and Hindered Opportunity
“During enslavement, American government at all levels enabled and beneftted from the direct theft of African Americans’ labor. Since then, federal, state, and local government actions have directly segregated and discriminated against African Americans and also paved the way for private discrimination in labor and employment. Federal, state, and local laws and policies, including those of California, have expressly and in practice limited what work African Americans can do and suppressed African Americans’ wages and opportunities for professional advancement. Federal laws have also protected white workers while denying the same protections to African American workers, setting up and allowing private discrimination. Government and private discrimination have contributed to the inability of African Americans to build wealth over generations. Although progress has been made, African American workers continue to face serious discrimination today. The badges and incidents of slavery have carried forward. The devaluation of African Americans, their abilities, and their labor did not end. It simply took on different forms.” …
Chapter 11 - An Unjust Legal System
"...[T]hroughout history, the American government at all levels has treated African Americans as criminals for the purposes of social control, and to maintain an economy based on exploited African American labor. This criminalization of African Americans is an enduring legacy of slavery. These persisting effects of slavery have resulted in the over-policing of African American neighborhoods, the mass incarceration of African Americans, and other inequities in nearly every corner of the American legal system.
"This long history of criminalization began with enslavement and has created what some describe as a caste-like system in America where African Americans are in the lowest caste of America’s racial hierarchy.1 As the following chapter will show, this criminalization of African Americans has resulted in a criminal justice system that, overall, physically harms, imprisons, and murders African Americans more than other racial group relative to their percentage of the population. While constitutional amendments2 and federal civil rights laws have tried to ameliorate this mistreatment of African Americans, the inequities that remain are so signifcant that some scholars have argued that, as it relates to African Americans, U.S. society has replaced legal segregation with the criminal justice system. African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested, convicted, and to serve lengthy prison sentences. 5 African American adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated than white people. The experiences of African Americans with the criminal justice system also result in a general mistrust of the civil justice system where African Americans also face barriers to accessing justice such as obtaining a lawyer." ...
Chapter 12 - Mental and Physical Harm and Neglect
"Scholars have stated that Europeans developed a racial hierarchy in which Black people were relegated to the bottom of humanity, and often placed outside of it altogether, in order to justify the enslavement of African people.1 The United States is no exception to this global reality. This chapter will describe how federal, state, and local governments subjected enslaved people and their descendants to brutal and dehumanizing conditions, policies, and practices. The United States has treated African Americans as subhuman and engaged in practices harmful to the health of African Americans through forced labor, racial terror, oppression, torture, sexual violence, abusive medical experimentation, discrimination, harmful neglect, and more, as will be explained throughout this chapter. Scholars have stated that racism and enslavement are, at least in part, responsible for the fact that African Americans have had the worst healthcare, health status, and health outcomes of any racial or ethnic group in the United States."During enslavement, enslaved people were treated like animals, and physicians provided healthcare only to the extent necessary to proft from enslaved peoples’ bodies. After the end of slavery in 1865 and a short-lived period of reconstruction, federal, state, and local government offcials worked with private citizens to segregate African American communities—damaging African American health, creating unequal healthcare services for African American people; depriving African American communities of safe sanitation and adequate sewage systems; and sacrifcing African American health for medical experiments. During the 20th century, federal and state sponsored corporatization of healthcare resulted in rising healthcare costs, the separation of African American doctors from African American patients, and further inequality between white and African Americans.
"Centuries of exposure to racism has contributed to a serious decline in African American physical and mental health. African Americans die at disproportionately higher rates from preventable health problems. Doctors are more likely to misdiagnose African Americans, leading to disparate outcomes in mental health. African American women face high rates of maternal death and adverse birth outcomes — even Black women with the highest education attainment have the worst birth outcomes across all women in America. African American children face poverty, malnutrition, and worse health than that of white American children. The mismanagement of public health crises by county, state, and federal governments has resulted in an undue burden of disease and death in African American communities — particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, in the face of overwhelming oppression, African American healthcare providers, patients, and community members, nonetheless, have worked to build healthy communities and fight for a more equitable healthcare system."...
"Wealth — what you own minus what you owe—is the key to economic security. It is what enables families to build a better future. Wealth functions in many ways. It provides economic stability during lean times. It opens doors to improving quality of life. It is a dam against the foodwaters of economic catastrophes. It provides access to political power and it allows us to live and retire with dignity.
"Wealth can also be passed down through generations, allowing children to live better lives than their parents and grandparents. It allows parents to pay for their children’s college education. It allows grandparents to help a young family buy their frst home. Throughout American history, government policies at all levels have helped white families collect these tools while preventing or undermining African American families’ ability to do the same.
"As a result, the wealth gap between African American and white Americans is enormous and roughly the same today as it had been two years before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. In 2019, the median African American household had a net worth of $24,100, less than 13 percent of the median net worth of white households at $188,200.
"This wealth gap persists regardless of education level and family structure. For example, at the median, single African American women over the age of 60 with a college degree— at $11,000—have less than three percent of the wealth of single white women over the age of 60 with a college degree— at $384,000. Single white parents have more than double the wealth ($35,000), at the median, than married African American parents ($16,000).
"The wealth gap is present across all income levels. In 2016, estimates drawn from the Survey of Consumer Finances indicate the median white household in the bottom ffth of incomes, or the poorest “quintile” of white households, had a net worth of $21,700, which is greater than the median net worth of $18,601 for all Black households. Black households in the bottom fifth of incomes had a median net worth of $2,700, less than one eighth as much as the poorest quintile of white households.
"The trend is the same across social classes. In 2019, the median white working-class household had a net worth of $114,270, while the median African American professional-managerial household had a net worth of $38,800. In the same year, white professional-managerial households—at $276,000—had a median net worth that was eight times the median African American professional-managerial household and 19 times the median African American working-class household.
"This wealth gap is the result of the discrimination that African Americans experience, as described in the previous chapters.11 The American government at the federal, state, and local levels has systematically prevented African American communities from building, maintaining, and passing on wealth. These harms cascade over a lifetime and compound over generations.
"The historical causes of the wealth gap is based in enslavement and legal segregation and continues through ongoing racial inequality and racism today. They include direct government creation of white wealth and destruction of African American wealth through the support of racial terror, disenfranchisement, land theft, mass incarceration, exclusion of African Americans from government benefts, and banking discrimination. Unequal homeownership, fewer assets, and lower business ownership continue to drive the wealth gap today. This has resulted in racial differences in the capacity of African Americans to transmit resources across generations, lower fnancial resilience during crises, and homelessness.”…
Chapter 18 - Introduction to the Task Force’s Policy Recommendations
Chapter 21 - Policies Addressing Political Disenfranchisement
Chapter 22 - Policies Addressing Housing Segregation & Unjust Property
Chapter 23 - Policies Addressing Separate and Unequal Education
Chapter 24 - Policies Addressing Racism in Environment & Infrastructure
Chapter 25 - Policies Addressing Pathologizing the African American Family
Chapter 26 - Policies Addressing Control Over Creative, Cultural & Intellectual Life
Chapter 27 - Policies Addressing Stolen Labor and Hindered Opportunity
Chapter 29 - Policies Addressing Mental and Physical Harm and Neglect
Chapter 31 - California Prosecutorial & Judicial Race Data Survey
Chapter 34 - Introduction to Compendium of Statutes & Case Law
Additional news articles:
Everything you need to know about California’s reparations report, by Curtis Bunn, NBC News, Jun. 13, 2023.
California's reparations report excludes payment plan but is full of program proposals, by Emi Tuyetnhi Tran and Curtis Bunn, NBC News, Jun. 29, 2023. (“The 1,100-page report identifies ways to calculate monetary reparations to redress ‘how enslavement and its enduring legacy of systemic racism cemented structural inequality.’)
California reparations task force releases final set of recommendations, by Nicole Chavez, Stephanie Elam and Anna-Maja-Rappard, CNN, Jun. 29, 2023.