We have done so much with so little from so few. We made a way out of no way. But for that to persist in a nation that claims to be about equal protection on the law, that claims to be about fulfilling the problems of the decoration of independence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, It's not been for us. For us, it has been hardship, power, and hellless moments continuously.
I'm wes Kosova today on the Big Take. California seriously explorers reparations for African Americans. For decades, African American activists and politicians have made the case for reparations to provide some measure of compensation for the legacy of slavery, racism, and discrimination in the US, but these efforts haven't gone anywhere. Now California is taking the argument for reparations to the
next level. A state task force of economists, public policy experts, and elected officials has written a detailed draft report that attempts to quantify the costs of historical injustice. They calculate it to be as much as eight hundred billion dollars. The goal of the task force is to recommend to state lawmakers who should be eligible to receive compensation of
one kind or another. That big top line number and the potential for payments to some individual jewels of up to a million dollars or more have gotten a lot of attention, positive and negative. And we'll get into what those numbers mean, because there's more to it than that part of a reparations plan, and the cost wouldn't be for individuals, but to address ongoing inequality in things like education and healthcare. Camilla Moore is an attorney and reparatory
justice scholar in the chair of the task force. I'll talk with her about the challenges of trying to put a dollar figure on injustice.
It's been a romant of emotions.
It's been very cathartic to hear from those who would be eligible. You know, descendants of slaves, for instance, who are pretty much sharing their stories to us every time we meet, pouring their hearts out about the harms and atrocity they've endured.
I also speak with Bloomberg's California bureau chief, Karen Breslau.
Some of this defies numbers, and it really speaks to something of a collective atonement.
She's written a deeply reported peace about the Task Force, and she's here to tell us how reparations would actually work. Jare a person more. Let me just start with the most basic question, what is the case for reparations? Why should California pay them?
So, the case for reparations in the state of California particularly is about the state taking account stability for its role in perpetuating what we've called the badges and incidents of slavery that still linger on and disproportionately negatively affect African Americans, primarily those who are descendants of slaves. And so we have spelled out in our final report various different instances of California a perpetuating exclusionary public policy or
widespread private discrimination as well. And that's what the crux of the justification for reparations in the state of California lives.
And so how do you decide who should be eligible to receive compensation?
So the task Force we debated around the issue of eligibility for over ten months and February of twenty twenty two. In March twenty twenty two, we finally came to a decision around who should be eligible, particularly for monetary cash payments.
In various other forms of reparations, and we decided to base eligibility on lineage, that being, if you're a descendant of a free or enslaved black person living in the United States prior to nineteen hundred, then you would be eligible, rather than a race based standard.
And so it's for people who lived anywhere in the United States, not just California, which of course was not a state that sanctioned slavery.
Yeah, it's for any person who's a descendant of an enslaved or free black person living in the United States more broadly prior to nineteen hundred, because a lot of Black American Californians, you know, our grandparents, great grandparents, they migrated from the South to California. The only part I wanted to note is around California's role in slavery. You know,
a lot of people ask why California. You know, we have argued as a task force, if we made the claim that California was only free and name there were over you know, two thousand black people who were enslaved
in the state. Not only that, California implemented or enacted a fugitive slave law that was actually much more aggressive than the federal Fugitive Slave Law that was in eighteen fifty two, so that deputized ordinary white citizens to essentially round up free black people to re enslave them in the South or in some instances in the state of California as well.
And so it's one thing to make the argument for reparations, which has been made over the years in any number of places, and quite another thing to try to figure out how you decide who gets what, How did you go about doing that? To put a dollar figure on centuries of injustice.
We hired five economists and public policy experts who are at the top of their field to just with this question in terms of how do you calculate potential compensation, particularly for these decades, generations longs of human rights violations?
Quite frankly, and so.
In our final report, you'll most likely see language acknowledging how it's nearly impossible to put a dollar amount on these human rights violations. But what we decided to do was to utilize these economists and public policy experts to essentially calculate the pure losses of the black community across
five different state sanctioned atrocity areas. The global figure that the task force arrived at meaning the five economists and public policy experts we hired were able to calculate almost eight hundred billion dollars in the total losses in five
particular harm areas, so housing segregation. So part of that eight hundred billion dollars represents the loss of home ownership value because there was state sanctioned redlining in the state that you know, relegated black folks to certain neighborhoods, to certain homes, health harms. There's an eight year life expectancy gap between white Americans and Black Americans, so some of that eight hundred billion dollar value of loss is an
attempt to quantify that life expectancy gap. They were able to gather some evidence to quantify the losses the black community has faced over you know, disproportionate uses of imminent domain in black communities, over policing and mass incarcerations. Took into account for instance, loss of earning potentials and things like that. And then the fifth form, which was devaluation
of black businesses. So taking in that eight hundred billion dollar amount also takes into account the losses that black businesses.
Have taken over time.
The state Taskforce has not recommended the state payout eight hundred billion dollars.
In some new outlets have.
Said we've recommended every black person get paid one point two million dollars. Now that's misinformation. The monetary figures again just represent supure loss economically speaking of the black community because of us being targeted via exclusionary public policy and why spread private discrimination. And so now it's going to be up to the state legislature to read that methodology, hopefully endorse it. But then it'll be up to them
to actually prescribe the actual amount. So it could be less than what we arrived at in terms of the loss, it could be more, it could be the same. It's that's a political conversation that's best left to the legislators at this point.
And so have you assigned dollar amounts for individuals to claim if they have suffered losses under one or more of these five areas?
So we haven't assigned dollar amounts, but we have recommended that there be two types of forms of compensation cumulative reparation repertory compensation and individual compensations. So we have recommended that all folks who are eligible receive reparations in the form of compensation. But in addition to that, those within the eligible class, if they can prove, so to speak, direct proof of harm in those five areas, then they should be entitled to additional compensation as well.
But the dollar amounts assigned to each of those forms of discrimination are not set out in the report.
There are monetary figures in the report, but they aren't dollar amounts that we're recommending per se.
They represent the loss.
Of the black community over time based on those particular areas.
And so those dollar figures, you then think, will be used by the legislator to try to come up with compensation amounts that correspond with the different form terms of injustice that people suffered, Yes, exactly, and is this something that individuals will have to apply for to say I was discriminated against in these areas and therefore I am making an application for compensation.
So one of the recommendations from the task force were to create a new state agency tentatively called the California American Freeman Affairs Agency, and that would be the agency where people would essentially sign up to receive direct repertory justice services, including showing their eligibility for the programs in general,
but also cash payments. We invited expert witnesses around what this agency could look like, like administrative law professors, for example, and we recommended that the agency have a genealogy branch to assist people in showing their eligibility, and also it's a general eligibility branch for those cash payments.
And so that each person would come forward and make a claim and then it would be looked into and sort of investigated to see whether or not the claim was valid.
Yes, absolutely, So.
You've been working on this for quite some time. What's this been like. You've been going around the state, You've been listening to people's stories. You've heard people saying that's a great idea, You've heard vocal opposition. What is it like to head this task forse.
First, I'd say an honor and a privilege. You know, I went to law school with an express purpose into studying repertory justice on a domestic and international level.
So I went to Columbia for my JD.
And then I received a Master of Laws an international criminal law from the University of Amsterdam. So this was just perfect timing for me in terms of me being able to transfer my wealth of knowledge that I have into this historic process.
It's been a romant of emotion.
It's been very cathartic to hear from those who would be eligible. You know, descendants of slaves, for instance, who are pretty much sharing their stories to us every time we meet, pouring their hearts out about the harms and atrocities they've endured over time living in the city of California.
You know, it's been interesting getting.
Hate mail as well from folks who aren't very enthusiastic about it, but you know, it all comes with the territory. So I've been having a great experience overall.
And so where does it go from here? You've written this report, You're going to deliver it, and then what happens next.
So the task for us, as you mentioned, we have finalized the report. It will be officially released at our last hearing, which will be on June twenty ninth in Sacramento.
After that, the report will be delivered to the legislators, and it'll be up to the state legislator, the State Assembly, and the State Senate to you know, study the report in good faith, meaningfully consult with us if needed, and implement our proposals and turn them into actual legislation, and then it will be up to Governor Newsom to sign
any reparations legislation into law. Some activists are saying that legislators can introduce reparations legislation as early as fall winter twenty twenty three or early twenty twenty four.
And do you think this is going to be successful? Do you think California will approve reparations in one form or another?
I do.
I already see some conversations online from state legislators who are enthusiastic about even some of the more controversial aspects of the report. So there are legislators who literally just got elected so they have some time to be in
the legislator, which is a good thing. That are you know, enthusiastic about introducing legislation for cash payments for dissentance of slaves And so I think that's a good science to see very early on, even before or the report is finalized, legislators willing to be bold and you know, taking aspects of the report that some deemed to be the hardest to accomplish, They're already looking into ways to partner with their other elected officials to make it a reality.
And then looking further down the road. Do you see your effort as a model for other states and maybe even the federal government for national reparations.
I definitely see to the extent that states and localities would like to also atone for any state or local atrocities. I definitely see what the state has done as a model. Also in our final report, there will be the final recommendation to transmit our final report to Congress and to the Biden administration, and that was in our introim report, but we've kind of beefed up the recommendation to say, Okay,
here's our final report. You know, you can implement full reparations without a comprehensive study because California has done that work for you already. And also to the An administration, you can create a commission for reparations by executive order committing to full effective reparations with a truncated study period because California.
Has done so much work on this already.
So yeah, I'm optimistic that our state has done the work to set precedent for what reparations could look like on state level and then nationally as well. And then I'll just lastly say there have been many different people around the world from marginalized communities that have been inspired by the work of our task force and has personally reached.
Out to me.
People from Namibia and Africa, Surinam in South America and so many other places who are inspired and looking to California for this.
Work as well.
Share a person coming Alamore. Thanks so much. I appreciate your time.
Thank you.
After the break, we dig into the details of the task forces recommendations. Now let's bring in my colleague, Karen Breslaw. She's Bloomberg's California a bureau chief and she's been covering the reparation's task forse Karen. Over the years, there have been any number of reparations efforts, but Californias is different. Can you talk about why that is so?
Wes.
There were policies, there were practices, there were laws that codified discrimination that contributed really since the day California became a state in eighteen fifty, really up until the current day, we're very familiar with some of those having to do with discriminatory application of federal law and federal programs.
Going back to the.
New Deal, the GI Bill, Urban renewal projects in the nineteen seventies in which black homes and businesses were taken through eminent domain or devalued or unjustly seized, and so there are definitely ways to track and to assign value value to the wealth gap. They looked not only at wealth gaps, but also health gaps. They looked at educational gaps.
They looked at harms affecting Black communities in California that go well beyond numbers, that don't really lend themselves to monetary compensation, and some of those have to do with intergenerational traumas.
Tell us more about this task force, How did it come to be and who's in it, how does it operate?
So in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder in twenty twenty, a then Assembly member named Shirley Weber introduced a bill to establish a Reparations task Force to look at not only the health, wealth, educational gaps, but also the police practices and differences that led to George Floyd's murder. Shirley Weber has since been elevated to Secretary of State of California, and the task Force is made up of a variety
of experts. They tend to be civil rights advocates, attorneys, not surprisingly economists, a couple of members of the current legislature appointed by the governor and the Speaker pro tem of the Senate, and they were given a mandate to study this issue for two years and to deliver a report to the Legislature by June of this year.
Karen, and you're reporting you talked to several people who are on the task force and are involved in this effort. Can you tell us about them?
Yes, two in particular.
One is Reverend Amos Brown, who is a longtime civil rights advocate in San Francisco and leads the oldest African
American congregation in San Francisco. He was born in Mississippi in nineteen forty one, the same year as Emmett Till, not far from mm Atill, and his political awakening came when Emme Attil was murdered and he saw his photos in Jet magazine, and he went to the NAACP right there in Jackson, Mississippi, and met Medgar Evers, who was the organization's field director and went on obviously to have a tremendous role in the American civil rights movement. Amos Brown,
as a young man, was mentored by Edgar Evers. He comes to it from a place of history and incredible personal connection.
And he is also the descendant.
Of a great great grandfather who was enslaved in Mississippi.
Let's listen to part of your interview with him.
California, San Francisco, a loge squeaky clean. Even in nineteen o eight, Reverend Alan Allensworth tried to establish a community down there near Bakersfield that became known as Alan's were the water was Paul the politicians were able to get the railroad track re rooted to kill the town. So it looks like every time we make progress, in spite of what we have been able to achieve, there is this alliance of a movement to say, no, you're not
going in further. We're gonna stop you. If it means suppressing the vote, if it means unjust police practices, if it means making sure that you don't get equality of opportunity or employment, if it means that you don't get healthcare those who are handicapped. We got measures through Congress. So wherever a particular group our population has been wronged, we made efforts, you know, through the land and tears up the community, we make funls available to have businesses.
We'll all received there none of us lives by bull lamb steps up whole bootstraps.
And so you've described the various ways that the task Force has tried to quantify all the various legacies of racism. How do they go about doing that?
Well, let's take an example, home ownership.
They can track rates of homeownership through a variety of federal and state data over time. They can look at lending practices, they can look at the actual mechanism of redlining.
And so another thing the task Force did was to look into historical examples of reparations on very large scales, Germany's reparations to Israel after the Holocaust, more recently, the nine to eleven Victims Compensation Fund, and they looked at, if you want, examples of wrongdoing by the US government, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two.
The US government.
Compensated the survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilist Study on black men by the US Public Health Service, and that continued, if you can believe it, until nineteen seventy two. So there are definitely historical frameworks here there's also an entire body of international law and standards set forth by the United Nations, and all of that factored into their report.
In your story, you write that after the task force started doing all of this work, they did come up with hard numbers for any number of things. Can you just run through what some of these numbers are that spell out what people are owed.
One calculation looked at the statistical value for a year of human life, and they looked at the differences in life expectance affecting Black Californians and came up with a value of thirteen thousand, six hundred and nineteen dollars per
statistical year of missing life expectancy. Another was wealth missing due to lower rates of black home ownership one hundred and forty eight thousand, ninety nine dollars, the average devaluation of a black owned business seventy seven thousand dollars for each year of disproportionate incarceration factored by race, combining lost wages and freedom one hundred and fifty nine thousand, seven
hundred and ninety two dollars. What they're doing here is preparing recommendations that are going to go to the legislature so that the lawmakers can have a frame of reference, can have some data to set up a reparations framework.
And so where would that revenue come from, would they raise taxes, would it come from specific places.
One proposal that a member of the task force made, who's Stephen Bradford, a state senator, is to set aside zero point five percent of the state's operating budget into an annuity, which would create about a billion and a half dollars in annual funding. And some of these reparations
do not have monetary value attached. Some include something like an official apology by the state of California, or discounted tuition or free tuition to eligible descendants of enslaved people who want to go to the University of California or any public university, greater healthcare, greater investments in healthcare.
What's the public's response been to the idea of reparations in California.
It's been very divided, not only by party, with Democrats who have an overwhelming majority in the state legislature, and also among voters. I think open to the concept, but very fuzzy on the details. And then there are those who are opposed to the concept of reparations that current generations should essentially pay the tab for generations. I think we're going to see a lot of movement in public opinion as this task Force report gets studied and discussed
in the legislature. Public opinion can move pretty quickly, but both the concept of reparations and the staggering totals are going to give a lot of people pause.
When you say public opinion is going to move, which direction do you anticipate it with moving?
I think it will move with understanding that reparations doesn't always mean a check. We saw that with the Japanese American Internment. Those survivors were compensated with twenty thousand dollars, which could not come close to the suffering and the losses and led to an apology whether US Congress and led to the funding of a number of public education initiatives.
When we come back, we hear from another member of the task Force. Earlier we heard Reverend Amos Brown and other members of the task Force also told their stories.
The other amazing story was Reggie Jones Sawyer, who's a member of the State Assembly from Los Angeles, and his family came from Arkansas from Hope Arkansas.
He is related to one of the Little Rock Nine.
Karen sat down with the assemblymen. Let's hear part of their conversation.
You know, ever since I was a little boy, I used to hear stories about my uncle being one in Little Rock nine. When the nine kids integrated Central High School in nineteen fifty seven, I used to hear stories of him being beaten and kicked all sorts of disparaging names just for him to try to get into high school. There's a picture of him standing next to a fence pole and he's by himself, and across the street you
can see the angry white mobs yelling at him. One day, they forgot to pick him up from school, so they all got in the car, raced down there, and he was standing next to this post and they went. When it got to him, he had to spit. Somebody urinated on him. I mean, it was pretty bad. And we asked him what happened, and he said that the kids swarmed.
The white kids just went around him and just called them name Martin Luther King and Reverend Lost and had taught him non violence, not to let anybody see you panic. And he said in the middle of the crowd. This young kid came out and said, hey, leave him alone. He's not doing anything, and he said and then they dispersed. He said he saw the kid the next day thanked him and said, wow, you're really you know your parents raised your right. It was a really Christian of you.
And the kid looked at him, he said, we're atheists. I just did it. It was the right thing to do. The barriers that those nine kids went through. I don't know if I could have gone through all of that, with all that I know now at my age, if I could have gone through that kind of trauma at that age, But I owe them a debt of gratitude because if it wasn't for them, I had absolutely no problem of getting into the University of Southern California, and
now I'm in the doctoral program at SC. And it's because of them I was able to fulfill my academic dreams with absolutely no problem whatsoever. And so I'm standing on their shoulders. And so when this opportunity came up, I realized, it's really important that I do everything I can to reverse what institutional slavery has done to African Americans, not only in America, but let's start here in California.
You know, when we talk about history and try not to repeat history, when we talk about critical race theory, which is really about telling the truth of history and what really happened, not what was whitewashed, but what really happened.
And what you'll find is not only were there governors who actively worked to send slaves back to the South here from California, that there were laws that prohibited African Americans from marrying outside their race, That there were laws that were put in place so that we couldn't live
in areas that we wanted to. That the GI Bill restricted us even though we went to war, fought for this country and laid our lives down, That we didn't have the same opportunities as our white counterparts to the GI Bill, and education and think of nature, and that California participated in it just as much as they did
in the South. We may be the benchmark not only for California or what reparations will be or should be, but the nation in any city or state in this country will then take all this data and use it as the floor for what they will or will not do in the future. That is an unbelievable responsibility. I don't think it's about paying, it's about reversing the harms that are now placed upon every African American in California.
If you can stop redlining, and you can do it without any financial responsibility, without having to implement any money, I think that works just as well. If we're talking about education, somehow we can make schools equal in the inner cities for African American kids who are performing at a lower level. If we can level that playing field in a way that is not a overly burdensome on the educational budget, then let's do that. It's more important
to have success than spend money. When it comes to mass incarceration, I have a bill right now where if you close to prisons, it's a savings of two hundred and thirty million dollars a year. What if we could plow that money back into recidivism programs, mental health program We'll pour it back into trauma inform care because a lot of kids see things on the street that then
get them into the school to prison pipeline. Then we save eighty thousand dollars a year to one hundred thousand dollars a year incarcerating people and that's money that we save, which means that's not an extra burden on us. We're now working on the savings and we're looking at an ROI return on our investment. What if we start looking at it that way. Yes, on the ledger, it may look like it's two hundred and thirty one million dollars that we're spending, but really not, this is the money
we saved. What if that two hundred and thirty million dollars turn into we close ten prisons instead of two. How much savings is that over a long period of time that we could say was part of reparations, reducing the amount of people who are innovating going back and forth like a turnstile into prison. How much money could we save there? Now we're talking about a robust system that does look like is billions and billions of dollars,
where there really is billions and billions of savings. Everybody's basing everything on money. I think changing policy is just as important as the financial remuneration. In fact, I think if we are to remove some racial disparity barriers, they will go a lot further than cash payment.
Karen, do you think ultimately there will be some form of reparations at the end of this long process.
I do, Wes.
I think it's going to be a range of monetary and non monetary measures. I think the public apology will come rather soon. I think public education programs will come soon. I think the notion of greater investment and health access to higher education, into HOMEOWNIP programs, I think all of that is readily within reach. I think the concept of individual compensation remains distant, and I don't expect that for years.
Karen, thanks so much for speaking with me today.
Thank you, Wes.
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