Any sensible American should adopt an unambiguous moral judgment against slavery. Chattel slavery was a sinful impediment to human progress and a stain upon our nation. Almost two centuries after the institution of race-based slavery was abolished, Americans’ justified urge to right past wrongs of slavery is now weaponized by radical politicians to create race-preferential policies under the banner of “reparations.”
Once again, California leads the nation in instituting reparation-themed programs and initiatives, even though the Golden State entered the Union in 1850 as a free state. On April 23, the California Senate Committee on Governmental Organization approved SB 1403 on a strictly partisan, 11-to-2 vote. Authored by Senator Steven Bradford of Gardena, who is also a member of the State Reparations Task Force, SB 1403 seeks to establish the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency to implement recommendations from the task force’s sweeping, 40-chapters-long reparations report.
Chief among the recommendations and central to the bill is the creation of a Genealogy Office to provide “expert genealogical research” and “confirm reparations eligibility.” Alas, a state-sanctioned agency, bearing shades of Nuremberg, will be entrusted to oversee a wide array of reparation schemes, including: property claims, educational access, environmental justice, criminal justice reforms, cultural activities, and more.
Rather than acknowledging the multiracial complexities of today’s America where many self-identified White Americans could trace their ancestral roots to slavery, the California Freedmen Affairs Agency would give a special consideration only for “African Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States,” according to the bill.
This emphasis on race and color echoes the racialized nature of the California Reparations Report, which goes beyond addressing the immediate harms of slavery and tackles the hotly contested concept of “institutional racism” as a permanent feature of American society. As it stands, the task force and supporters of reparations argue that California owes African Americans for its complicity in slavery and for its subsequent culpability in post-Civil-War discrimination that has embedded white supremacy in American institutions to the present day.
The California Reparations Report, which reads more like a political manifesto than a policy document, is the product of a reparations craze that started in the 2020 summer of racial reckoning, when the state legislature passed AB 3121 to establish the Reparations Task Force in July 2020. One would theorize that Sacramento Democrats must be slowing down, after the political temperature for racial identity politics cooled off and a poll showed scant public will for cash reparations. Even Governor Newsom had scaled back his support upon seeing the steep price tag of $800 billion for cash reparations.
But we may never underestimate the woke ideology’s stronghold on California’s Democratic lawmakers: every single one of them on the Senate Governmental Organization Committee, and on the Senate Judiciary Committee (which voted for SB 1403 8-to-1 on April 9), thinks setting up a state agency to facilitate the jaw-dropping recommendations of the Reparations Task Force is a splendid idea. Not to mention that their constituents most likely won’t be thrilled about fighting past discrimination with unconstitutional racial preferences. SB 1403’s fiscal impact, yet to be determined by the Senate Appropriations Committee, looms large in the context of the state’s monstrous $68 billion budget problem.
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Aside from identifying Black Californians eligible for receiving restitution, compensation, rehabilitation and other forms of reparations, the prospective Freedmen Affairs Agency would also be in charge of all state government functions pertaining to reparations. This means it would enforce the barrage of legislation entailed in the California Legislative Black Caucus’s 2024 reparations legislative package, if and when the bills get codified. Notably, the package includes ACA 7, a constitutional amendment to provide research-based exemptions to California’s constitutional ban on racial preferences (Proposition 209). If passed, ACA 7 would open the flood gate for government-sponsored discrimination. To this end, proponents of reparations make a wildly bizarre case that prohibiting racial preferences has exacerbated racism against African Americans.
The pipeline of discrimination in the name of reparations requires both virtue signaling and substantive changes to existing non-discrimination laws. And one ponders: for all this trouble, to what end? Should Californians, whose natural diversity in an increasingly multi-racial society defies cookie-cutter assumptions on race, ancestral origins, and disadvantages, be held responsible for our forefathers’ “sins” committed two centuries ago?
Wenyuan Wu is executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation.