California, is now considering reparations of up to $360,000 per eligible recipient, more than 50% higher than the amount floated as the highest possibility last year. This is despite the fact that it entered the Union in 1850, as a free state.
It is certainly not clear where this $360,000, per eligible recipient, will come from in a state with a budget deficit, nor why the number has grown. According to Bloomberg News, the pressure may be coming from local efforts, in cities like San Francisco, which is considering $5 million per black resident.
These people obviously think with their emotions, and not with their wallets. Besides being underwater financially, thanks to Governor Gavin Newsom’s leadership, with many cities hurting for funds, it remains also unclear why California would pay for sins it did not commit.
Advocates of reparations argue that California, as a state is guilty, regardless, because of lingering racial inequality. Further, the goal appears to be to encourage the nation, as a whole, to pay reparations. According to a report by Bloomberg News, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who wrote the bill creating the task force, when she served in the state assembly, said-
“If California can admit its sins and change the narrative, then there is a way forward for states and cities across the nation,”…
And…after 400 years of deprivation and lack of opportunity and tax on African Americans, it’s going to take more than a moment, to get to the place where we feel a sense of fairness and parody has been reached”
-California Secretary of State Shirley Weber
During the heyday of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed legislation to create the reparations committee. This appointed body, which has already made preliminary recommendations that include separate schooling for black Californians, is apparently not demographically representative of the state. It also does not include a single white member. Later this year, it is due to make is report to the CA Legislature.
