Posted on 05/17/2024 2:50:49 PM PDT by Libloather
California lawmakers have voted to officially apologize for the state's role in slavery, but efforts to make cash reparations payouts have been shelved.
The California Assembly on Thursday backed a bill authored by Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer that accepts responsibility for 'all of the harms and atrocities committed by the state.'
The Los Angeles Democrat received hugs and applause on the assembly floor after the bill was passed. It now moves on to the Senate.
'Not only is the apology letter important … it's whether or not we go ahead and fulfill the dream of what my ancestors wanted, which is to fully make us part of the American dream,' Jones-Sawyer said.
Lawmakers also approved plans to help black families research their family lineage, recover land unjustly taken from them, and to create a state fund for reparations programs.
But landmark pieces of reparations legislation — bills to give property tax and cash payouts to the descendants of slaves — were shelved in a Senate fiscal process.
State Sen. Steven Bradford, the LA Democrat who authored the bills, said they were shelved largely because of the state's roughly $45 billion budget deficit.
'It's a financial challenge this year,' Bradford said, according to the LA Times.
'But we always knew it wasn't going to be a one and done. This is going to be a multiyear approach.'
The bills were culled in a process known as the 'suspense file', which is sometimes used to nix controversial legislation.
The California Legislative Black Caucus has pushed hard to turn reparations into reality, including through a first-in-the-nation task force that wrapped up last year.
But while voters and politicians have gotten behind plans to issue an official apology, which does not have a large price tag, cash payouts to the descendants of slaves have failed...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Compromise of 1850. Doesn’t that take us off the hook?
Apologizing for stuff that nobody alive today was involved or responsible for, is meaningless now and easy to do.
Reparations for wrongdoing that occurred over a century ago, and that nobody today was responsible for, is money spend wastefully and irresponsibly, and not authorized by the people whose money would be used. Those that would get the money would just waste it and be right back in the poor house immediately, like it never even happened. It’s wasteful, irresponsible and idiotic. And, if the purpose is to ‘buy people’s votes’, it’s something that needs to be investigated and those responsible should be punished. Democrats have been buying the black vote for over a century now.
But California was a Free State.
California was a free State.
There was slavery there during the Spanish period and earlier years of the Mexican period. And some pro-Native American types consider the Spanish mission treatment of the Indians to be slavery (even if they worked less than half the days in the year, I think). Did the US inherit the guilt for the earlier slavery by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?
California was never formally a slave state… so not really sure what this is about at all.
Sorry for something that was never legally recognized here…..
HOW does one apologize for things they did not do & take responsibility???
HAS ALL LOGIC escaped Calif???
Yes there is no logic here. There is liberalism, not logic. Reparations for slavery is an emerging liberal cause.
The United States did not exist prior to 1783. Slavery that did exist at the time was NOT created by the United States but was a hold over from the time it was a British Colony.
From the beginning efforts were made to end the practice which in time required a Civil War. In 1865 the 13th Amendment was ratified ending slavery in the US, just 82 years after the country came into existent.
It has been 159 years since the end of slavery in this nation.
Any apology required and any reparations owed was paid in blood by Americans that fought and died to free slaves.
So the California Assembly isn’t going to bend over and take the “Black Caucus”, after all!
I finished an audio book by HW Brands called “Age of Gold” about the founding of California and the Gold Rush. When California applied to be a state, there was a meeting of like minded individuals in Monterey. The issue of slavery as dealt with in that the members of that assembly wanted nothing to do with slavery.
When the application came to congress all hell broke as southerners wanted California admitted as a slave state, even so far as dividing the state into two with the lower (southern) half being slave and the northern half free.
California was never a slave state, nor wanted to be a slave state. Now we can talk about the whites (miners) that came out and their treatment of Chileans, Mexicans, Indians and later Chinese—but that is another issue altogether. If goes to show that when money is to be made, certain peoples believe it all belongs to them.
California: ‘We are sorry that we are apologizing for something that as a state we were against. That said, due to our tax and spend by today’s Socialists, we can’t pay you something your ancestors received. If you want money, get an education and act White. Thank you.’. 🤓
“We weren’t a slave state. But, sorry anyway.”
Slavery wasn’t even a thing until 1655 with Johnson v Parker. Oh. And Johnson was black so the person who helped codify slavery was a black man.
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