Posted on 04/06/2022 5:08:58 PM PDT by Steely Tom
In a 5-4 vote on Mar. 29, 2022, the California reparations task force decided to limit reparations to African Americans who can trace their lineage to slavery, stating that those parameters were most likely to survive legal challenges.
Free black people who came to the United States in the 19th century or earlier will also be eligible for reparations. The task force cited the trouble of tracing family history and the danger of being captured and enslaved as reasons for their inclusion.
The two-year reparations task force, the first state group in the country, was created in 2020 when Governor Gavin Newson signed legislation for the group to study slavery and its harms, and to educate the public. Almost all of the task force members can trace their lineage to enslaved people. [1]
Black people who cannot trace their ancestry to slavery were considered for inclusion due to systemic racism, but were ultimately excluded. California is home to about 2.6 million African Americans.
The task force is about a year into its work, but had not created a compensation plan yet, which could include a range of solutions: “free college, assistance buying homes and launching businesses, and grants to churches and community organizations.” A final proposal from the task force is due in June 2023.
While California is the only state to have taken up the issue of reparations, some cities are doing so. Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago made reparations available to African American residents in 2021. Providence, Rhode Island, announced a city commission in Feb. 2022, and Boston, Massachusetts is considering a commission.
At the national level, federal legislation has been proposed (namely HR 40), supported by 363 groups in the Why We Can’t Wait Coalition. Meanwhile Japanese and Jewish American groups support reparations for descendants of slavery, including the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, Japanese American Citizens League and Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress.
In June of 2021, the state of California initiated a “Reparations Task Force” to consider questions of compensation for the descendants of the victims of chattel slavery. The task force is to report to the state legislature in June of 2023 to make recommendations.It is significant that the demand finds its home in California, of all states. The demand for reparations has been consistently rejected at the national level, but its proponents have found support here. In the antebellum, California deported runaway slaves back to the South, but it nonetheless remained a free state. Its government opposed the expansion of slavery into the state and supported the Union in the Civil War. When the reparations task force was kicked off in mid-2021, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber asked, “Why in California? Why not somewhere else? Why did we not do it in the South? If not us, then who?”
Good questions, but to give them a serious answer requires an analysis of contemporary political reality, not rhetorical self-aggrandizement. A hint is given in the latest decision by the task force that only those who identify as African American and can prove the enslavement of their ancestors or the presence of a free black ancestor in the US prior to the 20th century can receive a payout.
In a motion that passed 5-4, they stated that eligibility would be “determined by an individual being an African American descendant of a chattel enslaved person or the descendant of a free Black person living in the US prior to the end of the 19th century.” This criterion excludes black African immigrants—of which there are more than 300,000 in California and 2 million in the US—and those who do not identify as African American but can prove slave or free black ancestors.
The question of eligibility is not a minor question. The task force is after all expected to quantify the amount of money owed as part of its work, and the total sum may be substantial. Who will receive it is a chief concern. A number of genealogists were brought to speak to the task force about the issues of using a lineage based approach, some of whom raised important points. In particular, one warned that proving one’s heritage could be “time consuming and costly.”
It should be added that in such a formulation, there is more than a whiff of one of the most reactionary laws of the 20th century. Those who wish to receive reparations must demonstrate as a sort of pseudo-progressive contrapositive to the “one-drop rule” that they are descended from slaves. That criterion, infamous during the Jim Crow period, classified people as “black” if they could be shown to have a single drop of “black blood” in them. In its day, this was used to cast as wide a net as possible. Even those who may not have appeared “black” could be targeted. On occasion, entire families were discovered to be black, and segregated. As featured in the film Free State of Jones, Davis Knight, the grandson of Newton Knight, the white leader of an interracial rebellion against the Confederacy in Mississippi during the Civil War, was charged in the late 1940s for marrying a white woman. Davis Knight was one-eighth black.
But now that the issue is the distribution of financial compensation rather than the meting out of “justice,” racial hurdles that are “time consuming and costly” are to be set up to limit recipients.
Civil rights lawyer Lisa Holder, a member of the task force who opposed these criteria, stated, “We must make sure we include present day and future harms… The system that folks are advocating for here, where we splice things up, where only one small slice benefits, will not abate the harms of racism.”
But the same must be said about the whole project of reparations. It diminishes neither the repugnance nor the historical significance of slavery to insist that the demand for reparations raises questions not only of history, but of contemporary social life. In the US, more than one million people were left to die of COVID-19 over the last two years. Inflation is running rampant, and fascism has returned as a political force. Police continue to kill workers of every race and ethnicity with impunity. A new “forever war” against nuclear-armed Russia is the order of the day. Inequality is greater than at any point in history, and what the ruling class fears most of all is the resurgence of the class struggle.
It is in this context of deep crisis that the call for reparations finds its moment. California is a stronghold of the Democratic Party in the US, with a Democratic governor, and a supermajority in the legislature. The Democratic Party, one of the two right-wing parties of capitalist rule in the US, has turned ever more obsessively to racialism and identity politics as a political tool to divide the working class along racial lines.
The New York Times’ flagship, the 1619 Project, has formed the intellectual spearhead of these politics. The basic conception underlying the racialist falsifications of the 1619 Project is that the interests of “whites” and “blacks” are irreconcilably hostile, and that the conflict between these two camps forms the broad arc of American history. Historically, it denounces all that is progressive in American history, including the American Revolution and Civil War.
Source: California’s reparations task force limits potential recipients to those who can prove lineage.
Racis basteds.
Oh good. That’s all of us.
How ‘bout us whitey’s whose descendants didn’t have any slaves and had to do all the work to make America great themselves? Shouldn’t we get “reparations” also?
None of it will hold up to legal challenges. There is absolutely no way this is not struck down by the courts. It is nothing more than a liberal wetdream.
So the taxpayers who had nothing to do with slavery are going to have their money stolen by the state and given to people who weren’t slaves?
That will go over well.
Why I will never move to Californistan.
And those with kin that fought for the union side?
Maybe they should then in fairness limit the collections of said reparations to the white and black slave owner families.
You know because the vast majority of the country then wasn’t involved in the slave trade, many states abolished it or never were slave states, and no one alive today was a slave or owned slaves. You know. Pesky little facts like that.
When will the 600,000+ cw dead and their families be compensated?
Time to up my investments in gaudy jewelry and spinny rims
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.—KIPLING
Make the (D)’s pay - they’re the ones who held slaves and fought to keep them.
700,000 WHITES Slaughtered each other over that matter in 1861-1865.
Tens of thousands lost arms, legs, eyes.
Reparations have been paid for in blood.
What could go wrong?? This will be ripe with fraud as usual!!!
How are they going to prove lineage going back more than 100 years? Most of them don’t even know who their father is.
Depends on the definition of "prove," I would predict.
Which is where it will get interesting.
At the same time reparations are paid out to the descendants of slaves:
Never.
End of story.
I wish I had your confidence in the courts about that.
What about those who are Irish? I am half Irish. For centuries the Irish and Scottish were suppressed and effectively enslaved by the English, who stole their land from them. During and after that in the USA, there were decades of anti-Irish discrimination (”no Irish need apply”). For decades, Irish people in the USA could only get jobs that no one else wanted (seamstresses, railroad gang workers, policemen, etc.). This probably put people of Irish descent decades behind others in terms of prosperity.
When do I and others of Irish/Scottish descent get reparations? If not, why not?? Is it fair to give one suppressed group reparations but not another suppressed group? On what basis is the entitlement of suppressed groups to reparations determined?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.