Story at a glance
- California’s novel reparations task force convened on Tuesday.
- The group, composed of civil rights leaders, academics and politicians, will explore how California could provide Black residents reparations.
- Reparations aim to bridge socioeconomic gaps and repair racial injustices first stemming from slavery and continuing throughout the country’s history.
The novel California task force whose sole mission is to study how the state may carry out reparations for African American residents convened its first meeting on Tuesday, nine months after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed a bill into law creating the historic task force.
Reparations, or the reallocation of state funding to Black Americans who were broadly redlined from building comparable wealth to their white counterparts due to slavery and the U.S.’s history of institutionalized racism, gained traction amid the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020. Former Democratic presidential candidates, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), now-Vice President Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, also began positively speaking about reparations during their bids in 2019.
Some cities, including Evanston, Ill., voted to approve funding reparations to Black households. California is the only state to commission an entire committee devoted to studying how reparations may be distributed statewide.
“We have lost more than we have ever taken from this country. We have given more than has ever been given to us,” said task force member and state Sen. Steven Bradford (D), per local outlets.
Nine members compose the task force, including Cheryl Grills, a professor at Loyola Marymount University; Amos Brown, a civil rights leader and activist; Don Tamaki, an attorney and civil rights activist; and Jovan Scott Lewis, a Berkeley economic anthropologist.
“California is leading the nation, in a bipartisan way, on the issue of reparations and racial justice, which is a discussion that is long overdue and deserves our utmost attention,” Newsom said in previous comments.
Ultimately, the task force is set to develop recommendations that outline the depth of systemic racism’s effects on economic disparities and how to address them.
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