After two years of research “documenting how enslavement and its enduring legacy of systemic racism cemented structural inequality,” the California Reparations Task Force released their final report and recommendations to the state’s General Assembly to review.
The first-of-its-kind report on reparations for documented descendants of African-American slaves represented the biased views of the task force panel, who apparently subscribe to the false narrative of the 1619 Project’s ideology.
Recommendations found in the more than 1,000 pages of the report include a formal apology to descendants of African-American slaves in the United States, and reforms with suggested policies covering healthcare, housing, education, the “unjust” legal system, the wealth gap, and more.
The Washington Times shared:
Embedded in the panel’s … report is a veritable leftist to-do list that includes: universal health insurance for Black residents, a guaranteed basic income, free college tuition, “forgivable” interest-free loans to small businesses and erasing interest debt on unpaid child support.
That’s not all. The report now before the state Legislature also recommends ending policing of nuisance violations such as public urination, allowing Black LGBTQ youth to receive confidential “mental health care” without parental permission, and adopting “rent caps” in historically red-lined areas.
Those recommendations confirm claims that the reparations task force convened by California Governor Gavin Newsom is “stockpiled with radical far-leftists, some of whom seem to hate America and think it’s a living hellhole for black Americans.”
The glaring hypocrisy of the task force’s lack of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is evident, too, as eight of the nine members of the panel are black.
In addition to the lack of diversity within the task force, the Times reported, “Los Angeles radio host Larry Elder, a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, blasted the reparations concept as ‘nonsense’ and criticized the task force’s hard-left tilt”:
“There’s not a single conservative on this panel. You look at the bios of all the people there, it’s one left-wing person after another — nobody from the center, nobody from the right, no conservatives,” Mr. Elder said Monday on the Fox News Channel.
“The whole panel was basically designed to extract money from other people,” he said, “and that’s exactly what they’ve done.”
The ambiguity of the report’s multiple recommendations on compensation that could total over $800 billion is apparent in the report’s executive summary’s conclusion:
Since this list of harms and atrocities is not exhaustive, the total of the estimated losses to African American Californians is not a final estimate of losses, nor, given the Task Force’s determination of eligibility for compensation, is it is [sic] a recommendation of an amount of reparations payments. Rather, it is an economically conservative initial assessment of what losses, at a minimum, the State of California caused or could have prevented, but did not.
Further data collection and research would be required to augment these initial loss-estimates. And the Legislature would then have to decide how to translate loss-estimates into proposed reparations amounts and make determinations of who would ultimately be eligible to receive those amounts.
Praising the submission of the final report, California Attorney General Rob Bonta stated in a press release, “This final report decisively establishes that now is the time for California to acknowledge the state’s role in perpetuating these harms, and ensure that through a comprehensive approach to reparations, we commit ourselves to the healing and restoration of our African American residents.”
Kamilah Moore, the chairperson of the panel, said she hopes their efforts reinvigorate the Black community to exercise “self-determination with a renewed spirit and energy that enables us to freely determine our political status and to pursue our economic social and cultural development.”
“We have been relegated to the bottom of the caste system in this country,” Moore said, noting that the final report also highlights the unjust treatment of other racial and ethnic groups in the state. “It is also my hope that the task force’s general efforts empowers these groups in their respective advocacy and ultimately strengthens the capacity for cross cultural allyship and movement building.”
The cost to California taxpayers for the reparations is the elephant in the room. That will have to be decided upon by the Democrat-controlled Legislature, which will consider the report’s recommendations next year. The cost could be nearly three times California’s total annual budget of $300 billion, which is facing a potential $24 billion deficit for the 2023-24 fiscal year. State lawmakers will have to make a decision on the report, and the budget will affect any agreement to pay reparations.
Now that the “radical far-leftists” have had their utopian viewpoints on reparations declared, we can only hope that the truth of the reparations’ fiscal and moral bankruptcy will ultimately be deemed impossible to implement.
If by chance payments of any amount are ever issued, the butterfly effect will be unfathomable in Western society, as every descendant of any suppressed group will be reaching out for his “fair share.”
