09 May 2023

Billions in reparations proposed for black Californians

 As reported by NPR:
California's reparations task force voted Saturday to approve recommendations on how the state may compensate and apologize to Black residents for generations of harm caused by discriminatory policies...

After California entered the union in 1850 as a "free" state, it did not enact any laws to guarantee freedom for all, the draft recommendation notes. On the contrary, the state Supreme Court enforced the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed for the capture and return of runaway enslaved people, for over a decade until emancipation.

"By participating in these horrors, California further perpetuated the harms African Americans faced, imbuing racial prejudice throughout society through segregation, public and private discrimination, and unequal disbursal of state and federal funding," the document says.

California has previously apologized for placing Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II and for violence against and mistreatment of Native Americans.

The panel also approved a section of the draft report saying reparations should include "cash or its equivalent" for eligible residents.

Some estimates from economists have projected that the state could owe upwards of $800 billion, or more than 2.5 times its annual budget, in reparations to Black people.

The figure in the latest draft report released by the task force is far lower. The group has not responded to email and phone requests for comment on the reduction.
I have never understood how the concept of financial reparations can logically be justified for African-Americans but not for native Americans.  I suppose a lawyer could argue that the displacement and genocide of native Americans occurred before the "state" of California legally existed, but IMHO that's bullshit.

12 comments:

  1. Los Angeles County: 70,000 homeless. But we're going to give people money based on ancestry, rather than means? The Black college administrator making 500K per year gets a million dollars; the brain injured not-a-Black-person, living under a tarp, gets nothing? This is no way to attack poverty in California. Economic justice is a class problem, as MLK recognized on the eve of his Poor People's March on Washington. 50 years later and we don't have a clue. Identity politics is a scourge.

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  2. It's not about attacking poverty its about righting a wrong or injustice. They earned it.

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    1. I understand that part, but you haven't addressed my question as to why the principle doesn't apply to native Americans.

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    2. Not all wrongs can be righted.

      This reparations thing is a game of "chicken." How far down the conceptual road do we go before folding? The alternative to folding is a political catastrophe for the Sacramento Dems, as the reality of paying bonuses to people, irrespective of means, sinks in. And every person with some historical hell in their family tree begins to think more deeply.

      Irish laborers lived a hell on earth. Both my great-grandfather on my dad's side and my grandfather on my mom's side died in easily preventable industrial "accidents." This was the norm. It has been acknowledged that the 18th and 19th century poverty of the poor, i.e. from the streets of Manhattan to the ragged life of the rural ne'er do well, could be worse than the slavery of the slave.

      None of this is to say there are no claims of past horror worth exploring. But, the crimes are against the poor, and they continue. In our identity consumed leftist culture, we seem to prefer trying to rectify something in the story, over addressing a structural wealth inequality reality.

      I can see the rich, white, leftist SoCal celebrity taking more interest in compensating his well to do black neighbor than housing the homeless white man living under an overpass. It's so much more virtuous, given the white man, though brain injured, urine soaked and starving, has a kind of privilege Oprah and Michael Jordan will never have.

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  3. I completely agree but are people in fact arguing that native Americans deserve reparations less than black people? Or is it just that black people have had more traction for their cause?

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  4. Meanwhile, Governor Newsom has declined to express support for the committee's recommendations, and California just defaulted on $18.5B of debt, leaving business owners to pick up the tab.

    https://www.hoover.org/research/california-defaults-185-billion-debt-leaving-state-businesses-holding-bag

    https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/10/us/california-reparations-task-force-newsom-reaj/index.html

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  5. Reparations aren't going to happen because the taxpayer won't stand for them.

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  6. Bicycle Riders link to hoover report shows the incredible ineptitude of the system.
    I'd bet the discontinuation of the Pondera software that rooted out Billions in fraud was pushed by some politically powerful behind the scenes actors. The problem of fraud is being dumped on businesses who have no legal power to fix it by the government who does. Curiouser and curiouser.
    xoxoxoBruce

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  7. Text of a letter to the editor I sent to my local paper:

    When considering the utility of reparations–that is, financial compensation for the descendants of slaves–a fundamental question should be asked: On what basis is wealth distributed when and where our society distributes resources for the purpose of “promoting the general Welfare?” That is, as tasked by the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

    Imagine if the Preamble, instead of using the words “general Welfare,” directed us to “promote the Welfare of people of color, women and LGBTQ Americans.” If this were our mandate, it would be perfectly consistent to approach economic justice as a matter of race and gender identity, and not a matter of general welfare. That is, we would be Constitutionally oriented toward addressing welfare on the basis of specific and limited phenotypical identity–nothing general about it.

    The alternative to promoting welfare by race, gender and sexual orientation is to act on the basis of means; that is, means as defined in terms of measurable material stature, along a spectrum from one-percenter opulence, to the deadly, street-level deprivation experienced by the dispossessed of all colors.

    Only in a political culture deficient in its understanding of economic justice as a function of ECONOMIC IDENTITY–aka, class–would race and gender identity-focused, poly-myopia erode working class cohesion, diminishing the zeal for actionable systemic restructuring among those with clear, compelling and commonly held economic interests. Reparations brainstorming is a symptom; identity politics is the disease. No finer gift was ever so gratefully received by an ever more gluttonous ruling class.



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  8. Interesting how trying to right one obvious wrong somehow means there should be some comparison to other wrongs not completely righted or what that means for other people that have issues but weren't directly and systematically wronged. Sad.

    So the end result would be what? Just don't do anything for anybody?

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    1. The opposite: Do something for everybody. Eliminate poverty in the US. Make that our goal. No one left behind.

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    2. That's essentially what I said in a different form. Water it down to where no one gets anything even though some circumstances are drastically different from others in intent and systematic force.

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