California Governor Gavin Newsome is making history. The Democratic leader is pushing for the largest reparations effort the country has ever seen worth more than $559 billion. Under Newsome’s plan, descendants of slaves will receive an estimated $223,200 each for “housing discrimination” they faced in the expensive state of California. Black California residents are being targeted with this effort, and an estimated 2.5 million people would receive reparations for the horrible things California officials did to them throughout the time period of 1933 to 1977.
The estimated reparations amount totals more than California’s expenditures at $512.8 billion. This total includes money for schools, highways, police, the department of corrections, universities, and even hospitals.
Although Newsome is moving toward giving away millions of dollars in reparations to the Black people who were disenfranchised throughout the twentieth century, there are still a lot of questions about how the payments will be made. For example, the government of California does not know if they should pass out checks to affected people or if they should give away the money some other way.
Newsome’s team has created a task force to figure out reparations for Black California residents. The task force has until June 2023 to submit their final recommendations to the California Legislature. They are working through issues like the mass incarceration of Black people, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses, and disparities in health care and health equity.
“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” task force member Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at Berkeley, told the Times.
One example of housing discrimination in California was the destruction of Russell City. This location was near the coastline of San Francisco. The city was a safe haven for Black people as it provided housing for people who were trying to escape the horrors of the Deep South.
Although Russell City was a safe place for Black people to live, California bulldozed it and made way for an industrial area, forcing thousands of people out of their homes and into the streets without adequate compensation for their land and properties.
Former Russell City resident, Monique Henderson-Ford, was paid just $2,200 for her home, which was less than a third of what she paid for it.
“Imagine if the houses were still here,” she said. “We would all be sitting on a fortune.”
Reparations are a controversial topic for Americans. Although Black people were enslaved for centuries and built the country with their sweat and hard labor, many white Americans do not want to pay the expenses of reparations. However, several states and many cities are working toward their own form of reparations because they want to do right by the people who were influential in making America the great country that it is today.
Do you think more states should offer reparations to Black people like California is working to do?