by Clovis Honoré, “Indian Voices”
Social Justice Editor
The California legislature passed Assembly Bill No. 3121: the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans bill. On September 30, 2020 Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law. The Governor’s press release described the new law as “a first-in-the-nation task force to study and make recommendations on reparations for slavery”. The Task Force began its work on June 1, 2021.
Nearly a year later, on March 29, 2022 the Task Force voted to approve a motion that said that eligibility to any reparations determination relative to AB 3121 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 U.S .prior to the end of the 19th century.”
And the firestorm has now begun.
Many of the community advocates and civil rights professionals who attended and testified at the Task Force hearing were incensed that the decision would exclude hundreds of thousands of Black Californians who have endured racism, discrimination and mass incarceration who are not the descendants of slaves, but who immigrated to the United States and California from Africa, the Caribbean Islands or elsewhere in the world.
However, members of the Task Force who voted in favor of the motion explained that the legislation was specifically written to address the experiences of what some call ADOS - African Descendants of Slaves. The text of the legislation specifically states that the Task Force shall:
Study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans as a result of:
(A) The institution of slavery, including both the transatlantic and domestic “trade” that existed from 1565 in colonial Florida and from 1619 to 1865, inclusive, within the other colonies that became the United States, and that included the federal and state governments, that constitutionally and statutorily supported the institution of slavery.
(B) The de jure and de facto discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants from the end of the Civil War to the present, including economic, political, educational, and social discrimination.
Although the language in the bill expands to include the effects of the enslavement of Africans and others in the time after the end of slavery, up to current times, the decision of the Task Force to only include African Americans with ancestors who were affected by the impacts of American slavery up to 1900 would leave millions of Black people who immigrated to the United States after 1900 out of the equation, if this standard is adopted in other states, or by the federal government.
Of concern for reparations advocates is that whatever precedent is set in California will have repercussions around the country if and when other states and, if it ever happens, the federal government take up the issue of reparations for African Americans. This calls into question what reparations may be considered, or not, for Jom Crow and the war in drugs/mass incarceration and other systemic processes, like housing discrimination, in which local, state and the federal governments had a hand.
An additional argument heard from the committee was that they are attempting to craft a process which can withstand legal review and pronouncement already issued by the United States Supreme Court that prohibit race-based solutions to previous racial discrimination.
Critics wonder why the year 1900 was chosen. There doesn’t seem to be a good answer for this. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln on September 22, 1862 and became law on January 1, 1863. The Civil War ended on May 9, 1865. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, were passed between 1865 and 1870. Reconstruction ended in 1877. This ushuered in an unparalleled period of retrenchment into semi-slavery for most African Americans in the American south in particular.
The landmark Supreme Court case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, which enshrined “separate but equal” as the law of the land was decided in 1896. This may seem to be a less arbitrary date to use to determine eligibility for reparations, but what’s 4 years?
In any case the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans has its work cut out for it in the next year and a quarter, as the authority of the Task Force to pursue its mandate will expire July 1, 2023.
