The city of Oakland, Calif. is located in the state of California. The first-in-the-nation task force began deliberations Wednesday to quantify how financial compensation might be calculated and what might be required to prove eligibility for the program.
Task force members have more questions than answers when it comes to figuring out how to pay. Government taking of property, housing discrimination and homelessness, mass incarceration and over-policing are some of the harms experienced by Black people.
Oakland is a city that was the birthplace of the Black Panther but has lost some of its African American population due to rising home prices.
The task force needs to determine when each harm began and end and who should be paid compensation. The group can limit cash compensation to people who were in prison between 1970 and now. Even if they were not arrested, they could be compensated for living in a Black neighborhood.
The Legislature has a July 1 deadline for the final report from the task force on how to address the legacy of discrimination against black Californians. Policy changes will need to be passed by lawmakers.
The committee made a decision to limit the amount of compensation to descendants of Black people in the US as of the 19th century.
Monica Montgomery Steppe is a member of the task force.
She said that the foundation of all the other recommendations was this one.
The creation of the task force by the governor of California gave hope to those who had been discouraged by the federal government's lack of action. In cities, counties and at colleges, there has been an increase in the number of people who want to be compensated.
The Boston City Council voted on Wednesday to create a task force to study the city's role in slavery and its legacy of apology. In other parts of the country, lawmakers have pushed their states and cities to study the issue. Last year, the first U.S. city to make reparations available for Black residents was Evanston, Illinois, while New York will try again to create a commission to address the issue.
About 60 people attended California's meeting, nodding in agreement as task force members spoke of the generations of trauma suffered by Black children due to inaccurate and ongoing depictions of white families as ideal and Black families as not.
Max Fennell, a 35-year-old coffee company owner, said every person should get $350,000 in compensation to close the racial wealth gap and Black-owned businesses should get $250,000.
He said that it was a debt that they worked for free. "We aren't asking, we're telling you."
Demnlus Johnson III is a member of the city council.
He said to name the problem in order to fix it. Having it all aired out and put on the line is a major accomplishment.
The committee will make preliminary policy recommendations, such as audits of government agencies that deal with child welfare and incarceration, in order to reduce the disparity in how Black people are treated.
The impact of the state on black families who had their property seized through the use of Eminent domain was discussed. Lawmakers voted last year to return a beachfront property known as Bruce's Beach to descendants of the Black residents who owned it before it was taken in the 20th century.
The officials from Oakland, Sacramento, Los Angeles and other California cities talked about their local efforts to get black people to pay their fair share.
Khansa T. Jones-Muhammad is the vice-chair of the Reparations Advisory Commission. The goal of the commission is to advise the city on a pilot program, but it doesn't have a time line for finishing it.
Preliminary estimates for what could be owed by the state as a result of discrimination began to be listed in September. They needed more data to come up with more complete figures.
The chairperson of the task force said the group had not made a decision on how much money would be needed.
The bill that created the task force was authored by the secretary of state. The bill was signed into law in September 2020 after a summer of nationwide protests against racism and police brutality.
In June, the task force released a 500-page report detailing discrimination that hurt Black Californians in the decades after slavery was abolished.
That's right.
Austin was reporting from the state of California. She is a member of the corps. A program called Report for America places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. You can follow Austin on the social media sites.
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