The Actual California Reparations Study

[IM2]

So California released a study on reparations. And while we have seen the expected moaning and groaning from the usuals, how about we look at the study?

California’s unprecedented reparations report details 150 years of anti-Black harm​

A new report from California’s first-in-the-country reparations task force details how slavery touched nearly every aspect of Black life in America, producing “innumerable harms” that are still felt today.

The report, which will be released Wednesday, offers a comprehensive look at the impacts of enslavement and generations of discrimination on Black Californians and Black Americans more broadly. It finds that the damage to Black communities is extensive and that a variety of intentionally crafted policy, judicial decisions and racism by private actors has created a widespread exclusion of Black people that has not been sufficiently addressed at any level of government.

“Almost 150 years of active, conscious federal, state, and local government action and neglect of duty have resulted in compounded harms that are unique to Black Americans,”

California’s unprecedented reparations report details 150 years of anti-Black harm​

In nearly 600 pages, it recounts the “moral and legal wrongs the American and Californian governments have inflicted upon their own Black citizens."

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf

These things have been said here by blacks in this forum. Now you guys can squawk all you want, but it's time to face the truth. Slavery didn't end anything and reparations are being paid to people who have not suffered. Whether you owned slaves or not, you have benefitted from things blacks have been denied. The damage was caused by government policy and the government at every level has done nothing to fix the damage. There was no 40 trillion, there has not been government giving blacks ANYTHING for 60 years. NO OTHER GROUP has been made to endure what blacks have. That's not whining, it is FACT.

Despite this blacks have survived. There is no black victimhood and a subculture of people so weak that they storm the nation's capital over some stuff that was made up because one of them lost an election and could not be president anymore is the epitome of a victim mentality. So man up, because this is the start. The reckoning for America and its relationship with 40 plus million black citizens has come.

 

[IM2]

Over 13 chapters and about 600 pages, the interim report’s authors recount the “moral and legal wrongs the American and Californian governments have inflicted upon their own Black citizens and residents,” noting how slavery and subsequent discrimination have exposed Black communities to racial terror and political disenfranchisement, left them with inferior outcomes in health and wealth building, and relegated them to segregated neighborhoods and schools.

The harms were largely intentional, crafted through local and national policies that reinforced one another, ensuring that the formerly enslaved and their descendants would be denied even basic protections under the law. The denial was acutely felt in California, which prohibited slavery when it joined the U.S. in 1850 but also supported the rights of pro-slavery white Southerners and looked the other way as enslaved people were trafficked into the state.

The stated ban on slavery was far from the only time California seemed to contradict itself on its stance toward Black Americans, according to the report. Two years after California entered the U.S. as a free state, legislators passed a fugitive slave law that allowed for the capture and deportation of men and women fleeing enslavement. The state also declined to immediately ratify the 14th Amendment, which established the equal rights of people born in the U.S., and the 15th Amendment, which said race could not be used to deny voting rights — it waited to approve the measures until 1959 and 1962, respectively.


As the state built a progressive reputation, drawing a growing Black population over decades, it continued to act against the best interests of Black people and other communities of color, according to the report. Black people were often denied voting rights and were subjected to literacy tests and poll taxes. Housing covenants were used to keep Black Californians from living in white communities, only for Black neighborhoods to later be demolished to create parks and freeways.

The report adds that in some metrics, California not only matched discrimination across the country; at times it was a national leader. The authors write that in the 1900s, the state led the country in forced sterilizations, which disproportionately affected Black, Latina and Indigenous women. Twenty-two years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson established that racial segregation did not violate the Constitution, California’s Supreme Court upheld racial segregation in schools. The state remains one of the most segregated in the country for Black and Latino students.

In a chapter dedicated to outlining how violence was used to terrorize Black Americans, the report focuses specifically on the expansion of the Ku Klux Klan in California, noting that in a 20-month period during the state’s “sizable and violent Klan resurgence” in the 1920s, California cities held more KKK meetings than Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina and Tennessee.

During the same period, Klan membership was widespread in some local governments, and it was also extensive in police departments in Los Angeles and Long Beach. As Klan activity receded nationwide during the Great Depression, it was sustained in California, and KKK activity increased in the 1940s in response to Black families’ trying to buy homes in better-resourced white communities.

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf

 

[IM2]

The report also highlights that historical injustices have helped fuel modern-day disparities, noting that California’s stagnant rates of Black homeownership, racial disparities in police arrests and use of force, a large gap in the average wealth of Black and white families and unequal discipline of Black students compared to their white peers are least in part the results of decades of social engineering designed to exclude Black Californians from gaining access to the same political, financial, employment and educational opportunities as their white counterparts.

Such exclusion also had support at the federal level, which the report takes care to document, highlighting that in the years before enslavement and in the decades after its collapse, all levels of government worked with private actors to preserve and deeply entrench racial discrimination.

“Reparations is a federal responsibility first and foremost,” Moore said. “The report has nationwide breakdowns for each chapter to constantly remind people that even with the current California effort, this is primarily a federal responsibility.”

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf

 

[JustAGuy1]

Let Ca pay for it, we're not.

 

[Gabe Lackmann]

A reparations study...from California.

That's like Barnum & Bailey doing a study on the importance of clowns in society.

You already received your reparations.

Welfare, section eight housing, affirmative action, college admission preference, corporate hiring preference.

 

[IM2]

Historians have argued that southern lawmakers ensured that the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (commonly known as the G.I. Bill) was administered by states instead of the federal government to guarantee that states could direct its funds to white veterans. Similarly, in order to secure the support of white southern lawmakers, Congress included segregation clauses or rejected anti-discrimination clauses in the Hospital Survey and Reconstruction Act of 1946 (commonly known as the Hill Burton Act), which paid for our modern healthcare infrastructure. The same tactics were applied to the American Housing Act of 1949, which helped white Americans buy single family homes. These federal legislative decisions enshrined the government sanctioned discrimination of African Americans for decades to come and perpetuates the racial hierarchy today.

Throughout the 20th century, American federal, state, and local municipal governments expanded and solidified segregation efforts through zoning ordinances, slum clearance policies, construction of parks and freeways through Black neighborhoods, and public housing siting decisions.

The passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 outlawed housing discrimination, but did not fix the structures put in place by 100 years of discriminatory government policies, and residential segregation continues today.

California Reparations Study pg.9

Contrary to what Americans are taught, the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education, which established that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional, did not mark the end of segregation.

After Brown v. Board, many white people and white-dominated school boards throughout the country actively resisted integration. In the South, segregation was still in place through the early 1970s due to massive resistance by white communities. In the rest of the country, including California, education segregation occurred when government sanctioned housing segregation combined with school assignment and siting policies. Because children attended the schools in their neighborhood and school financing was tied to property taxes, most Black children attended segregated schools with less funding and resources than schools attended by white children. In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed this type of school segregation to continue in schools if it reflectedresidential segregation patterns between the cities and suburbs. In part, as result of this and other U.S. Supreme Court decisions that followed to further undermine desegregation efforts, many public schools in the United States were integrated and then resegregated, or never integrated in the first place.

California Reparations Study pg.11

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf

 

[IM2]

Due to residential segregation, African Americans have lived in poor-quality housing throughout American history, exposing them to disproportionate amounts of lead poisoning and increasing risk of infectious disease. Segregated Black neighborhoods have more exposure to hazardous waste, oil and gas production, automobile and diesel fumes, and are more likely to have inadequate public services like sewage lines and drinking water pipes. African Americans are more vulnerable than white Americans to the dangerous effects of extreme weather patterns such as heat waves, made worse by the effects of human consumption and industrial degradation of the environment.

California Reparations study, pg. 11.

Government policies and practices—at all levels—have destroyed Black families throughout American history. After the Civil War, southern state governments re-enslaved children by making them “apprentices” and forcing them to labor for white Americans, who were sometimes their former enslavers. In the past century, state and federal government financial assistance and child welfare systems have based decisions on racist beliefs created to maintain slavery and which continue to operate today as badges of slavery. Government issued financial assistance has excluded African Americans from receiving benefits. In the early 1900s, state governments made support payments every month to low income single mothers to assist them with the expenses incurred while raising children. Black families were generally excluded, despite their greater need. Scholars have found that racial discrimination exists at every stage of the child welfare process. The data show that when equally poor Black and white families are compared, even where both families are considered to be at equal risk for future abuse, state agencies are more likely to remove Black children from their families than white children. As of 2019, Black children make up only 14 percent of American children, and yet 23 percent of children in foster care. Studies have shown that this is likely not because Black parents mistreat their children more often, but rather due to racist systems and poverty. In the 2015-16 school year, Black students were arrested at three times the rate of white students, while only comprising 15 percent of the population in schools. This disparity widens for Black girls, who make up 17 percent of the school population, but are arrested at 3.3 times the rate of white girls. Meanwhile, the criminal and juvenile justice systems have intensified these harms to Black families by imprisoning large numbers of Black children, thereby separating Black families.

California Reparations study, pg. 12

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf

 

[IM2]

During slavery, state governments controlled and dictated the forms and content of African American artistic and cultural production. Advocates argue that this is still true today. After the Civil War, governments and politicians embraced minstrelsy, which was the popular racist and stereotypical depiction of African Americans through song, dance, and film. Federal and state governments failed to protect Black artists and creators from discrimination and simultaneously promoted discriminatory narratives. Federal and state governments allowed white Americans to steal Black art and culture with impunity—depriving Black creators of valuable copyright and patent protections. State governments denied Black entrepreneurs and culture makers access to the leisure sites, business licenses, and funding for lifestyle activities that were offered to white people. State governments built monuments to memorialize the Confederacy as just and heroic through monument building, while simultaneously suppressing the nation’s history of racism, slavery and genocide. States censored cinematic depictions of discrimination while also censoring depictions of Black people integrating into white society.

It is undeniable that the labor of enslaved Africans built the infrastructure of the nation, produced its main agricultural products for domestic consumption and export, and filled the nation’s coffers. Since then, federal, state, and local government actions directly segregated and discriminated against African Americans. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson officially segregated much of the federal workforce. While African Americans have consistently served in the military since the very beginning of the country, the military has historically paid Black soldiers less than white soldiers and often deemed African Americans unfit for service until the military needed them to fight. Federal laws have also protected white workers while denying the same protections to Black workers, empowering private discrimination. Approximately 85 percent of all Black workers in the United States at the time were excluded from the protections passed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—protections such as a federal minimum wage, the maximum number of working hours, required overtime pay, and limits on child labor. The Act essentially outlawed child labor in industrial settings—where most white children worked— and allowed child labor in agricultural and domestic work—where most Black children worked.

Although federal and state laws such as the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act of 1959 prohibit discrimination, enforcement is slow and spotty. Federal and state policies such as affirmative action produced mixed results or were short lived. African Americans continue to face employment discrimination today.

California Reparations study, pgs. 13-14

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf

 

[IM2]

American government at all levels criminalized African Americans for social control, and to maintain an economy based on exploited Black labor. After the Civil War, and throughout segregation, states passed numerous laws that criminalized African Americans as they performed everyday tasks, like entering into the same waiting rooms as white Americans at bus stations or walking into a park for white people. In the South, until the 1940s, Black men and boys were frequently arrested on vagrancy charges or minor violations, then fined, and forced to pay their fine in a new system of enslavement called convict leasing. In the words of the Supreme Court of Virginia, they were “slaves of the state.” During the tough on crime and War on Drugs era, politicians continued to criminalize African Americans to win elections. President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor explained that by “getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, [the Nixon White House] could disrupt those communities… Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” The criminalization of African Americans is an enduring badge of slavery and has contributed to over policing of Black neighborhoods, establishment of the school to-prison pipeline, the mass incarceration of African Americans, and numerous other inequities reaching every corner of the American legal system.

California Reparations study, pg. 14

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf

 

[IM2]

The government actions described in this report have had a devastating effect on the health of African Americans. Compared to white Americans, African Americans live shorter lives and are more likely to suffer and die from nearly all known diseases and medical conditions compared to white Americans. When African Americans are hospitalized, Black patients with heart disease receive older, cheaper, and more conservative treatments than their white counterparts. Researchers have found that by some measures, this health gap has grown and cannot be explained by poverty alone, as middle- and upper-class African Americans also manifest high rates of chronic illness and disability. Researchers have linked these health outcomes in part to African Americans’ unrelenting experience of racism in our society. Research suggests that race-related stress may have a greater impact on health among African Americans than diet, exercise, smoking, or low socioeconomic status. In addition to physical harm, African Americans experience anger, anxiety, paranoia, helplessness, hopelessness, frustration, resentment, fear, lowered self-esteem, and lower levels of psychological functioning as a result of racism. These feelings can profoundly undermine Black children’s emotional and physical well-being and their academic success.

California Reparations study, pg. 15

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf

 

[IM2]

As described in further detail throughout this report, government policies perpetuating badges of slavery have helped white Americans accumulate wealth, while overwhelmingly erecting barriers which prevent African Americans from doing the same. Federal and California Homestead Acts essentially gave away hundreds of millions of acres of land almost for free mostly to white families. Today, as many as 46 million of their living descendants reap the wealth benefits, approximately one-quarter of the adult population of the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, the federal government created programs that subsidized low-cost loans, which allowed millions of average white Americans to own their homes for the first time. Of the $120 billion worth of new housing subsidized between 1934 and 1962, less than two percent went to non-white families. Other bedrocks of the American middle class, like Social Security and the G.I. Bill, also mostly excluded African Americans. The federal tax structure has in the past, and continues today, to discriminate against African Americans.

These harms have compounded over generations, resulting in an enormous wealth gap that is the same today as it had been two years before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. In 2019, the median Black household had a net worth of $24,100, while white households have a net worth of $188,200. This wealth gap persists across all income levels, regardless of education level or family structure.

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf

 

[IM2]

THIS WILL BE A CASE AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT. NONE OF YOU WILL BE PERSONALLY PAYING ANY MORE TAX THAN YOU WOULD ALREADY PAY. SO STOP WHINING AS IF BLACK PEOPLE ARE TAKING MONEY OUT OF YOUR POCKETS.

 

[OhPleaseJustQuit]

Let Ca pay for it, we're not.

Nobody gets to talk to me about reparations until I am compensated for being abducted, raped and beaten (enslaved) by a black and being threatened with a knife while another black invaded my home and stole my belongings.

That's it.

I've already paid my share of your motherfucking reparations.

 

[DukeU]

THIS WILL BE A CASE AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT. NONE OF YOU WILL BE PERSONALLY PAYING ANY MORE TAX THAN YOU WOULD ALREADY PAY. SO STOP WHINING AS IF BLACK PEOPLE ARE TAKING MONEY OUT OF YOUR POCKETS.

You're not very bright.

Where does the gov't. get money from?

 

[Gabe Lackmann]

THIS WILL BE A CASE AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT. NONE OF YOU WILL BE PERSONALLY PAYING ANY MORE TAX THAN YOU WOULD ALREADY PAY. SO STOP WHINING AS IF BLACK PEOPLE ARE TAKING MONEY OUT OF YOUR POCKETS.

Besides the 22% of all direct welfare compensation...nearly twice your population.

Despite being the lowest (by far) contributors of any group to the tax base.

That, of course does not include disproportionate incarceration rates, crime rates (courts and police costs), and disease rates (Cancer, heart disease, obesity, HIV etc.).

All of which are a further burden on the tax base.

Now you want us to give you extra money?

Having a laugh?

You should be because this is absurd.

Do you know what the blacks in this country deserve?

One last free ride...straight back to the motherland.

 

[Polishprince]

It would certainly help to thin out the job market if black people started getting reparations to live off of.

I guess it would justify bringing in millions of Illegals to do the jobs that honkies won't do and blacks are no longer doing

 

[IM2]

Besides the 22% of all direct welfare compensation...nearly twice your population.

Despite being the lowest (by far) contributors of any group to the tax base.

That, of course does not include disproportionate incarceration rates, crime rates (courts and police costs), and disease rates (Cancer, heart disease, obesity, HIV etc.).

All of which are a further burden on the tax base.

Now you want us to give you extra money?

Having a laugh?

You should be because this is absurd.

Do you know what the blacks in this country deserve?

View attachment 654329

One last free ride...straight back to the motherland.

Everything you talk about is the result of white racism.

 

[IM2]

It would certainly help to thin out the job market if black people started getting reparations to live off of.

I guess it would justify bringing in millions of Illegals to do the jobs that honkies won't do and blacks are no longer doing

Actually it would create jobs, but how about you guys try discussing what was in the report instead of your opinions about black people.

 

[Polishprince]

Actually it would create jobs, but how about you guys try discussing what was in the report instead of your opinions about black people.

It would create jobs that couldn't be filled.

That's the point.

Black people wouldn't need to work any more, so the jobs they have now would go begging.

Although it would be hard to get a lot of white people to work either, as they wouldn't want to have to pay reparations out of their salaries. Although I'm sure some would

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

THIS WILL BE A CASE AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT. NONE OF YOU WILL BE PERSONALLY PAYING ANY MORE TAX THAN YOU WOULD ALREADY PAY. SO STOP WHINING AS IF BLACK PEOPLE ARE TAKING MONEY OUT OF YOUR POCKETS.

Who funds the government?