More than two years after the police death of George Floyd, a nine-member Reparations Task Force calculated that Black Californians may receive more than $223,000 each in reparations for the lasting economic effects of racism and slavery.
$223K Worth of California Reparations
The state of California has made history by becoming the first state in the United States to mandate that its government entities create a distinct demographic category for those who are descended from slaves.
According to Newsweek, the taskforce, which was constituted by a bill that was passed by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020, is said to have spent months traveling across the West coast state to study about the effects of these measures
The report also stated, in its report from March 2022, the taskforce stated that those who would be eligible for the reparations would be the descendants of African Americans who were enslaved or of a free Black person who lived in the United States before to the end of the 19th century.
The people who are eligible for the reparations are only those who can provide evidence that they fall into one of these categories. It is believed that there are 2.6 million people of African descent living in California, with around 2 million of those people being descendants of slaves.
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To Address Nation’s Stark Racial Disparities, Persistent Wealth Gap
The initiative is similar to those being taken on a more local level in California and elsewhere to combat the nation’s glaring racial inequality and ongoing wealth disparity.
The New York Times revealed the most recent data from the Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances saying that the median wealth of Black households in the United States is $24,100, while it is $188,200 for white households.
The task force released an initial report this year that described in detail the forced migration of African Americans to California during the Gold Rush era, as well as the subsequent segregation of African Americans in many of the state’s largest cities through the use of racial restrictive covenants and redlining.
