Faced with mounting pressure to take executive action on reparations for African Americans, 55-year-old California Gavin Newsom isn’t sure what to do, given the state runs a $29.5 billion budget deficit for fiscal year 2023. Reparations payments could cost the sate some $640 billion, paying the state’s 1.8 million Black residents $360,000 per resident who can show an ancestor enslaveD by the U.S. government. California lawmakers have been in the forefront of the reparations movement. California’s reparations task force was approved by the legislature and signed by Newsom in 2020. “The task force is doing the grunt work of preparing final recommendations, at the end of the day these recommendations are non-binding and still require uncompromising political will to enact remedies that will begin to address centuries of compound harm,” Dreisen Heath, a reparations expert.
Why California has usurped a federal issue related to reparations in anyone’s guess. Newsom knows the state can’t afford to pay the whopping sum of $640 billion when it can’t cover its growing yearly budget deficit, now pushing $30 billion according the State’s Legislative Analyst. Why Heath or other reparation advocates think the economically-strapped state can pay reparations is pure fantasy. Reparations are based on the premise that Black Americans have been compromised compared to Whites in economic prosperity, something that can’t be determined purely by actuarial numbers. “Governor Newsom has the authority to enact these recommendations, if they are in fact aligned with the entire descendant communist’s wishes, following the issuance of the final report on July 1 , and should do so, if state lawmakers fail to act,” Heath said, not knowing how California would pay.
Arguments about the economic damage done to African Americans by slavery don’t take into account what happened to Native Americans, equally or even more disenfranchised over the centuries by U.S. laws. Why have advocates for Black reparations not included Native Americans? Does the African American community really think they’re the only racial or ethnic group compromised by the U.S. government or laws of the land? Published by the New York Times in 2019, Hannah Nicole-Jones’ 1619 project becomes the historic rationale for paying Black Americans reparations. According to Jones, 1619 was the date the first West African slaves were brought to the Virginia Colony at Fort Monroe, Hampton, Virgina founded in 1606. Nicole Hannah-Jones and other New York Times’ writers forget that the United States of America didn’t exist in 1619.
U.S. Revolutionary War with Great Britain spanned from April 19, 1775 to Sept. 2, 1783, over which time some 6,800 Americans and 24,000 British lost their lives. When you consider the U.S. Constitution was not signed until Sept. 12, 1787, how can the 1619 project hold the United States responsible for slavery when the country didn’t exist in 1619? Yet when the California task force calculated damage from slavery they use the date 1619, when the Virginia colony was part of sovereign England ruled by King George II. California’s reparations task force was created in the wake of George Floyd’s death May 25, 2020 by Minneapolis police. What does one man’s death at the hands of a law enforcement agency have to do with the validity or rationale for reparations. African American lobbying groups seized the opportunity to push for reparations while left wing groups burned down American cities.
During task force deliberations over the last two years, economists increased the reparation from $220,000 to $360,000, 60% increase, taking into account the wealth gap between Whites and Blacks, including housing discrimination, mass incarceration and health harms, all of which figure into the $360,000. Cities like San Francisco also have reparation proposals, amounting to $5 million per resident or paying $97,000 a years for 250 years. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors considered a plan to wipe out all the debt of the City’s 50,000 Black residents, including all personal, credit card debt of all Black households. While nothing been finalized yet, San Francisco currently runs a $728 million budget deficit, with no hopes of a state or federal bailout. Supervisors don’t know where the cash would come from. Lobbying groups push for reparations regardless of the available resources.
Reparation advocates fabricate a rationale for doling out large sums of cash based on discrepancies in wealth between Whites and African Americans. No amount of economic equalization would make up for the centuries to disparities between Whites and Blacks. Calculating Black losses since 1619, the date the first African slaves showed up in at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virgina, is preposterous since the United States didn’t exist until it ratified its Constitution Sept. 12, 1787. When you consider the Bill of Rights weren’t signed until Dec. 16, 1791, it’s difficult to pinpoint the clock when the U.S. government was responsible for slavery. If you look at the fact that the British brought slaves to America, it really wasn’t an American invention. Black lobbying groups want the U.S. government and American taxpayers to pay for slavery when id didn’t originate in America.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
