Ahead of the curve in what looks like the endgame for Black Lives Matter, the California legislator set up a task force to look into the feasibility to reparations for descendants of slaves. Certain high profile black leaders like 75-year-old Black Entertainment Television [BET] CEO Bob Johnson have argued for years that reparations would settle the score for the African American community, estimated the cost at around $15 trillion, something unfathomable given the national debt pushing $28 trillion, a staggering figure when you consider it was $20 trillion when former President Barack Obama handed the reins to 74-year-old President Donald Trump. What’s even more astonishing is that California, the most populous state in the union, has a 2020 annual budget of 203.3 billion. Gov. Gavin Newsom, 48, announced May 7 that California has a $54 billion budget deficit for fiscal 2020.
What the California State Senate is doing taking up African American reparations in the time of massive budget deficits is entirely unknown. On a 23-3 vote, the State Senate approved creating a nine-member panel to make recommendations to the California Assembly. “Let’s be clear: Chattel slavery, both in California and across the nation, birthed as legacy of racial harm and inequity that continues to impact the conditions of Black life in California,” said 55-year-old Sen. Holy Mitchell, who happens to be African American. Mitchell knows the State can’t afford to pay her salary, health care and future retirement benefits, knowing the whopping state budget deficit. Mitchell cites higher levels of homelessness, unemployment, incarceration, lower academic performance and higher health risks in the coronavirus AKA SARS CoV-2 or Covid-19 national crisis.
Whether the State can afford to pay reparations or not, Mtichell cites facts not in evidence when she says that African Americans have higher levels of poverty, homelessness, lover test scores when she blames the black condition in California or in the U.S. on slavery. Whatever happened before the Civil War, certainly before the Revolutionary War, the U.S. was not responsible for slavery when it was part of British colonial life before the 13 colonies signed the Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776. Yet Mitchell thinks the U.S. government which ratified the constitution Sept. 17, 1787, it’s to blame. Seventy-eight years later the U.S. fought a bloody civil war [1861-1865], killing 1.472 million U.S. citizens from the Union and Confederate combatants. Among other things, it’s generally accepted the U.S. Civil War was fought over slavery, leaving lives shattered on both sides of the conflict.
Africans were brought to the colonies as slaves or indentured servants, not a function of U.S. government policy. If Mitchell wants to open up a discussion over reparations, she should talk to white descendants from the Union and Confederate armies that lost their lives battling to end or preserve slavery. It’s generally accepted that President Abraham Lincoln escalated the war when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation Jan. 1, 1863, assuring that the battle with the Confederacy would not stop until they submitted to one gvernment, namely, the Union. Black Lives Matter and Mitchell don’t take into account the enormous sacrifices made by generations of white families for the Union and Confederate armies to eventually end slavery. But hypothetically, had the British not brought African slaves to the colonies, West Indies, parts of South America, those descendants would have died in Africa of starvation or disease.
Proponents of reparations don’t take into consideration what life would have been like had descendants of slaves stayed in Africa or returned there had they not accepted life in the United States. California’s reparations task force is commissioned with the impossible task of calculating losses to African American descendants of slave in California, reporting their findings back to the legislature in 2023. Members of the task force would have to calculate the amount of losses suffered by descendants of slaves, without taking into account that had they stayed in Africa their bloodlines would have been lost to famine or tribal warfare. When Mitchell attributes socioeconomic differences between whites and blacks to slavery, she has no evidence or proof. So when her task force meets to determine losses to African Americans, she’ll have to prove slavery caused the differences.
When you consider the disproportionate amount of government largess going to the African American community, including, welfare, Medicaid, Aid of Families with Dependant Children, Social Security Disability Insurance, Section 8 housing, etc, does Mitchell really think the government does nothing for black Americans? When it comes to housing, it makes sense for the government to tax billionaires to help finance more subsidized housing to mitigate the homeless population. But all the current federal government aid already goes to African Americans at a higher percentage per capita than whites or Hispanic counterparts. Sociologists with real data can show that other concrete factors in the African American community prevent them from advancing their socioeconomic status. It’s beyond a stretch to say hypothetical or real links to slavery rob African Americans of success in America.
