The California Remedies Task Force proposed during its meeting this Friday in Sacramento to allocate $360,000 to each African-American residing in the state, as compensation for past slavery.
The payments would be made to each African-American descendant of an ancestor who was a slave in the territory of the United States, and the total amount of the reparations would be 640,000 million dollarsdistributed among about 1.8 million African Americans residing in California.
The money could be given directly to those eligible for compensation or distributed in the form of investments in education, health care or housing for Afro communities. There was no talk of how state authorities should finance the initiative amid the budget deficit they are facing, or whether compensation would be borne by taxpayers.
The Task Force set the sum of $640 billion using a model that assessed the racial wealth gap in California. Damages related to specific injustices such as housing discrimination, mass incarceration, and health neglect were calculated.
The history of discrimination in terms of living place against African-American Californians constituted a significant portion of the compensation recommended by the proponents. They estimated that several black communities lost their properties due to the development of the infrastructure projectseither in exchange for money or through compulsory expropriation.
- Being a northern state of the UnionCalifornia was not noted for its use of African slave labor, unlike the Confederate States of the South, when the Civil War broke out in 1861. In fact, slavery was constitutionally prohibited in their territory since 1850although in those times the law was not always followed to the letter.
