- Reparations advocates are looking at California as a bellwether for the country, with a national program their ultimate goal.
- A significant majority of the U.S. population remains opposed to reparations for Black people, especially direct payments, but public support is growing.
- Financial reparations, along with an apology, would acknowledge an oppressive history and show an effort to atone, said California state Sen. Steven Bradford.
After publishing a sweeping historical account linking Black oppression from the slavery era to systemic racism today, the California Reparations Task Force now faces its most challenging task: figuring out the structure and the cost of a reparations plan for descendants of enslaved people.
In a nearly 500-page interim report, the task force laid out a detailed history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation and continuing discrimination and how that created structural racism that persists, as evidenced in the huge wealth gap between Black and white Americans.
Source by