A newly formed Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery will administer reparations in the state of California after Gavin Newsom just approved that bureau’s creation, but there’s still no word on what the reparations will look like.

The City and County of San Francisco discussed the idea of reparations for Black residents for a while in 2023, which drew negative national headlines for the fact that they discussed $5 million lump sum payments for descendants of slaves. But the entire SF reparations idea ended up being eliminated by London Breed herself thanks to budget cuts, and all that came from the effort was a measly formal apology.

Though there was a state-level effort on reparations too. That effort produced a reparations bill last year, though that bill did not make it out of committee. The California Legislative Black Caucus tried another go at it this year, and Politico reports that Newsom signed their 2025 reparations bill last week.

“I signed a bill two days ago with the Black Caucus as it relates to creating a new office to address these systemic issues,” Newsom said on (of course) a podcast Friday. But these so-called reparations are almost certainly not going to involve cash payments, as Newsom himself told Politico in 2023, “Dealing with the legacy of slavery is about much more than cash payments.”

And the full text of the reparations bill uses the word “reparations” only once, in the bill’s title. It does, though, say that “This bill would establish the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery within” the state Civil Rights Department, and that bureau would “create a Genealogy Division, as specified, and to verify an individual’s status as a descendant and would require proof of an individual’s descendant status to be a qualifying criterion for benefits authorized by the state for descendants.”

So what would these benefits be? The bill only says that future bureau’s work “would include findings and declarations relating to a gift of public funds.” And even the California Legislative Black Caucus press release on the bill’s passage makes no reference to what any reparations might be, saying only that it takes “significant steps to address structural disparity in California,” and calling it “a new model for justice that recognizes the impact of systemic harm.”

California was technically not a slave state, though plenty of slaves were brought here by their owners to work, and that arrangement was perfectly legal pre-Civil War. So yes, there are descendants of California slaves currently living in California, as historians estimate the state had as many as 4,000 slaves.

Related: California Legislators Introduce First Reparations Bill, Cash Payments Not Proposed [SFist]

Top image: A protestor displays sign reading “Reparations Now!” during a rally billed as a Day of Resistance held in honor of George Floyd on May 21, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. The rally and march was organized by Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles as the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s killing approaches. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)