{"id":15809,"date":"2025-10-21T12:37:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T12:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/15809\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T12:37:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T12:37:10","slug":"newsom-is-slow-rolling-ca-reparations-he-embraced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/15809\/","title":{"rendered":"Newsom is slow rolling CA reparations he embraced"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dan Walters<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\""Walter\"
\n\t\t\t\tWalter Forster, a Los Angeles resident, holds a sign that advocates for financial compensation during the California Reparations Task Force meeting that was held at the California Science Center in Los Angeles on Sept. 23, 2022. Photo by Pablo Unzueta for CalMatters<\/p>\n

This commentary was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

George Floyd, a Black man who had been detained by Minneapolis police after a store clerk alleged he had used a counterfeit $20 bill, died as Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, ignoring Floyd\u2019s complaints that he could not breathe.<\/p>\n

A video of Floyd\u2019s May 25, 2020 death triggered massive protests<\/a> throughout the nation and across the globe, energizing the Black Lives Matter movement that had been founded in 2013.<\/p>\n

Four months after Floyd’s death, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills<\/a> to address, he said, \u201cthe scourge of racial injustice rooted in the legacy of slavery and systemic racism,\u201d including one authorizing a nine-member task force<\/a> to study reparations for Black Californians.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cAs a nation, we can only truly thrive when every one of us has the opportunity to thrive,\u201d Newsom declared.\u00a0\u201cCalifornia\u2019s rich diversity is our greatest asset, and we won\u2019t turn away from this moment to make right the discrimination and disadvantages that Black Californians and people of color still face.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three years later, in 2023, the task force produced a 1,060-page report<\/a> that catalogued California\u2019s discriminatory treatment of Black people after its 1850 admission as a state that officially prohibited slavery. The report recommended \u201cappropriate remedies of compensation, rehabilitation, and restitution for African Americans, with a special consideration for African Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cCompensation should be provided for any economically assessable damage, as appropriate and proportional to the gravity of the violation and the circumstances of each case,\u201d the task force wrote.<\/p>\n

The report identified a series of reparations amounts for various purposes, with some estimates amounting to $360,000 for each of the 1.8 million Black Californians deemed to have enslaved ancestors. That would total nearly $650 billion \u2014 about twice the state\u2019s annual budget.<\/p>\n

News coverage of the eye popping figure put Newsom on the spot. He responded with what political pros call a slow roll \u2014 seeming to support something but finding excuses to delay actually doing the something.<\/p>\n

Initially Newsom said in a statement that \u201cdealing with the legacy of slavery is about much more than cash payments,\u201d but when news media suggested he was backing\u00a0away from his implied 2020 support of reparations, he issued another statement to the Sacramento Bee:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sensationalized framing in pieces published by outlets like Fox News and others is inaccurate. The governor looks forward to reviewing the final report \u2014 and all recommendations \u2014 when complete.\u201d Newsom\u2019s chief communication advisor, Anthony York, said that the cash payments issue \u201cwill be resolved\u201d after Newsom meets with legislative leaders later in the year.<\/p>\n

Two years later, the slow roll continues.<\/p>\n

Black legislators have submitted many bills to implement pieces of the 2023 report, but without Newsom\u2019s support, none has broached cash reparations, and he has been very selective<\/a> about which bills he accepts. Last year, he vetoed a bill that would have allowed descendants of slaves seek redress<\/a> for Black-owned land seized by public agencies.<\/p>\n

This year, the Legislature\u2019s Black Caucus introduced 16 bills in its \u201cRoad to Repair\u201d <\/a>agenda. A few made it to Newsom\u2019s desk, and he vetoed five of them<\/a>. Two he signed give up to $6 million to the state university system<\/a> to study ways of identifying descendants of slaves and create a Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery <\/a>to fashion a reparation structure.<\/p>\n

Effectively, Newsom\u2019s slow roll protects him from taking any meaningful actions, thus bequeathing reparations to his successor, like his many other unresolved California issues.<\/p>\n

From a purely political standpoint it makes perfect sense. Newsom\u2019s governorship is drawing to a close. He obviously wants to become president of the United States, and financial reparations are not popular nationally.<\/a><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Dan Walters, CalMatters Walter Forster, a Los Angeles resident, holds a sign that advocates for financial compensation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[13741,7,9,8,964,457,3690,3481],"class_list":["post-15809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-black-lives-matter","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-commentary","tag-gavin-newsom","tag-racism","tag-reparations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}