A Berkley school district has an ill-fated idea to pay for reparations by suing companies with a questionable connection to slavery.
The Berkeley Unified School District’s Reparations Task Force proposed several ideas for funding possible reparations, including “unrestricted cash payments for BUSD Descendant students.”
The task force suggests “filing a lawsuit against those private entities whose historic activities connected to the legacy of chattel slavery, particularly redlining, have led to lower funding for BUSD today.”
It has to use “legacy” because it is not clear that the district has a connection to one of the 1,500 slaves who lived in California.
“It is not known whether anyone who was enslaved at that time resided in what is now Berkeley,” the report states.
But the charge for the task force is to consider anyone who descended from a slave anywhere in the country, so companies that did business in Berkeley in the 1950s should be targeted for lawsuits because of slave owners from Georgia in the 1850s. It makes sense if you don’t think about it.
Redlining, a form of housing discrimination, happened most prominently in the first half of the 20th century, partially driven by federal regulations that incentivized it. While discrimination in housing may still exist, it has thankfully been illegal since the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
The task force’s proposal is unjust for the same reasons reparations, in general, are unjust. They punish people today for actions taken decades, if not centuries, ago. There are probably few shareholders today who were involved in the practices of banks in 1968. And even if there were, the time it would take the lawsuit to play out would mean that younger shareholders would end up paying the financial penalty for actions they had no role in decades ago.
Legal fees could be in the “millions of dollars,” according to the task force’s estimate. But the two examples of similar legal strategies have both failed.
The June 6 report cites a case in Illinois where “descendants of individuals enslaved in the U.S. sought reparations from private corporations that were alleged to have unjustly profited from the institution of chattel slavery.”
They lost.
It also cites a case, at the time pending, “by the survivors and descendants of survivors from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre on the basis of Oklahoma’s public nuisance law.”
That lawsuit also failed on June 12.
The problem may not even be as much with redlining as with the school district, which conveniently shifts the blame for low test scores to racist insurance companies and banks decades ago.
The task force wrote that “it is clear that school desegregation, though an important step forward, did not resolve the impact of the legacy of chattel slavery on students in BUSD. Subsequent efforts to address these issues have also fallen short.”
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The reason “subsequent efforts” have failed is because slavery is not why 26% of black students in the district read at grade level and why 20% are proficient in math, compared to 67% of their peers.
Some of these problems can be addressed through interventions such as tutoring, working to get parents involved, and other methods of ensuring black students keep up in school. But the district will struggle to aid its black students while it remains stuck in the past and focused on suing companies on flimsy grounds that have yet to work.
Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate editor for the College Fix and has previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.
