LOS ANGELES – California has offered an official apology for its role in slavery and past discriminatory policies toward Black people, but the US state is not planning to offer reparations to the descendants of enslaved people.
Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law Sept 26 a formal declaration to be preserved in the western state’s archives.
The text states that California “accepts responsibility for the role we played in promoting, facilitating and permitting the institution of slavery, as well as its enduring legacy of racial discrimination.
“California is now taking another important step forward in recognising the grave injustices of the past – and making amends for the harms caused.”
The declaration was the chief recommendation of a task force created in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-racism demonstrations following the death, at police hands, of George Floyd in 2020.
Black activists welcomed the apology but some said the state should offer financial compensation.
“Apologies alone aren’t enough – they must include material reparations,” Ms Kamilah Moore, an attorney and former chair of the task force, said on X.
If combined with money, Ms Moore said, “an apology can lead to communal reckoning and repair.”
California never joined with the Southern states that allowed slavery, but it allowed Southerners to bring their slaves into the state during the California Gold Rush, and it pursued any escaped slaves.
Following the 1861-1865 Civil War and the nationwide abolition of slavery, the state banned interracial marriages for decades, tolerated local branches of the racist Ku Klux Klan and set policies that effectively kept Blacks out of certain neighbourhoods.
In 2023, a task force in the California city of San Francisco recommended paying reparations of US$5 million (S$6.4 million) to each eligible Black citizen – an idea Republican politicians denounced as “absurd” and unrealistic.
Around a dozen US states have issued formal apologies for their involvement with slavery.
In December 2023, the state of New York – which did not fully abolish slavery until 1827 – created its own task force to study the state’s “legacy of slavery and its lingering effects” and to issue recommendations for how “to address these longstanding inequities”. AFP