The Berkeley Unified School District’s “Reparations Task Force” earlier this month recommended “both financial and educational reparations” for students who are descendants of slaves.
According to The Daily Californian, the reparations would consist of “harm reports, curricula changes and financial payments,” the latter of which would come from donations, increased taxes, and lawsuits against entities “whose historical actions have decreased funding” for the district.
The harm reports would include the “impacts of segregation, discriminatory policies and legacies of chattel slavery within BUSD.”
A parcel or real estate tax was recommended to help pay the reparations — via a “citizen-led initiative” which would require a simple majority for passage.
The Mercury News reports the task force’s 54-page report had “compiled 15 types of possible reparations and identified 12 possible funding sources.”
The 18-member task force, the catalyst for which was the killing of George Floyd, notes that “chattel slavery […] ingrained race-based inequity in American society[,] pervaded every aspect of daily American life and has persisted ever since the Thirteenth Amendment officially abolished slavery in 1865, including in race-based policies such as school segregation and redlining.”
It lists past examples of reparations, including Germany’s to Holocaust survivors and descendants of its victims, Canada’s to First Nation (Native American) survivors of the residential school system, and the U.S.’s to Japanese-Americans relocated to holding camps during World War II.
Reparations Task Force co-Chair Adena Ishii, whose family was forcibly relocated to one of the WWII camps, said “They say that if you don’t understand history, then you’re doomed to repeat it […] I think the combination of understanding our history and learning from the mistakes of the past and ensuring that we don’t commit the crimes that we have in the past.”
Ishii is a candidate for Berkeley mayor this year.
A Berkeley community survey conducted last December through January showed that 85 percent of the 2,300 respondents favored “financial reparations for educational purposes.”
MORE: Columbia professor wants more than $2 trillion in education reparations for blacks
MORE: Duke professor calls for $14 trillion in reparations for black Americans
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