The California Congressional Black Caucus thinks that Californians oppose reparations for slavery only because they haven’t been given “enough information.” In reality, Californians have all the information they need to understand that reparations would be a bad, divisive, and destructive policy.
The California Black Caucus plans to launch a statewide campaign to “educate” Californians on why they should give hundreds of billions of dollars to black people who are 150 years removed from slavery. This is because those ungrateful, uneducated residents haven’t bothered to read the reparations task force’s 400-page report or its 1,100-page report that would supposedly make it impossible for them to oppose reparations.
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In reality, though, everything Californians need to know is right in front of them. For starters, slavery ended 158 years ago, meaning not a single person in California was alive to experience it. Indeed, California was not a slave state at all, though the task force argues it was “complicit in chattel slavery.”
The second big issue is that much of the reparations proposal centers on things that have nothing to do with “reparations” as anyone would generally understand it. That includes mandating ethnic studies classes in K-12 schools, eliminating public urination laws and other quality-of-life crimes, abolishing the death penalty, eliminating cash bail, and making Election Day a national holiday. It’s a liberal wish list, not a proposal to rectify historical wrongs.
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And then, of course, there is the cost. The proposal did not include a specific price tag, but the task force estimated that each black person who is eligible should be given up to $1.2 million. The estimated cost of the reparations plan would be over $800 billion, which is over 2.5 times the state of California’s annual budget. And that is a low estimate. As we all know, California often pays well above the initial estimated cost of its grand projects.
And that is why 59% of all Californians, including majorities of Latinos and Asian residents, oppose reparations. It is not because they are uneducated in the oh-so-wise ways of some collection of bureaucrats who want free money. It is because they recognize that reparations in California, 158 years after slavery, are unnecessary, have nothing to do with slavery in the first place, and will bankrupt the state at the expense of people who happen to have the right skin color. You don’t need to read 1,500 pages of reports to recognize that.