Tim Graham: Publicists Pushing for Racial Reparations in California

California Reparations Task Force Recommends Billions in Compensation for Black Residents

California’s Reparations Task Force has recommended that state lawmakers provide billions of dollars in compensation payments to black residents, along with a formal apology for slavery. While this is meant to address the “enormous and persistent wealth gap between black and white Americans,” it raises questions about the fairness of making 18-year-old white people or newly arrived migrants pay for the sins of slavery.

Recommended Payouts:

• Compensation for health care disparities: $13,619 for each year of residency
• Compensation for mass incarceration and overpolicing of African Americans: $2,352 for each year of residency in California during the war on drugs from 1971 to 2020
• Compensation for housing discrimination: $3,366 for each year between 1933 and 1977 spent as a resident of California

If you’re a black person who’s lived in California for the last 60 years, that would add up to about $980,000. However, this is probably not going to happen because it would cost more than twice the current California state budget.

National Public Radio (NPR) reported on this story, but the reporter failed to lay out the recommended payouts and never explained why anyone would oppose it. Instead, the reporter spent about four minutes laying out the findings of this radical panel, which went on for 40 chapters about the history of systemic racism. This includes the present. The opposition was only cartooned as racist.

The panel’s main point of contention was whether the reparations should be “lineage-based” — as in, you have to establish you’re a descendant of slaves, or someone whose property was taken. “It comes up at every meeting,” the reporter reported.

Just as allegedly prestigious outlets like NPR have championed transgender Rep. Zooey Zephyr in Montana and the Bullhorn Justins in Tennessee, the only point of view worth exploring and defending in state politics right now is on the radical left.

Photo credit: qimono at Pixabay