October 11th 2025.
Five years after the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, formed a task force to study the impact of slavery in the state, a new state agency has been established to help compensate the descendants of those who were enslaved in California. This decision comes despite the absence of cash payments as restitution for the injustices inflicted upon their ancestors. According to Politico, Gov. Newsom announced the creation of this agency on Oct. 10 during an episode of "Higher Learning" hosted by Van Latham and Rachel Lindsay. He expressed that this office is a crucial step towards taking action on reparations.
In 2024, Gov. Newsom had previously indicated that one of the reasons for vetoing a bill that aimed to compensate victims of racially-motivated eminent domain was due to the lack of a state agency to distribute funds to Black Californians. The renewed push for reparations in the aftermath of the tragic deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020 has been met with resistance from the White House, which has hindered progress. As a result, the California Black Caucus has opted to refer to their latest bill package as the "Road to Repair" instead of explicitly labeling it as reparations. This tactic has been deemed as cynical by some, but it also reflects the lessons learned from the disagreements between the Caucus and reparations advocates in 2024, which caused some Caucus members to withdraw support for their own initiatives.
Notably, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan's Assembly Bill 7 has turned the argument made by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who believes that policies should be colorblind, on its head. This is a clever strategy, as pointed out by columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan in Capital & Main, for a left-leaning Black elected official to use Thomas' reasoning to advocate for reparations, something that Thomas himself does not support. Another significant development is Assemblymember Tina McKinnor's reintroduction of a bill that seeks to restore land or provide compensation to homeowners whose land was taken by eminent domain. This bill seems to have been inspired, in part, by the creation of the new state agency. As Assemblymember McKinnor stated in May, current programs aimed at promoting homeownership do not specifically address the historical injustices and discrimination faced by the descendants of enslaved people, which has contributed to the wealth gap and housing disparities.
In addition to these two initiatives, another important bill in the California Black Caucus' package is one that bears a striking resemblance to a bill that Gov. Newsom had previously vetoed in 2024. At the time, he argued that without a state agency in place to distribute funds, he could not establish a Bureau for the Descendants of American Slavery. This bureau is a nod to the Freedmen's Bureau, which was established during the Reconstruction period but was shut down after only seven years. The Freedmen's Bureau played a significant role in coordinating Field Order 15, which aimed to provide Black Americans with plots of land that had been confiscated from white Southerners as restitution for their enslavement and the Civil War. However, this promise was not kept, as the election of President Andrew Jackson led to yet another betrayal of the people who had built American wealth through forced labor.
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