California task force determines that only direct descendants of US slaves will receive reparations

• After a six-hour debate on Tuesday, March 29, the California task force voted to limit the eligibility of who will receive reparations.
• Under the new proposal, lineage — not race — will determine who is eligible.

After a six-hour debate Tuesday, a California reparations task force determined that only Californians who are direct descendants of enslaved people in the United States would be eligible for a forthcoming reparations package.

The nine-member task force, five of whom were appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021, voted 5-4 in favor of determining eligibility for reparations based on the lineage of "an individual being an African American descendant of a chattel enslaved person or the descendant of a free Black person living in the US prior to the end of the 19th century," the motion said. The eligibility will be tied to former enslaved and free Black persons living in the US during the 19th century, which can be traced through US census records.

Two of the task force members were appointed by the California Senate and two others were appointed by the California Assembly.

In 2020, Newsom signed a bill, AB 3121, which established a two-year plan to create a task force to study and develop reparations plan recommendations for the descendants of slavery.

The task force — comprised of politicians and economists — is expected to release a reparations proposal, including individual payouts and an apology, sometime in June 2023.

Under the initial plan, Black Americans from all backgrounds were eligible to receive reparations. Now, Black immigrants and their descendants will not be eligible. According to Black Alliance for Just Immigration, that will exclude roughly 178,000 people in California.

While California joined the US under the Compromise of 1850 — never having slavery as an institution or economic vehicle — it did have a fugitive slave law that kept persons in bondage so long as they were transported back to a southern state that had slavery as an institution.

California is the only state in the nation that has passed a US slavery reparations study bill.