What in the actual F..

California Creates Taskforce To Consider Reparations For Slavery

TOPLINE California Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed a law creating a taskforce to study the feasibility of reparations, making it the first state in the U.S. to move to seriously study the issue.

KEY FACTS

AB-3121 establishes a nine-member task force to study how reparations could be awarded and who would be eligible for them in an effort to address the wrongs of slavery in the U.S.

The task force would give “special consideration for African Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States,” the law says.

Though California entered the Union as a free state in 1850, the task force will study issues like an 1852 fugitive slave law that said an “enslaved black person who had entered California when it was still a territory had no legal right to freedom even though the state constitution banned slavery,” according to the California Historical Society.

The task force will also look at discrimination against Black people after slavey, examining issues such as “sharecropping, convict leasing, Jim Crow laws, redlining, unequal education, and disproportionate treatment at the hands of the criminal justice system,” the law says.

Any state level reparations authorized under the law “are not to be considered a replacement for any reparations enacted at the federal level,” the law says.

CRUCIAL QUOTE

“Hundreds of years of racial discrimination in the United States have left many African Americans still disadvantaged in terms of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, the racial wealth gap, and other indicators of economic and educational opportunity,” said Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, who introduced the bill, in a statement.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/09/30/california-creates-taskforce-to-consider-reparations-for-slavery/#4838aa93122a