California reparations proposal could mean $223K per person in payments for Black residents

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Reparations Task Force received projections from a consulting panel that show California may need to pay over $200,000 per person to Black residents if the state wishes to make good on promises of reparations for past housing discrimination. 

Newsom has aggressively pushed his plan to provide financial reparations to Black Californians whom he says must be financially compensated for decades of discrimination. 

The California Reparations Task Force’s five member economic consultant team reported that under the initiative, qualifying Black residents in the state could qualify for $223,200 per person. 

The task force’s consultant team drew its ballpark number by examining gaps in housing and speculating the approximate amount of wealth lost between 1933 and 1977. The state panel says that Black Californians lost $5,074 per year under previous housing policies.

‘The $559 billion figure is in reference to a scope of work document presented to the California Reparations Task Force by its five member economic consultant team during our September public hearing in Los Angeles,’ the California Reparations Task Force clarified in a statement to Fox News Digital.

The group added, ‘According to the economic consultant team, the $559 billion figure represents the State of California’s ‘maximum liability’ for de jure homeownership discrimination ‘if all 2,550,459 Black California residents who lived in the state in 2021 were descendants of the enslaved in the United States and had spent the entire time period from 1933 to 1977 in California (or were the legal heir of a person that did).”

Via legislation signed in 2020, Newsom created the task force, which voted in March to limit potential reparations to descendants of free or enslaved Black people in the country at the end of the 19th century rather than all Black people, as many reparations advocates have pushed for. 

A report from the group — which runs 500 pages — is the first government-commissioned study on harms against the Black community since the 1968 Kerner Commission report ordered by President Lyndon Johnson, task force Chair Kamilah Moore said.

A federal slavery reparations bill, commonly referred to as H.R. 40, has languished in Congress since it was first introduced in 1989. It passed out of the House Judiciary Committee in 2021, but most believe it is unlikely to progress further.