Mulling Reparations, California Sets Aside $12 Million as a Start

Last year, a California task force issued a seminal report urging reparations for Black residents that could add up to hundreds of billions of dollars. But the state’s new $298 billion budget, signed Saturday after a woeful run for California finances, is offering a much more modest beginning: $12 million.

The budget does not call for immediate cash payments for Californians whose lives were shaped by injustices. Instead, it promises some state money if lawmakers agree on proposals that supporters see as early steps to repair the consequences of California’s past.

The state’s approach has drawn criticism as offering far too little in the face of a sprawling, methodical report that laid bare a troubling history and offered recommendations on how to make up for it. Some lawmakers, though, have nevertheless welcomed the money as a start after the state scrambled to close a $47 billion shortfall.

“I thought it was a win,” Assemblywoman Lori D. Wilson, a Democrat who chairs the Legislative Black Caucus and represents a Northern California district, said in an interview on Saturday. “To see it in the budget means that we were listened to.”

Though many state lawmakers have, for now, eschewed seeking direct cash payments, they have pressed for ideas like creating a California American Freedmen Affairs Agency and prioritizing Black people for professional licenses, “especially applicants who are descended from a person enslaved in the United States.”

On Thursday, the Legislature placed on the November ballot a proposal to amend the State Constitution to ban involuntary servitude, even for state prisoners. The measure is part of a reparations package that the Black Caucus announced in January.