Reparations

California’s first-in-the-nation task force to identify reparations said business loans, housing grants, tuition, wage and job protections could provide redress for African Americans.

The task force has voted to distinguish between descendants of enslaved people who immigrated to California from other states, and Black people who immigrated from other countries. Its arbitrary classifications are likely to have legal, political and cultural repercussions.

A racial equity organization launched a new $500,000 fund to help Indigenous Californians record the state's history of colonial violence. Leaders are partnering with the state’s Truth & Healing Council, which will produce a report.

A task force is helping state officials examine how African Americans have been harmed by slavery and systemic racism and, weighing that, how the state should respond. What reparations should there be?

The first-in-the-nation California reparations commission votes to limit payments largely to descendants of slaves.

CalMatters is dedicated to explaining how state government impacts our lives. Your support helps us produce journalism that makes a difference. Donate now. Next month, California’s first-in-the-nation reparations task force is set to debate who should be eligible for direct payments proposed as a way to compensate African Americans for slavery and its lingering effects. In a […]

Proposed Oakland school closures have reinvigorated debates over learning loss and educational inequities widened by the pandemic.

Good morning, California. It’s Friday, October 1. Police reform + racial justice Better late than never. That was the message undergirding a stack of criminal and racial justice bills Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law on Thursday, a year after many of them failed to make it out of the Democratic-controlled state Legislature. California now […]

I wasn’t surprised to hear California has a reparations committee, and I do know we each bear some part of the collective responsibility for the injustices perpetrated by any government of which we are a part — and in my case, perpetrated by my family.

Just how dysfunctional is California’s unemployment department? Apparently so dysfunctional that Bank of America, which since 2010 has had an exclusive contract with the state to deliver unemployment benefits through prepaid debit cards, wants to end the contract — even though the Employment Development Department just renewed it for another two years. The news, first […]