Elias: Budget too tight this year for cash reparations to Black Californians

Try taking an apology to the bank and see what the teller says, or even the bank president. One thing’s for sure: No apology will directly produce a bank deposit.

Thousands of Black Californians knew this when they attended hearings across the state last year aiming to develop an aid package for descendants of slaves who still suffer poverty and other after-effects of bondage. So they responded far more enthusiastically to the possibility of cash reparations than anything else mentioned.

Neither preferential college admissions nor affirmative action in hiring or anything else drew crowd approval like cash. No cash is in any proposal for reparations being floated in the state Legislature now, though, not even in the 14-bill package announced earlier this year by the legislative Black caucus.

That’s partly because there’s no cash to be had in this year of huge budget deficits amounting to somewhere between $38 billion and $73 billion. It’s also due to a seemingly definitive poll which found last fall that California voters by more than a 2-to-1 margin oppose paying descendants of the enslaved cash reparations for atrocities against their forebears.

That survey by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found 59% of voters against it and just 28% in favor, with a relatively paltry 13% undecided or neutral. Cash reparations, said poll director Mark DiCamillo, have “a steep uphill climb, at least from the public’s point of view.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the key piece of reparations legislation this year involves no money, or even affirmative action, which many Californians have long opposed. Rather, it would require the governor to apologize quickly to descendants of human chattel. That costs nothing, but from the viewpoint of Black lawmakers may seem as if it would leave them a big foot in the door for future actions on other types of reparations when times grow fiscally looser.

Even last year, with much smaller deficits than now, Gov. Gavin Newsom made it clear he would veto cash reparations. Not wanting to embarrass him by forcing an actual decision, majority Democratic legislators won’t yet try to approve cash reparations.

One reason most Californians look askance at cash reparations is that this state was never a center of slavery. Under pre-Emancipation federal law, slaveowners could bring their human property into free states and keep them enslaved. Similarly, escaped slaves could be tracked down in so-called free states and forced back to their previous owners. California was part of this, but not a ringleader, essentially no more culpable than New York, Massachusetts or Illinois, all of which were hotbeds of abolition.

California voters looking at those historical realities were not inclined last year to pay the great-great grandchildren of slaves victimized by a Supreme Court that upheld slavery even in free states. That court included five justices from slave states.

If only because of California’s peripheral involvement with slavery, it would make no political sense to back monetary reparations. Plus, the concept may be illegal on its face. That’s because government favoritism of one group over others is not permitted under the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees all who live in America “equal protection of the laws.”

So if one person whose forebears suffered legally sanctioned injustice could get six-figure cash reparations from the government, so could anyone else whose ancestors also suffered government-imposed injustice.

That would include Native Americans enslaved by Californians including John Sutter, whose Sacramento fort is often recognized as a key starting point for the Gold Rush, and possibly also Chinese and Jewish Americans precluded from owning some land and buildings by legally approved property covenants. Start giving big chunks of cash to members of all these groups and soon money itself might become meaningless.

The bottom line: The legislative Black caucus is wise to limit its demands in this early phase of recognition that some kind of compensation is in order for those who continue to be victimized by the aftermath of slavery. It’s possible that looser financial times will make more measures possible but certainly not yet.

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com, and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.