Our neighbors to the west are about to embark on a large political and socio-economic experiment to place money behind the movement that launched the 2020 summer of protest.
California is one in all a dozen states that now aim to deal with historic wrongs against African Americans through a large transfer of wealth to Black communities.
Momentum for reparations drew strength from the gale-force winds created by the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd. That outrage has led to progressive Democrats across America pushing reparations in cities, states and in Congress.
Reparations has all the time been a tough sell, however the Black Lives Matter movement has given it latest impetus, and Democrats committed to social justice say the time is now.
They’re walking on precarious ground.
Reparations could cost California billions
The political fight they’re courting in one in all our bluest states may not bring the final result they’re anticipating. In reality, it’s hard to see how it might at the degrees of compensation they at the moment are envisioning.
A defeat for reparations within the nation’s most populous and diverse state could deliver a serious blow to the movement nationally and strike a death knell to the identity politics Democrats have practiced for a long time.
Within the Golden State, the push for reparations began anew in 2020 when its progressive governor, Gavin Newsom, created the Reparation Task Force.
That nine-member panel has been crisscrossing the state gathering data, and can present its report with a proposed call for motion to the California Legislature next yr.
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This past week, the duty force released its estimates for compensation owed Black Californians for housing discrimination practices from 1933 to 1977. That potential price tag is $569 billion or $223,200 per person, The Latest York Times reports.
Expensive. And on first impressions, a large overreach.
But housing discrimination is just one price tag. The duty force is considering 4 other areas of money compensation: mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses and health care, The Latest York Times reports.
Before we even know these additional price tags, The Times is asking California’s reparations project “the nation’s most ambitious effort to date to compensate for the economic legacy of slavery and racism.”
Its diversity could possibly be a serious roadblock
California would appear the best political climate to check such a proposal. Democrats have dominated the state for a long time, and the Republican Party there may be a spent force.
Further, California is essentially the most diverse state within the country, with no race or ethnic group constituting a majority, in accordance with the Public Policy Institute of California. California’s population is 40.2% Latino, 35.2% white, 16.4% Asian American or Pacific Islander, 6.5% Black and 1.7% Native American or Alaska Natives, the U.S. Census reports.
Asians, not Latinos, at the moment are the fastest-growing ethnic group within the state, in accordance with the U.S. Census.
However the numbers suggest California could turn out to be a serious roadblock to the concept of presidency paying marginalized groups for historic wrongs.
Reparations are deeply unpopular in America, in accordance with a 2021 Pew Research Center survey. Sixty-eight percent of all Americans oppose them, while only 30% have expressed support.
African Americans favor reparations by 77% to 17%, in accordance with the Pew survey. But other groups, including white (18% to 80%), Hispanic (39% to 58%) and Asian Americans (33% to 65%), are strongly opposed.
State lacks money to fight today’s problems
With such opposition from other larger ethnic groups and with Blacks underrepresented within the state (6.5% of the California population vs. 13.6% nationally), blue state California may turn out to be a bulwark against reparations and the identity politics that inform it.
In reality, only two years ago, Californians overwhelmingly defeated ballot Proposition 16 that will have allowed the state and native governments to make use of race and gender as aspects in public college admissions, government jobs and contracting.
The final result wasn’t close. The so-called affirmative motion proposition went down by a margin of 57% to 43% despite proponents outspending opponents by 14 to 1. Golden State voters did this in the identical yr they were voting for Joe Biden for president, 64% to 34%.
The issue isn’t that Americans don’t recognize the historic evils of slavery and Jim Crow. Those are undeniable facts and represent a few of crucial history we’d like to pass on to our kids. Mankind should always remember its capability for cruelty and repression, especially on a big scale.
The issue is that we live in an age of limited resources when we are able to’t afford to deal with all the issues of the current, let alone the past.
California currently faces a $25 billion budget deficit. “Tax revenues have fallen wanting projections every month this fiscal yr, and layoffs at marquee tech firms like Lyft, Meta and Twitter have heightened economic pessimism throughout the state,” Politico reports.
Many economists are predicting 2023 will bring recession. That coupled with today’s inflation could greatly challenge government treasuries.
What happens when identity politics collide
When the summer protests of 2020 grew larger and at times descended into violence within the nation’s biggest cities, many Americans wanted to grasp the political philosophy driving them. That movement may be hard to grasp. It’s multi-pronged and amorphous. There isn’t any central leadership.
It goes by different names, “wokeness,” “social justice,” “Black Lives Matter,” and its critics call it “the successor ideology.” It existed before George Floyd’s death and has begun to develop the more distinct outlines of a cause with aspirations and demands.
It’s built upon liberal identity politics and is informed by “intersectionality,” an analytical framework that appears at how identity based on discrimination or oppression can overlap, in order that a gay Black woman faces more obstacles in society than a straight white man.
In a recent podcast titled “The Woke Reformation”, Niall Ferguson, a Stanford and Harvard economist and historian, said he believes woke-ism seems destined to fall.
“I sense that a part of the issue with the woke project is that it’s inherently divisive,” Ferguson said. “Intersectionality ultimately pits different minority groups against each other, because there may be a type of hierarchy of victimhood.”
Ferguson’s remark is greater than theoretical. You may see it within the reader response to The Latest York Times story on California reparations. The competing interests of the Democratic Party and its identity politics are colliding in The Times story chat.
You may see it in readers’ reactions
Understand that Latest York Times readership is 91% “Democrat or leaning Democrat,” in accordance with a 2019 survey from the Pew Research Center, but many of the comments on California reparations were negative, arguing they’d either go too far or not far enough. Few spoke favorably of the hassle.
Listed below are a few of the comments:
“You forget to say the … Latinos, whose country used to own Cali before the US of A appropriated it, do they should pay?”
“What about reparations for Native Americans, who lost a lot land and were subjected to genocide?”
“I wish California would also compensate the various tons of of hundreds of Asians and their American-born descendants – primarily Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos – who got here to California to work and make a greater life but were cheated out of property, good education, jobs, and in some cases their lives.”
“Let’s have reparations for girls of all colours, religions, and ages who’ve been paid less for a similar work of a person.”
“Me and my brothers and sisters are third generation Americans born here long after the Civil War. Our great grandparents got here here from Europe and Czarist Russia within the late 1800s. They got here here penniless not owning slaves. Now you’re telling us our kids and grandchildren must pay for wrongs of slavery and Jim Crow laws of the South. That’s as improper as slavery. It’s egregious.”
Why California could end identity politics
“This sort of woke nonsense makes me sick, and just FYI, I’m not a Republican.”
“It’s pursuing policies like this that help the Democrats lose elections. We want for Congressional Democrats (outside of California) to be daring enough to talk out against this effort for reparations. With sensitivity to the Black community, after all.”
“And now the GOP, Fox News and the right-wing Web ecosystem has its latest, biggest culture-war wedge issue. The GOP will successfully use this to distract tens of millions of poor, working class, and middle-class voters from specializing in the prevalence of Democratic economic policies.”
For Democrats, the takeaway is that this:
Pursue this massive transfer of wealth, use it to redress evils of the past on the expense of today’s inadequately funded schools and roads and health care, and you might soon find that California will not be the promised land for reparations and identity politics.
It’s where they go to die.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist. He may be reached at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
