Based on a formula created by California Reparations Task Force, a nine-member panel appointed by Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, the total amount owed to black California residents victimized by the War on Drugs since 1970 amounts to over $225 billion.
The figure is contingent on an “annual reparations amount of $159,792” calculated to take into account “the disproportionate years spent behind bars for African American” multiplied by “what a California state employee would have earned in a year on average (since incarcerated persons were forced, unpaid ’employees’ of the state).”
“The Task Force’s experts then added compensation for loss of freedom, comparable to Japanese American World War II prisoners, and arrive at $159,792 per year of disproportionate incarceration in 2020 dollars.”
According to this formula, California should pay over $225 billion in damages for alleged incarceration-related racism alone.
The Task Force broke down compensation into three overarching categories: health harms dating back to the 1850s, housing discrimination, and mass incarceration.
Concerning the former, the Task Force argued that the value “for each year of life absent anti-Black racial discrimination” to be $127,226. The figure is derived from an estimated $10 million in lifetime earnings divided by “the white non-Hispanice life expectancy in California,” which is 78.6 years.
“Not being able to own your own businesses, not being able to have access to capital, not being able to be hired and move up and matriculate — all of those things kept us from being able to rise naturally,” committee member Reginald Jones-Sawyer told CBS following publication of the report.
He plans to draft and release an accompanying bill for the 2024 legislative season.
The group was assembled by Governor Newsom in the wake of nationwide racial protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
In March 2022, the Task Force passed a motion outlining eligibility for payouts based on “an individual being an African American descendant of a chattel enslaved person or the descendant of a free Black person living in the US prior to the end of the 19th century.”
Nearly 7 percent of Californians are expected to qualify for reparations under this definition. Some, however, are disappointed with the lineage-based approach ultimately adopted by the Task Force, since it would potentially exclude black immigrants.
The motion split the group, with five voting in favor and four against, Cal Matters reported in March. “We must make sure we include present-day and future harms. The system that folks are advocating for here, where we splice things up, where only one small slice benefits, will not abate the harms of racism,” committee member Lisa Holder told Cal Matters.
A Pew Research survey from November 2022 found that only 18 percent of white Americans supported reparations, while over three-quarters of African Americans did.
“It’s part of our past. It was brutal. Oppression is part of the story and it should be told. But we should never define ourselves by what disabled us,” Bob Woodson, a black American opposed to reparations, told CBS News on Monday.
Still, despite the eye-watering sum for a state struggling to balance the book, the Task Force insists the recommendation compensations are not enough.
“No amount can encompass the full scope of damage done by the institution of slavery and ongoing discrimination,” the group argued in the final recommendations section of the report.