California calls for U.S. government to apologize or compensate African Americans for history of oppression

The state government of California has released a 500-page report that outlines the state’s role in the systematic oppression of Black descendants of American slaves, and offers what lawmakers are calling a roadmap to issuing reparations in the near future.

The report, which was commissioned by Governor Gavin Newsom two years ago, detailed how the laws and policies that have, over many decades, worked to keep black communities from reaching the same potential as predominantly white ones.

The report states that the effects of those policies still have an effect on black residents of California today. California’s Reparations Task Force report also offered some possible measures to offer reparations.

A second report by the task force will be issued next year that will detail a path forward with issuing reparations and how the process will be implemented. The initial report focuses mainly on detailing the history of inequality in the country and specifically the state of California.

Chair of the task force, Kamilah Moore, calls the report the most comprehensive look at the history of black oppression by the state government in over 50 years. She hopes people will “pore into the report and read it with an open mind and an open heart to really understand the African American experience in the state.”

The report from California, the state with the fifth largest African American population in the country, says that years of discriminatory policies have maintained a divide between black and white Americans.

“Four hundred years of discrimination has resulted in an enormous and persistent wealth gap between Black and white Americans,” the report says. “These effects of slavery continue to be embedded in American society today and have never been sufficiently remedied. The governments of the United States and the State of California have never apologized to or compensated African Americans for these harms.”