A California state-empowered panel on “reparations” for the institution of slavery, which was outlawed and forever banned when the Civil War ended in 1865, has postponed a decision on who should qualify as they wrestle with whether it should only be descendants of actual slaves or all persons of color, the latter based on the false premise that America continues to suffer from “systemic racism.”
As noted by Breitbart News in 2020, “the Golden State, which entered the Union in 1850 as a free state, decided to set up a committee to study reparations in the wake of national protests and riots over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“When the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans launched in 2021, one member claimed that black Americans were treated as badly in California as they were in the South in the years after the Civil War,” the outlet continued (white immigrants from Europe were also ‘treated badly’ when they arrived in America and for years afterward but that’s another story).
Nevertheless, who should actually qualify for the taxpayer-funded reparations has eluded the committee thus far.
“California Secretary of State Shirley Weber has told the reparations task force to prioritize residents descended from enslaved people so the ambitious effort remains manageable,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Sunday. “But the focus could potentially exclude many Black residents navigating systemic racism deeply embedded within American society [sic].”
Columnist Justin Phillips added:
After nearly two hours of fiery public debate on Feb. 24, California’s reparations task force could have made a seminal decision on who gets reparations — all Black people or just the ones who can trace their ancestry to slaves in the U.S.
Instead, the first-in-the-nation body awkwardly punted until later this month. Of the panel’s nine members, five voted for the delay. The decision didn’t sit well with the four who didn’t. …
Deciding who is deserving and less deserving of reparations will do little to heal our people’s generational trauma. And for the task force, its legacy will depend on whether it can ensure all Black Californians benefit from its decisions — whenever they come.
Asked to define “systemic racism” in 2020, outgoing Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said it was “racism that is built into systems.”
On the website of California Attorney General Rob Bonta is this claim: “The institution of slavery is inextricably woven into the establishment, history, and prosperity of the United States” — as if the initial prosperity our nation found before 1865 is responsible for all the prosperity since, which is patently false and ridiculous.
When the committee was born, Secretary of State Shirley Weber said that the topic of reparations in the Golden State was relevant because of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre in Greenwood, Oklahoma, where a middle-class back community was attacked on June 1, 1921.
“We were denied an opportunity to prosper in this nation,” Weber said. “What does it feel like to live in a country that never says, ‘I’m sorry’?”
She concluded that “the racism of this country has created an environment that allows … injustice to occur,” and added that racial injustice has continued ever since, making it necessary for California to set an example.
Question: Why should Americans alive today ‘apologize’ for an institution they had no part in creating or participating in?
Question: Does the fact that far too many black leaders continue to harp about slavery while making false and inflammatory claims of ‘systemic racism’ have anything at all to do with our nation being unable to racially heal?
