There is a proposal to establish a state office to do DNA samples to determine a person’s slave ancestry to determine the amount of reparations a person is owed.
California (where else but?) Sen. Steven Bradford, a Democrat (of course) of Los Angeles County has introduced Senate Bill 1403 to establish a genealogy bureau to determine eligibility for reparations, the UK’s Daily Mail reported.
While California leads the nation in homelessness, has residents fleeing to other states, and suffers out-of-control crime, it is step-by-step working on a process to develop a plan for reparations, mainly to blacks.
Indeed, these people are serious about this stuff.
And it shows us how crazy ideas once limited to late-night college dorm discussions have escaped into mainstream thought.
Here’s the plan, such as it is.
Last year, a task force created to further the idea of reparations decided that, oh, say $1.2 million dollars should go to each person who suffered from the injustice of slavery.
Of course, people enslaved in 1865 and before are all dead, so they’re not eligible.
Will this be the end of California as we know it?
But, some of their descendants, it is argued, afterward suffered ongoing injustice. Most people recognize some aspects of that, but no one has figured out exactly who they are or how to quantify that injustice.
Since 19th-century U.S. slaves were black, it raises the question about those black people who immigrated to the U.S. after the slave era.
So the California reparations advocates are trying to tackle that.
Bradford’s bill calls for a genealogy team to examine historical records, conduct oral interviews, do DNA tests and more to figure out how a person can claim oppression from the slave era.
The important thing, according to the California reparations task force, is that it would all be based not on race, but on lineage.
And it would all be housed in — they’re actually saying this — something called the California American Freedman Affairs Agency.
When’s the last time the term “freedman” was in regular usage?
This, of course, being California, and since it’s all based on Democrat’s view of the world, some have argued slavery has caused parallel oppression of blacks who are not descendants of slaves.
But the task force side-stepped that.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom likes the idea of reparations, but even he balks at what would be billions of dollars in costs.
Nationally, reparations advocates want some $14 trillion — yes, trillion with a “T” — to equalize disparities between the wealth of blacks and whites, the Daily Mail reported.
No wonder that some on social media platform X called the whole thing “abhorrent,” and labeled it “just another day in California’s Orwellian paradise,” saying the state was “bankrupt but they’re building more government.’
It’s noteworthy that California officials are concerned about which blacks are eligible, based upon their slave backgrounds, but they do not differentiate among whites or others.
Since most slaveholders were white, the question comes up about which whites? Slave-era whites who did not have slaves? White immigrants who came to the U.S. after slavery?
Not surprisingly, reparations are most popular among blacks, with whites, Asians and others opposed, since the crushing tax burden would fall upon them.
In some respects, it brings to mind the “one drop of blood” rule of the 19th century that defined who was a black person.
And if we start going down that rabbit hole, we discover new things — as in, former California gubernatorial candidate and radio talk show Larry Elder, who is a black conservative, raising the question of who will pay reparations to 19th-century slaveholders, who lost what was considered to be their property, slaves, as a result of the Civil War?
On another note, we might say reparations have been paid by much of the Great Society welfare efforts begun in the 1960s.
Also, we might point to reparations in the form of 600,000 people killed from 1861-1865 during the Civil War.
While both sides could argue that there were other issues, including economics, lifestyles, and particularly the respective roles between the states and the federal government — it is inescapable that slavery was foundational to the national split.
The blood that was shed in that war was a high price that ultimately spurred some reconciliation for what had nagged the U.S. founders since the beginning – a failure to reach their ideal of the equality of all.
Yet California policymakers believe they need to nail down methods of reparations.
But even with the heavy lifting of all their efforts, it’s telling that a survey of 6,000 people in the state showed only 23 percent in favor.
That confirms it’s an idea that needs to go back to the unfettered world of the campus dorm.
