Governor Newsom is uncharacteristically quiet in the wake of the approval of a reparations plan authored by a commission he himself created. As it currently stands, the proposal would offer up to $1.2 million each for Black Californians should they meet certain requirements about their residency and family lineage, and whether they’ve experienced “mortgage discrimination.” 

For Mr. Newsom to be so quiet on an issue of such significance is unlike him. He has made himself a national figure in the fight for abortion rights, traveling the country talking about the “freedom” offered in California compared to conservative states that are restricting those procedures. He famously ran ads against Governor DeSantis during last year’s election. 

The minority leader of the California state assembly, Assemblyman James Gallagher, tells the Sun that Mr. Newsom has backed himself into a corner, either signing legislation that could lead to financial ruin for the state or rejecting the proposal and angering his own ideological base. 

“The governor doesn’t like to put himself in embarrassing situations,” Mr. Gallagher said. “He likes to focus on other things, so I think he would like to do anything other than talk about this.”

The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

The largest chunk of the reparations payments would go to those who can prove they are the descendants of an enslaved person (even though California was not a “slave state” prior to the Civil War). In California, there are around 1.8 million individuals who have at least one ancestor who was enslaved, and they would be each entitled to around $360,000. In total, that would cost the state $640 billion — more than double the size of Mr. Newsom’s proposed $297 billion state budget for 2023. 

It is unclear how California could afford to pay these reparations, and whether the commission’s proposal is purely aspirational.

For any Black person who lived in California between 1970 and 2022, they would be entitled to $2,352 per year as a recompense for alleged police brutality against Black people. Should a citizen claim 50 years of residency, they would be entitled to $115,260. 

The proposal would also award reparations to those affected by “redlining” by banks — the alleged practice of using the banking system to keep people of color out of certain neighborhoods — between the early 1930’s and late 1970’s. Those residents would be entitled to $3,366 per year and could receive as much as $148,099 per person.

While California itself entered the union as a free state in 1850 and never allowed slavery, the state supreme court did mandate the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, forcing residents to turn over escaped slaves to the authorities so they would be sent back to their white owners. 

National Book Award winner and reparations advocate Ta-Nehisi Coates advocated for payments to Black Americans before Congress in 2019 at a hearing to consider the issue. “The matter of reparations is one of making amends and direct redress, but it is also a question of citizenship,” he told members of Congress after drawing a line from slavery to Jim Crow to today’s wealth disparities between racial groups. 

The reparations proposal says that for this and other injustices, the state of California is guilty of aiding and abetting disenfranchisement and white supremacy. “By participating in these horrors, California further perpetuated the harms African Americans faced, imbuing racial prejudice throughout society through segregation, public and private discrimination, and unequal disbursal of state and federal funding,” the document states.

A number of cities across the country are also considering their own reparations plans. The San Francisco board of supervisors established a reparations task force in 2020, which has now recommended a plan that would cost the city several billion dollars. In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu recently appointed a number of activists, academics, and faith leaders to her city’s reparations task force.

A 2022 poll from the Pew Research Center found that nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose paying reparations to the descendants of slaves. 

In March, a polling expert with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Professor Tatishe Nteta, told National Public Radio that the overwhelming number of Americans oppose reparations for two major reasons: the first being that many people feel that Black Americans are treated equally today, and the second being that those who were never slaves do not deserve reparations.