A member of California’s reparations task force is dismissing the total dollar amount as the “least important piece” of their proposal, despite the committee considering doling out nearly triple the state’s existing budget in payments to Black residents as a way to make amends for slavery and subsequent discrimination.
“We want to make sure that this is presented out in a way that does not reinforce the preoccupation with a dollar figure, which is the least important piece of this,” Cheryl Grills, a clinical psychologist and member of the California Reparations Task Force, told CalMatters in a new interview.
“It’s important,” continued Grills, “but it’s the least important in terms of being able to get to a point in our country’s history and in California’s history where we recognize that the harm cuts across multiple areas and domains and that the repair needs to align with that.”
Cheryl Grills, right, and Lisa Holder, left, both members of the California Reparations Task Force (Screenshot from Twitter account od )
REPARATIONS FOR BLACK CALIFORNIANS COULD COST $800B, ECONOMISTS WARN
Last month, economists predicted in a preliminary estimate that California’s reparations plan could cost the state over $800 billion. The task force, which consulted five economists and policy experts to arrive at the number, clarified that the total does not include compensations for property the group says was taken unjustly, or for the devaluation of Black-owned businesses. California’s total annual budget currently sits at roughly $300 billion.
The task force had previously been considering a proposal to give just under $360,000 per person to approximately 1.8 million Black Californians who had an ancestor enslaved in the U.S., putting the total cost of the program at about $640 billion.
It’s unclear how California would pay for large-scale reparations. Newsom announced in January that the state faces a projected budget deficit of $22.5 billion for the coming fiscal year. Then…
