A California panel has recommended reparation payments of up to $1.2 million for some Black residents. But advocates face an uphill battle in gaining the support of the state\u2019s Latino and Asian residents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reparations advocates have launched an aggressive campaign in California to win the support of skeptical Latino and Asian Americans for a proposal submitted to the legislature Thursday to pay some Black residents more than $1 million each as restitution for past racist government policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After decades of lobbying, the reparations movement scored its biggest victory yet with the introduction of the multibillion-dollar California proposal to address historical discrimination against Black Americans, including in policing and housing policies. But advocates\u2019 thorniest challenge lies ahead: gaining the support of other racial and ethnic groups that have also endured racist government policies and now make up the majority of the state\u2019s population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The effort is being closely watched by reparations proponents across the country who see a California panel\u2019s proposal, which would be the largest payout of its type in history, as a potential model. If legislators adopt all of the state panel\u2019s\u2002recommendations<\/a>, lifelong Black California residents older than 50 could each receive $1.2 million to address past discrimination in housing, health care, policing, property seizures and commerce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gaining the support of Asian American and Latino voters would give legislators more political ammunition to pursue the idea, advocates say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt is going to be very important to build ally-ship with these communities to get this done \u2014 we cannot do it alone,\u201d said Kamilah Moore, chair of the legislatively mandated panel that spent two years studying the state\u2019s past treatment of Black residents and developed a compensation formula.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Advocates plan to host happy hours, speak at churches and hold movie nights to build support, but acknowledge they face an uphill battle. The proposal lands on legislators\u2019 desks as the state government grapples with a $31.5 billion budget deficit and as political strategists worry<\/a> that public support for racial justice has waned. The legislature\u2019s Democratic majority will have to satisfy its most loyal constituency, Black Americans, without turning away Latino and Asian voters, strategists say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Asian Americans and Latinos, the two fastest-growing voting blocs in the country, are more likely to support reparations for Black Americans than their White peers, but the idea remains broadly unpopular among both groups, according to various polls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While just 15 percent of White Americans support the federal government paying reparations to the descendants of enslaved Black Americans, 36 percent of Hispanic Americans support the idea, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll<\/a> conducted this spring. A 75 percent majority of Black Americans support federal reparations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That poll did not have a large enough sample of Asian respondents to draw a conclusion, but a 2021 Pew Research Center poll<\/a> found a similar lack of support among Latinos, with 39 percent supporting reparations, and a slightly smaller proportion of English-speaking Asian Americans saying the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Making the sales job more complicated is California\u2019s long history of discrimination against Asian and Latino residents, who currently make up about 16 percent and 40 percent<\/a> of the population, respectively. Black residents make up about 6.5 percent of the population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The state deported thousands of Mexican American citizens during the Great Depression of the 1930s and enacted some of the first laws targeting Asian immigrants, including banning them from owning land in the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A 500-page report by the reparations panel \u201chighlights the unjust treatment\u201d of other groups, Moore said. \u201cSo it is also my hope that the task force efforts empower these groups in their respective advocacy,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Slavery was never legal in California, critics of the reparations proposal say, and its voters prohibited the use of racial preferences in state-sanctioned programs nearly a quarter-century ago. Others argue that it\u2019s unfair to make current residents pay for the sins of the state\u2019s White founders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s been racism lollapalooza here in California against multiple groups,\u201d said Manuel Pastor, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied the state\u2019s complicated racial history. \u201cAnd there\u2019s definitely not a sense that Asian and Latino folks benefited in the same way that White folks did from suppressing African Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The key may be recruiting Gen Z voters \u2014 about half of whom are non-White \u2014 to build support for reparations for Black people, advocates say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Get Free, a national youth-led movement, is recruiting and training organizers in California to talk about reparations with their peers online and in person. Gen Z voters grew up with the Black Lives Matter movement, said Nicole Carty, executive director of the group, and have a deeper understanding of social justice issues. \u201cAs this generation comes of age, I think we\u2019re going to see a shift in support around the reparations movement as well,\u201d Carty said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, convincing older generations of Californians may be a tougher task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider Kit Lam, who moved to the state from Hong Kong more than a decade ago and says he has learned a lot about the discrimination endured by Black Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Lam, a legislative aide for a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, is skeptical of the California reparations proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAbsolutely the community suffered from racism,\u201d said Lam, 47. \u201cI 100 percent agree that we should invest in the African American community \u2014 for example, education is a good way to bring everyone up \u2014 but I don\u2019t know if individual payments are fair.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lam says his family has often faced racism, including his American-born wife being told \u201cto go back to China\u201d more times than they can remember.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cChinese workers\u2002built the railroads<\/a>, but that kind of stuff is never mentioned in the history books,\u201d he said, referring to the thousands of immigrants who worked under hazardous conditions in the 1860s. \u201cI think that the government should help Black people, but I think that they should also do something for the Chinese community.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lack of support from other racial and ethnic groups has irked some reparations advocates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n James Lance Taylor<\/a>, a member of San Francisco\u2019s reparations task force and a political science professor at the University of San Francisco, directs much of his current frustration toward the city\u2019s Chinese American community, which has largely not supported the reparations movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A separate San Francisco panel has recommended as much as $5 million each for some Black residents<\/a>, a proposal that is also facing resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhere is the Chinese community?\u201d said Taylor, who is Black. \u201cIts general silence is passive-aggressive racism and evidence of the challenge we have.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the pandemic, San Francisco\u2019s Asian American community was subject to frequent and sometimes violent prejudice because the coronavirus originated in China. As violence against the community spiked, its leaders called for additional law enforcement resources, requests that African American leaders did not oppose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ve had support from the different races, but we never asked for money,\u201d said Ed Siu, president of the Chinatown Merchants United Association of San Francisco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Siu moved to San Francisco from Hong Kong in 1976, attending high school and college in the United States. His business group has 150 members, and many of them suffered lost businesses and even violence during the peak pandemic years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Siu criticized the city\u2019s Black community for its \u201cviolent\u201d protests calling for change and argued that the government needs to treat every community the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI don\u2019t hold a position against African Americans, but every group should get the same,\u201d said Siu, 63. \u201cNot one single group should be singled out for benefits. We pay taxes, they pay taxes, so why shouldn\u2019t the share be equal?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just around the corner from the travel agency Siu runs in the heart of Chinatown is the First Chinese Baptist Church, a small brick building with a regular congregation of about 150 people. Some of its parishioners marched once with Black churches in favor of reparations, according to its pastor, Sebastian Ong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAs a church, we have reached out during this time, and we have been intentional about forming relations with Black folks,\u201d said Ong, an immigrant from Singapore. \u201cBut our experience too has been fraught with discrimination, not just now but historically.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere should be reparations for them, and there should be reparations for us,\u201d he continued. \u201cBut this isn\u2019t about us versus them, and I\u2019m not saying just because they receive reparations that we should be receiving the same kind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, some Asian American groups have come out in support of reparations, including the Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress, which helped lead the campaign in the 1970s and 1980s to secure payments for Japanese Americans who survived incarceration camps during World War II. Legislation signed in 1988 provided $20,000 each in reparations to more than 80,000 Japanese Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many Japanese Americans make pilgrimages to the shuttered incarceration camps scattered throughout the country, including several in California, said Kathy Nishimoto Masaoka, co-chair of the group. Those crowds could be more receptive to the argument for reparations for Black Californians, she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe idea of reparations is not alien to us and we have a history of supporting other communities and groups,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Group members plan to fan out across the state over the next few months, speaking to student organizations, churches and veterans groups in support of reparations, Masaoka said. They also plan to host a \u201creparations happy hour\u201d in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles this summer during the national convention of the Japanese American Citizens League.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat I think we share in Latinx and Asian communities with Black Americans is a history of going through some of the same discrimination,\u201d Masaoka said. \u201cWe were treated a certain way because we were people of color, and that\u2019s the reason why I think so many people in our communities will support the idea.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The state\u2019s Black population lags behind other communities on many scores, reparations advocates note, including wealth. The median household income for Black residents is $58,958 compared with $67,327 for Latino households, $96,566 for White households, and $108,477 for Asian households, according to the most recent census data<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This wealth gap is the direct result of racist policies that locked Black Americans into failing schools and over-policed communities, the California reparations panel argues in its report<\/a>. The report cites the state\u2019s extensive history of \u201csundown towns\u201d \u2014 the use of urban renewal and highway projects to dismantle once-thriving Black neighborhoods like San Francisco\u2019s Fillmore District, effectively destroying generations of wealth accumulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But for advocates to succeed, they will have to overcome a history of tension between Black Californians and other communities. In the early 1990s, the Black community was outraged when Soon Ja Du, a Korean store owner, was sentenced to probation after shooting and killing Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Black girl. Later, during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Black protesters targeted Korean American-owned businesses<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n