A week ago, with little fanfare, Gov. Newsom signed a reparations bill. As many of you might recall, he’d earlier announced, in no uncertain terms, that he’d never allow cash payments to Black people, not even descendants of slaves. So what does the bill he signed actually mandate?
Not much. Newsom signed SB 518, which was introduced by the California Legislative Black Caucus as a Hail Mary when they couldn’t get their more radical bill through the Legislature. It establishes a “Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery.” Despite its fancy name, it is a performative or symbolic bureaucracy that gives reparations supporters an opportunity to stay busy and claim the appearance of achievement, while effectively postponing any substantive reparations for years to come, if not forever. In other words, a typical government agency.
The reparations supporters are fooling themselves that SB 518 will actually lead to more substantive measures, i.e. money going to Black people. That is not going to happen. Newsom is being merciful to the reparations people by allowing them a vestige of face-saving. They can argue to their constituents, “Hey, we admit that this isn’t much, but it’s a first step toward real cash payments,” such as the $5 million-per-Black person insanity that Black activists tried to force through the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. That idea obviously went nowhere, but it’s indicative of how these people think.
The language of SB 518 is so ambiguous that it will take years to figure out what it actually means (which is often the point of bureaucratese). The new Bureau has first to “address the lasting harms” of what it supposes to have been discrimination in California’s past history against Black people. Such an analysis will clearly take a very long time, as galaxies of “experts” square off against each other with dueling statistics. This kicking-the-can-down-the-road is a familiar device for doing nothing; it makes the likelihood of anything happening fade with each passing day; and it exhausts even the patience of left-leaning media, who hate having to cover the minutiae of boring committee hearings.
Then the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery will have to “advise on reparative remedies,” another takes-forever task that leads deep into the bureaucratic swamp. And even after all that nonsense, implementing the Bureau’s recommendations “shall be contingent upon appropriation of sufficient funding by the Legislature.” There is no way the California Legislature, now or in the foreseeable future, will allocate money for cash reparations. If it did, there would be a voter revolt.
So nothing is going to happen. Newsom understands that if he commits money for reparations, he’ll never be President, because the American people loathe reparations. I, personally, happen to believe that Newsom is acting in this way not out of pure ambition, but because he genuinely thinks that reparations is a stupid idea. Since he can’t come out and say so (political correctness), he’s managed to throw the reparations people a sop, while effectively putting the final nail into their coffin. Good for him.
Steve Heimoff