California Assembly committee greenlights reparations housing bill

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CN) — California lawmakers in both chambers on Tuesday examined bills by the state’s reparations task force intended to address systemic inequality stemming from the country’s history of slavery.

The bills touch on tracing the lineage of a descendant of an enslaved person, create a state bureau for those descendants and designate a percentage of funds from a homeowner assistance program to the descendants who meet certain requirements.

“The descendants of U.S. slaves look like a lot of us in this room,” said Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, a Hawthorne Democrat, speaking about her Assembly Bill 57.

McKinnor’s bill would earmark at least 10% of the funds in the California Housing Finance Agency’s home purchase assistance program for people who meet loan requirements and are descendants of formerly enslaved people.

Taneicia Herring, government relations specialist with the NAACP California-Hawaii State Conference, said that housing policies were designed to discriminate against those descendants.

“They ensured that true equality was never an option to begin with,” Herring said.

But Andrew Quinio, with the Pacific Legal Foundation, argued that the bill wasn’t race neutral, meaning it wouldn’t pass constitutional muster. He suggested McKinnor remove the language about lineage and instead tie the funds to an injury someone suffered.

“Will it be tested in the courts? Absolutely,” said Assemblymember Ash Kalra, a San Jose Democrat and committee chair. “But you know what? Jim Crow was tested in the courts and ultimately defeated.”

McKinnor’s bill passed out of committee and now proceeds to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

Though they appeared Tuesday before a different committee in a different chamber, a pair of Senate bills complemented McKinnor’s bill — the language of which, according to a bill analysis, requiring an applicant be a qualifying descendant only becomes effective when a new state agency is established.

Senate Bill 518 would create a Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery, under which the bureau’s duties would include determining someone’s status as a descendant, as well as review and investigate reports of property improperly taken by racially motivated eminent domain.

The bill — written by state Senator Akilah Weber Pierson, a Los Angeles Democrat — would have a genealogy division to help people trace their lineage and a property reclamation division to research when someone’s land was wrongly taken.

Don Tamaki, a former member of the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, with a Special Consideration for African Americans Who are Descendants of Persons Enslaved in the United States, said the bill aligns with the task force’s final report.

However, Chris Lodgson, with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, argued the bill offered no privacy protections for the information it would collect from people. Additionally, he noted that the agency would be housed in the state’s Department of Justice.

Weber Pierson also presented Senate Bill 437 to the Senate Judiciary Committee. It would allocate $6 million to the California State University system for research on how to determine who is a descendant of a formerly enslaved person and is eligible for reparations.

“This bill is essential for the successful implementation of the California reparations task force’s final recommendations,” Weber Pierson said in a bill analysis. “To establish eligibility for the recommendations outlined by the task force, we must first have a clear, accurate, and evidence-based method for identifying descendants of American chattel slavery.”

Michael Willis, a professional genealogist, argued against the bill. He said the money given to the university system would be a waste, as genealogists already have an existing methodology of tracing lineage.

“Only genealogists have the expertise, not CSUs, to do this,” he added.

Senate Judiciary members hadn’t yet voted on the two Senate bills as of publication time.