Earlier this month, a California lawmaker was reduced to tears during a debate over reparations as Republicans argued that Asian and Latino people should not be forced to pay into a bill to compensate African-Americans who are the descendants of slaves.
“I’m concerned about proposals that would make it easier to distribute reparations,” state Assemblywoman Kate Sanchez (R-Rancho Santa Margarita) said during a hearing on a bill that would create a “Reparations and Compensatory Justice Fund” in the state Treasury.
Sanchez noted that some economists estimate that the reparations recommended by a state task force last year could cost more than $800 billion, more than 2.5 times the state’s annual budget.
“Paying for it will require significant tax increases the likes of which this state has never seen before,” she argued. “I recognize and acknowledge this painful part of our history. [but] The suffering of our past should not be borne by people today.”
Sanchez, who is Hispanic, noted that more than half of California’s population is “Latino and Asian” and that the state “has nothing to do with slavery, segregation or Jim Crow laws.”
“It’s fundamentally unfair to force these people to pay this,” she said in opposition to SB1331.
Rep. Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) responded to Sanchez by declaring that “action is needed, and that includes reparations.”
“In some cases, this may include monetary compensation,” he argued.
“I know it’s hard to ask those of us in Congress right now to make that commitment, but nobody has asked generations of Black families that it’s OK to take their wealth, that it’s OK to enslave them, that it’s OK to…” Kalra said, haltingly, before pausing to compose himself.
“If we are allowed to condemn their children to generations of poverty,” he continued, “this country became a superpower based on hundreds of years of unpaid labor of African-descendants. We need to acknowledge that.”
Kalra, who became the first Indian American member of the California Assembly in 2016, argued that “to this day” the state continues to benefit from “what has happened to our fellow Black community members for generations.”
The Assembly Judiciary Committee voted to pass SB 1331.
This is one of four reparations bills the California State Assembly has considered in committee and passed. Sacramento Observer.
The California Legislative Black Caucus has introduced 14 reparations bills this year. SB 1331 is not among the 14 bills introduced by the CLBC, according to the outlet.
State Sen. Steven Bradford (D), the author of SB 1331, argued that reparations could take the form of free college tuition, free health care and assistance for first-time homebuyers who are the descendants of slaves, rather than direct cash payments.
