We alerted readers to this scheme a while back, but California’s “bad idea” (and racist, to boot) of reparations for slavery as well as other perceived offenses has come a few steps closer to reality.

Last weekend, in an emotionally charged meeting open to stakeholders, the California Reparations Task Force (CRTF) presented a first draft of its recommendations — which were immediately dismissed by some participants as not enough. Yes, a payment of up to $1.2 million won’t cover the grievances for some, who demanded everything from a match to the $5 million apiece the city of San Francisco is considering as their own reparations to the equal monetary worth of the “40 acres and a mule” promised to slaves. With interest that raises the price to an eye-popping $200 million apiece.

“This million dollars we’re hearing on the news is just inadequate and a further injustice if that’s what this task force is going to recommend for Black Americans for 400-plus years and continuing of slavery and injustice that we have been forced to endure,” said one unidentified participant. “To even throw a million dollars at us is just an injustice.”

Nor is it just money, as the complaints indeed go back to the days of slavery. As the CRTF report states: “After California entered the union in 1850 as a ‘free’ state, it did not enact any laws to guarantee freedom for all… On the contrary, the state Supreme Court enforced the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed for the capture and return of runaway enslaved people, for over a decade until emancipation.” They also demand condemnation of California’s first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, who they claim “encouraged laws to exclude black people from California.”

Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who represents the Oakland area where the hearing was held, said California was “leading on the issue,” calling the CRTF proposal “a model for other states in search of reparative damage, realistic avenues for addressing the need for reparations.”

Added state Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who sits on the CRTF panel, “This really is a trial against America’s original sin, slavery, and the repercussions it caused and the lingering effects in modern society.”

To come up with a payment they deemed adequate, the CRTF assigned dollar amounts to a plethora of offenses: “health harms,” housing discrimination, mass incarceration, unjust property takings, and devaluation of black-owned businesses. Maximizing these amounts for a person who’s old enough to qualify for all of them brings up the $1.2 million figure in the headlines — those who actually get payments will likely receive less. Even so, the reparations are presumed to run up to $500 billion, dwarfing California’s $300 billion annual budget that’s already $22.5 billion short for the next fiscal year.

Yet the group justifies the expense by pointing to the federal government. “During both the economic crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic,” it said, “the federal government took on not billions, but trillions of dollars of additional debt in order to ensure the collective good. Some people benefitted from these funds more directly than others, but the burden was shouldered collectively and the impacts accrued to the collective good. So it should be with reparations for African Americans.”

(We’d certainly object to the notion that all this federal debt really “accrued to the collective good.”)

Not only was the CRTF hearing short on decorum, as its organizers frequently had to oversee shouting matches and eject the most disruptive participants, but it was short on common sense as well. No one there stopped to realize that all of us have ancestors who were slaves or slave owners, and sometimes both. Where does it stop?

That’s the point of Andreas Koureas, who writes at The Spectator: “There is a problem with this [thesis of slavery reparations] though: ultimately, the great evil of slavery was practiced by all inhabited continents and all races. And there will be almost no one alive today in the world who doesn’t have an ancestral link to the slave trade. This fact collapses the modern-day reparations argument.”

In a state like California, which is already hemorrhaging taxpayers to low-tax states such as Texas and Florida, those who would be subject to paying for these dubious reparations offenses are sure to follow their former neighbors out the door. But we’re sure Gavin Newsom isn’t worried about anything but shoring up his black vote when he inevitably runs for president.