THE TASK FORCE
THE TASK FORCE
A Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans California Assembly Bill 3121 (AB 3121) was enacted on September 30, 2020, and sunsetted on midnight June 30 2023.
The California Reparations Task Force was established to study and make recommendations on how to address the lasting harms of slavery and systemic racism. This body, composed of scholars, community leaders, and activists, thoroughly researched the historical and present-day impacts of racial injustice. Their work culminated in a series of over 115 recommendations.
Identify, compile, and synthesize the relevant evidentiary documentation of 246 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, and decades more of exclusion and discrimination resulting in the disparities that exist today.
Recommend appropriate compensation, rehabilitation, and restitution remedies for African Americans, with special consideration for descendants of persons enslaved in the United States.
Recommend appropriate ways to educate the California public of the task force’s findings.
Deliver to the Legislature the Final Report together with any recommendations by July 1, 2023.
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Approved by Governor September 30, 2020. Filed with Secretary of State September 30, 2020.
LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST
AB 3121, Weber. Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.
Existing law requests the Regents of the University of California to assemble a colloquium of scholars to draft a research proposal to analyze the economic benefits of slavery that accrued to owners and the businesses, including insurance companies and their subsidiaries, that received those benefits, and to make recommendations to the Legislature regarding those findings.
Existing law requires the Insurance Commissioner to request and obtain information from insurers licensed and doing business in this state regarding any records of slaveholder insurance policies issued by any predecessor corporation during the slavery era. Existing law requires insurers to research and report to the commissioner on insurance policies that provided coverage for injury to, or death of, enslaved people.
This bill would establish 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, consisting of 9 members, appointed as provided. The bill would require the Task Force to, among other things, identify, compile, and synthesize the relevant corpus of evidentiary documentation of the institution of slavery that existed within the United States and the colonies. The bill would require the Task Force to recommend, among other things, the form of compensation that should be awarded, the instrumentalities through which it should be awarded, and who should be eligible for this compensation. The bill would require the Task Force to submit a written report of its findings and recommendations to the Legislature. The bill would authorize reimbursement of the members’ expenses only to the extent an appropriation therefor is made in the Budget Act. The bill would state that any state level reparations authorized under these provisions are not to be considered a replacement for any reparations enacted at the federal level. The bill would repeal these provisions on July 1, 2023.
Delivered
On June 29, 2023, California’s 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, released its historic Final Report and presented the report to the Legislature, in accordance with Assembly Bill 3121, which created the Task Force and established its mandate.
Spanning more than 1,100 pages, with thousands of citations…
The Final Report documents the atrocities of 246 years of enslavement, another 100 years of racial terror and legal segregation that followed, and decades more of further discrimination in California and nationally.
As evinced by the extensive data marshaled and presented in the Final Report, many of the vast harms produced by 400 years of government-enabled discrimination persist today. African Americans, in California and nationally, endure the effects in virtually every aspect of life, from health, education, and work to the environment, housing, and wealth accumulation.
Report Contents
The Task Force’s report provided an overview of the five internationally recognized components of full Reparations—compensation, restitution, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition—and summarizes past and ongoing reparatory efforts undertaken in California, in the United States, and across the globe. As history shows, Reparations are not a new concept.
For example, the federal government has undertaken reparatory efforts, both where it was directly responsible for the harms and in other instances where it was not, but a decision was made as a collective to try to bring repair.
The Task Force, in formulating its recommendations, followed widely accepted international standards for the remedy of harms caused by the state and has further endeavored to learn from and build on the examples of other attempts to do the same.