Will California Realize Reparations to Its Black Residents?
The California Reparations Task Force is readying its final report to the state legislature by July 1st. California lawmakers in 2020 passed AB 3121, establishing this first-of-its-kind task force to determine the scope of harm and potential for redress to the state’s Black residents. The group of nine spent two years conducting hearings and gathering testimony.
One member of the task force, Lisa Holder, told YES! Magazine in 2021 that the group’s goal was to make “evidence-based recommendations” drawn from two years of gathering testimony and documenting the harms arising from “the original systems of oppression, like slavery and Jim Crow segregation, and the continuing and ongoing systems of oppression that we’re seeing in institutional racism and structural racism.”
The task force is sending its interim report, which includes suggested financial compensation, to the state legislature for debate and approval.
Holder, who is President of the Equal Justice Society spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar about the report in an interview on Rising Up With Sonali.
The views expressed here and on Rising Up With Sonali do not necessarily reflect the opinion of YES! Media.
Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.
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