California is infested with violent crime, failing schools, America’s highest gasoline prices (a stunning $9.60 per gallonMendocino), and a 1,200-year-record drought.
Al fresco vagrants—too many of them mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs and alcohol—populate ramshackle tent cities that breed lawlessness, squalor, and chaos.
Rampant wildfires burn the Golden State to a crisp and pump its skies full of carbon dioxide—a poison worse than cyanide, according to the high priests of the Church of the Green New Deal.
So, amid such monumental challenges, on what have California’s leaders focused lately?
Slavery reparations
Radical-left Democratic Governor. Gavin Newsom should be focusing his energy and time on urgent matters that can often lead to death, such as those involving Gavin Newsom. Instead, Newsom is sifting through a list of Wokistani brethren in Sacramento. 500-page reporton reparations ordered by state legislators through legislation signed by the governor in 2020.
This huge study arrived June 1. It is “an organizing tool for people not only in California, but across the U.S.,” Reparations Task Force Chairwoman Kamilah Moore said. Legislators expect a “comprehensive reparations scheme” next year.
All of this will consume a lot of official attention that should have been directed at keeping Californians safe from being bankrupted or murdered. Instead of uniting Californians, the ensuing discussions will likely to divide Golden State residents along race lines and possibly within racial groups.
California was not a member of the Confederacy nor was it a slave state. Nonetheless, Democrats are desperate to plunge America’s most populous jurisdiction into a corrosive debate over slavery.
Since 1987, I have lived in Manhattan. However, I was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and reared there throughout the glorious 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s. It is hard to imagine a better time and place to grow up.
Californians of all races got along well during most of those wonder decades. Tensions flared during Watts race riots, and after the Rodney King verdict.
Southern California was sunny, bright, and prosperous. It had a mellow vibe and incomparable weather. The population tried to at least try to bridge ethnic differences and share that peaceful feeling. We didn’t get shattered by slavery, which ended 98years before I was born, thousands of kilometers away.
My mother, 83, was a saint, and my father, 90, is from Costa Rica. They arrived legally in Costa Rica with visas and passports rather than running across the southern frontier. It’s a great idea.
I’m sure that my parents and other black Californians from Latin America, the Caribbean, and contemporary Africa must wonder why Sacramento Democrats hope to spend their tax dollars to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves—whom their families never owned.
Are black taxpayers financing reparations for other African people? And people ask me why I don’t write fiction.
Hispanics and Asians whose great-great-grandparents lived in Ecuador, Korea, and other nations even further flung—while blacks toiled in Dixie for free—must ponder why they are being dragged into debates and potential tax-funded financial transfers that have nothing to do with them.
White Californians in the tens to millions belong to families that had no slaves, spent the antebellum decades in Europe, bled at Antietam fighting for the Confederacy or were themselves victims to feudalism, indentured slavery and even slave labor. “Why are fingers being pointed at us?” they surely ask.
Instead of making California a new San Andreas fault, the best thing that the Golden State could do is to encourage wide school choice and high education standards. There are many options to help poor black children learn and succeed, including charter schools, magnet schools and homeschooling.
If you are so determined, this will provide boatloads of social justice for black Californians. It is better than watching Newsom or his minions drive their state down treacherous cliffside roads and staring in the rearview mirror at old ugliness.
The Daily Signal offers a variety perspectives. This article is not meant to represent the views of The Heritage Foundation.
Are you a fan of this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Be sure to include the article’s URL, headline, and your name.
