California task force launches study of slave reparations
旧金山--加利福尼亚州首个研究和建议为非裔美国人提供赔偿的工作组于周二举行了首次会议，启动了一项为期两年的进程，以解决奴隶制和系统性种族主义的危害，尽管联邦政府不采取行动.
The nine members of the task force, appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders, include the descendants of slaves who are now prominent lawyers, academics and politicians. The group's newly elected chair is a young lawyer who specializes in intellectual property, and their vice-chair is a longtime civil rights activist arrested with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at a lunch counter sit-in in 1961.
"I'm so thankful to my ancestors, who survived so much trauma, so much pain, so much tragedy, so much brutality, so that I could live," said Lisa Holder, a civil rights attorney in Los Angeles. "And I am ready to fight to deliver them - our ancestors -justice."
Tuesday's meeting of the first state reparations committee in the U.S. came as President Joe Biden commemorated the lives of hundreds of Black people killed by a white mob in what was then a thriving African-American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a century ago. It also comes just over a year after George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by a white police officer in Minnesota.
Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who as a state assemblywoman authored the state legislation creating the task force, noted the solemnity of the occasion as well as the opportunity to right an historic wrong that continues today, in the form of large racial disparities in wealth, health and education. African Americans make up just 6% of California's population yet were 30% of an estimated 250,000 people experiencing homelessness who sought help in 2020.
"Your task is to determine the depth of the harm, and the ways in which we are to repair that harm," said Weber, whose parents were sharecroppers forced to leave the South.
Critics have said that California did not have slaves as in other states and should not have to study reparations- or pay for it. But Weber said the state is an economic powerhouse that can point the way for a federal government that has been unable to address the issue. It would not replace any reparations agreed to by the federal government.