An obstacle to Black reparations in California: Convincing Latinos and Asians.

[jboldeniv]

A California panel has recommended reparation payments of up to $1.2 million for some Black residents. But advocates face an uphill battle in gaining the support of the state’s Latino and Asian residents.






Reparations advocates have launched an aggressive campaign in California to win the support of skeptical Latino and Asian Americans for a proposal submitted to the legislature Thursday to pay some Black residents more than $1 million each as restitution for past racist government policies.

After decades of lobbying, the reparations movement scored its biggest victory yet with the introduction of the multibillion-dollar California proposal to address historical discrimination against Black Americans, including in policing and housing policies. But advocates’ thorniest challenge lies ahead: gaining the support of other racial and ethnic groups that have also endured racist government policies and now make up the majority of the state’s population.

The effort is being closely watched by reparations proponents across the country who see a California panel’s proposal, which would be the largest payout of its type in history, as a potential model. If legislators adopt all of the state panel’s recommendations, lifelong Black California residents older than 50 could each receive $1.2 million to address past discrimination in housing, health care, policing, property seizures and commerce.

Gaining the support of Asian American and Latino voters would give legislators more political ammunition to pursue the idea, advocates say.

“It is going to be very important to build ally-ship with these communities to get this done — we cannot do it alone,” said Kamilah Moore, chair of the legislatively mandated panel that spent two years studying the state’s past treatment of Black residents and developed a compensation formula.

Advocates plan to host happy hours, speak at churches and hold movie nights to build support, but acknowledge they face an uphill battle. The proposal lands on legislators’ desks as the state government grapples with a $31.5 billion budget deficit and as political strategists worry that public support for racial justice has waned. The legislature’s Democratic majority will have to satisfy its most loyal constituency, Black Americans, without turning away Latino and Asian voters, strategists say.

Asian Americans and Latinos, the two fastest-growing voting blocs in the country, are more likely to support reparations for Black Americans than their White peers, but the idea remains broadly unpopular among both groups, according to various polls.

While just 15 percent of White Americans support the federal government paying reparations to the descendants of enslaved Black Americans, 36 percent of Hispanic Americans support the idea, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted this spring. A 75 percent majority of Black Americans support federal reparations.
That poll did not have a large enough sample of Asian respondents to draw a conclusion, but a 2021 Pew Research Center poll found a similar lack of support among Latinos, with 39 percent supporting reparations, and a slightly smaller proportion of English-speaking Asian Americans saying the same.
Making the sales job more complicated is California’s long history of discrimination against Asian and Latino residents, who currently make up about 16 percent and 40 percent of the population, respectively. Black residents make up about 6.5 percent of the population.

The state deported thousands of Mexican American citizens during the Great Depression of the 1930s and enacted some of the first laws targeting Asian immigrants, including banning them from owning land in the state.
A 500-page report by the reparations panel “highlights the unjust treatment” of other groups, Moore said. “So it is also my hope that the task force efforts empower these groups in their respective advocacy,” she said.
Slavery was never legal in California, critics of the reparations proposal say, and its voters prohibited the use of racial preferences in state-sanctioned programs nearly a quarter-century ago. Others argue that it’s unfair to make current residents pay for the sins of the state’s White founders.

“It’s been racism lollapalooza here in California against multiple groups,” said Manuel Pastor, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied the state’s complicated racial history. “And there’s definitely not a sense that Asian and Latino folks benefited in the same way that White folks did from suppressing African Americans.”

The key may be recruiting Gen Z voters — about half of whom are non-White — to build support for reparations for Black people, advocates say.

Get Free, a national youth-led movement, is recruiting and training organizers in California to talk about reparations with their peers online and in person. Gen Z voters grew up with the Black Lives Matter movement, said Nicole Carty, executive director of the group, and have a deeper understanding of social justice issues. “As this generation comes of age, I think we’re going to see a shift in support around the reparations movement as well,” Carty said.

Still, convincing older generations of Californians may be a tougher task.

Consider Kit Lam, who moved to the state from Hong Kong more than a decade ago and says he has learned a lot about the discrimination endured by Black Americans.

But Lam, a legislative aide for a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, is skeptical of the California reparations proposal.

“Absolutely the community suffered from racism,” said Lam, 47. “I 100 percent agree that we should invest in the African American community — for example, education is a good way to bring everyone up — but I don’t know if individual payments are fair.”

Lam says his family has often faced racism, including his American-born wife being told “to go back to China” more times than they can remember.

“Chinese workers built the railroads, but that kind of stuff is never mentioned in the history books,” he said, referring to the thousands of immigrants who worked under hazardous conditions in the 1860s. “I think that the government should help Black people, but I think that they should also do something for the Chinese community.”
The lack of support from other racial and ethnic groups has irked some reparations advocates.

James Lance Taylor, a member of San Francisco’s reparations task force and a political science professor at the University of San Francisco, directs much of his current frustration toward the city’s Chinese American community, which has largely not supported the reparations movement.

A separate San Francisco panel has recommended as much as $5 million each for some Black residents, a proposal that is also facing resistance.
“Where is the Chinese community?” said Taylor, who is Black. “Its general silence is passive-aggressive racism and evidence of the challenge we have.”
During the pandemic, San Francisco’s Asian American community was subject to frequent and sometimes violent prejudice because the coronavirus originated in China. As violence against the community spiked, its leaders called for additional law enforcement resources, requests that African American leaders did not oppose.
“We’ve had support from the different races, but we never asked for money,” said Ed Siu, president of the Chinatown Merchants United Association of San Francisco.

Siu moved to San Francisco from Hong Kong in 1976, attending high school and college in the United States. His business group has 150 members, and many of them suffered lost businesses and even violence during the peak pandemic years.

Siu criticized the city’s Black community for its “violent” protests calling for change and argued that the government needs to treat every community the same.

“I don’t hold a position against African Americans, but every group should get the same,” said Siu, 63. “Not one single group should be singled out for benefits. We pay taxes, they pay taxes, so why shouldn’t the share be equal?”

Just around the corner from the travel agency Siu runs in the heart of Chinatown is the First Chinese Baptist Church, a small brick building with a regular congregation of about 150 people. Some of its parishioners marched once with Black churches in favor of reparations, according to its pastor, Sebastian Ong.

“As a church, we have reached out during this time, and we have been intentional about forming relations with Black folks,” said Ong, an immigrant from Singapore. “But our experience too has been fraught with discrimination, not just now but historically.”

“There should be reparations for them, and there should be reparations for us,” he continued. “But this isn’t about us versus them, and I’m not saying just because they receive reparations that we should be receiving the same kind.”

[jboldeniv]

Still, some Asian American groups have come out in support of reparations, including the Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress, which helped lead the campaign in the 1970s and 1980s to secure payments for Japanese Americans who survived incarceration camps during World War II. Legislation signed in 1988 provided $20,000 each in reparations to more than 80,000 Japanese Americans.

Many Japanese Americans make pilgrimages to the shuttered incarceration camps scattered throughout the country, including several in California, said Kathy Nishimoto Masaoka, co-chair of the group. Those crowds could be more receptive to the argument for reparations for Black Californians, she said.

“The idea of reparations is not alien to us and we have a history of supporting other communities and groups,” she said.

Group members plan to fan out across the state over the next few months, speaking to student organizations, churches and veterans groups in support of reparations, Masaoka said. They also plan to host a “reparations happy hour” in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles this summer during the national convention of the Japanese American Citizens League.

“What I think we share in Latinx and Asian communities with Black Americans is a history of going through some of the same discrimination,” Masaoka said. “We were treated a certain way because we were people of color, and that’s the reason why I think so many people in our communities will support the idea.”

The state’s Black population lags behind other communities on many scores, reparations advocates note, including wealth. The median household income for Black residents is $58,958 compared with $67,327 for Latino households, $96,566 for White households, and $108,477 for Asian households, according to the most recent census data.

This wealth gap is the direct result of racist policies that locked Black Americans into failing schools and over-policed communities, the California reparations panel argues in its report. The report cites the state’s extensive history of “sundown towns” — the use of urban renewal and highway projects to dismantle once-thriving Black neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Fillmore District, effectively destroying generations of wealth accumulation.

But for advocates to succeed, they will have to overcome a history of tension between Black Californians and other communities. In the early 1990s, the Black community was outraged when Soon Ja Du, a Korean store owner, was sentenced to probation after shooting and killing Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Black girl. Later, during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Black protesters targeted Korean American-owned businesses.

A recording leaked in October that captured Los Angeles council members discussing ways to increase Latino representation through the redistricting process, while using vulgar and racist language against the city’s Black and Indigenous communities, crystallized the problem, advocates say.

Yardenna Aaron, executive director of the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, a California watchdog that represents janitors, has been trying to convince her mostly Latino members of the importance of reparations and plans to host a series of educational sessions on the topic next month. Her conservations so far, she says, have focused on shared experiences of racism.

Many of the Latino janitors, especially those who are undocumented, have faced wage theft, she says, so she tells them about Black service industry workers in the Jim Crow South who were routinely not paid for their work.

“What happened with Black people is happening to other people, just with a different label and a different name,” said Aaron, who is Black. “Oftentimes, racism, hate and bias are insidious in that way. The race may change, but the policy and the intent there doesn’t.”

The key to winning Latino and Asian support for the Black reparations movement may be convincing non-Black communities that it could become a blueprint for restitution to their communities as well, said Noemi Lujan Perez, 47, a diversity, equality and inclusion consultant and native of South Los Angeles.

“The Black civil rights movement helped open the door for our Latino rights, our Chicano rights,” said Lujan Perez, whose mother came to California from Mexico. “So it’s going to be about teaching our people that as the Black community moves their pieces forward, there are going to be opportunities for us to move our pieces forward, and in that way it takes away the perceived optics that this is a Black-only movement.”