California, Never a Slave State, Considers Reparations - Will Swaim [View all]

Poor people—including poor black people—have it hard in California. An honest assessment of the causes would require the Golden State’s political establishment to admit that its attempts to address enduring poverty have been catastrophic for low-income Californians. Instead, Californians got a state reparations commission that time-traveled to the 19th century and discovered that slavery is the real reason for enduring black poverty. To settle accounts, the commission has determined that California taxpayers owe each of their black neighbors $223,000. The state Legislature, which created the task force, will take up that proposal in a few weeks.

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Detailing the report’s shortcomings would take another 500 pages. Begin with this: Slavery in what’s now California was banned under Mexican authority in 1837. California joined the union in 1850 as a free state. The panel briefly acknowledges this only to dismiss it, lingering instead on the 1852 passage of the California Fugitive Slave Act, under which 13 people were deported from the state. The commission briefly mentions that the reviled law lapsed three years after being passed but doesn’t mention the numerous cases of white California officials—sheriffs, judges, attorneys and others—who discovered and liberated enslaved people.

The best known may be the story of Biddy Mason, one of several slaves brought to California by a Utah farmer in 1851. When Los Angeles County Sheriff David W. Alexander learned of their presence in San Bernardino, he rode 60 miles with a mixed-race posse to free Mason and the others. Los Angeles County Judge Benjamin Hayes formally emancipated them in a subsequent trial. Mason went on to become one of Los Angeles’s wealthiest landowners, a merchant, midwife and philanthropist. Nor does the commission explain that millions of black Americans voluntarily migrated to California. However bad it may have been, California was better for blacks than almost everywhere else.

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The real challenge to black and other poor Californians is bad government. Take the state’s execrable public education system. California ranks dead last in the nation in literacy. Black children are the most brutalized these failures: Only 10% meet math standards and about 30% achieve English competency. Yet as test scores fall, high school graduations rise. Denied a real education, many of these children will qualify only for low-level jobs and government assistance.

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Mr. Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and a co-host of National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast. I knew him when he was the editor and publisher of the late OC Weekly, part of the Village Voice group.