In the debate over “critical race theory,” some Americans reject the idea that the nation should be held accountable for slavery’s aftermath. They insist that discussing institutional racism will cause emotional stress and feelings of guilt among young descendants of the enslavers. That, however, is a false narrative because it presupposes that, when slavery ended, African Americans had every opportunity to pursue the so-called American dream. In fact, slavery has never really ended.

A Reparations Task Force which the California Assembly created in 2020 makes that point in its interim report submitted on June 1. It states that subjugation of African Americans continues through a racial hierarchy based on slavery without shackles. Its mandate is to study and recommend “appropriate remedies of compensation, rehabilitation and restitution for African Americans, with a special consideration for descendants of persons enslaved in the United States.” A final report will be out next year.

About 12 million people lived in the 15 slave-holding states prior to the Civil War, including four million who were enslaved, according to the 1860 census, on the pretext that it was their destiny as a supposedly inferior race. This exploitation of other human beings enabled the United States to build “one of the largest and most profitable enslaved labor economies in the world after the War of Independence” and it adopted a constitution protecting slavery while assigning “outsized federal power” to pro-slavery European Americans.

Slave-owners made more than $159 million between 1820 and 1860 and slavery was such an important part of the economy that, by 1861, almost two percent of the federal budget was devoted to just paying for expenses related to enslavement, such as enforcing fugitive slave laws. Half of the pre-Civil War presidents and more than 1,700 Congressmen from 37 states owned slaves.

Draconian laws controlled those millions of slaves — among other things, permitting their killing with impunity. The enslaved were not allowed to resist a European American, leave the plantation without permission or gather in large groups away from the plantation. Enslavers regularly staged public beatings and other violent acts against the enslaved.

Babies were enslaved at birth for their entire lives, the lives of their children and their children’s children. The enslavers raped and impregnated women and girls and sold the offspring. President Thomas Jefferson, who enslaved four of his own children, wrote that the “labor of a breeding [enslaved] woman who births a child every two years” was as profitable as the best enslaved worker on the farm.

The task force presented this background, citing some 237 sources, as basis for its preliminary recommendations in a more than 400-page report. It took only two years, whereas a bill which the late Michigan Democratic Congressman John Conyers Jr. introduced 30 years ago simply to study possible reparations is still stalled in the U.S. Congress.

The neo-slavery affects all facets of African American life going back to the end of the Civil War after which freedom was replaced by legal and, later, de facto, segregation that still sustains the racial hierarchy. The task force noted that Andrew Johnson, after becoming president following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, said in 1866 that “[t]his is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men[.]” That sentiment sustains the anti-reparations crowd.

Racial segregation began in housing from the beginning and, with it, in education. The 13th Amendment’s guarantee of the right to vote has been ignored and “racial terror” was introduced. Such actions “pervaded every aspect of post-slavery Black life and prevented African Americans from building the same wealth and political influence as white Americans,” the task force said. “African Americans faced threats of violence when they tried to vote, when they tried to buy homes in white neighborhoods, when they tried to swim in public pools and when they tried to assert equal rights through the courts or in legislation. White mobs bombed, murdered, and destroyed entire towns.” Lynching and “mob murder’ were replaced by “extrajudicial killings by the law enforcement and civilian vigilantes.”

Governments at all levels “ignored the violence, failed or refused to prosecute offenders or participated in the violence themselves.” This terrorism “inflicts psychological trauma on those who witness the harm and injury. Many African Americans were traumatized from surviving mass violence and by the constant terror of living in the South.”

The legal system “overall physically harms, imprisons and kills African Americans more than any other racial group relative to their percentage of the population.” It criminalizes them “at all levels” for “social control and to maintain an economy based on exploited Black labor,” including invoking the exception in the 13th Amendment which allows for slavery “as a punishment for crime.”

According to the task force, “The criminalization of African Americans is an enduring badge of slavery and has contributed to over-policing of Black neighborhoods, establishment of the school-lo-prison pipeline, the mass incarceration of African Americans and numerous other inequities reaching every corner of the American legal system. It has also led to the re-traumatization of African Americans when both the police and mainstream media refuse to accept African Americans as victims. Law enforcement poorly investigates or ignore crimes against African American women.”

These “harms” continue to affect the mental and physical condition of African Americans and, contrary to what the “anti-woke” crowd claims, it is African American children who “experience anger, anxiety, paranoia, helplessness, hopelessness, frustration, resentment, fear, lowered self-esteem and lower levels of psychological functioning as a result of racism.” This “can profoundly undermine” their “emotional and physical well-being and their academic success. … These harms have compounded over generations, resulting in an enormous wealth gap that is the same today as it had been two years before the Civil Rights

Act was passed in 1964. In 2019, the median Black household had a net worth of $24,100, while white households have a net worth of $188,200. This wealth gap persists across all income levels, regardless of education level or family structure.”

The task force supports reparations at least for the descendants of the enslaved but is divided on whether it should be tuition and housing grants or cash. In housing discrimination between1933 and 1977 alone, the payout could be as high as $223,200 per person, for a total of $569 billion, The New York Times said.

And, in an obvious rebuke of anti-“wokeness,” the task force recommends adoption of a “K12 Black Studies curriculum that introduces students to concepts of race and racial identity; accurately depicts historic racial inequities and systemic racism; honors Black lives; fully represents contributions of Black people in society; and advances the ideology of Black liberation.” Instead of punishing “woke” teachers, the task force recommends identifying and supporting those “who give culturally nurturing instructions and adopt new models for teacher development to improve teacher habits in the classroom.”

Bold pronouncements indeed for a state where African Americans are only five percent of a population of 39 million, compared to, say, Florida, where they are 15 percent, and Texas, 12 percent – two states whose governors are in the vanguard of those who deny that slavery without shackles does exist.