California lawmaker wants reparations proposal to be a nationwide ‘blueprint,’ beyond ‘financial compensation’
Assemblymember Reginald Jones-Sawyer said the California reparations proposal should be taken up by cities and states around the country
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}A California lawmaker and member of the reparations task force believes the state's proposal for reparations will be the roadmap for the rest of the country.
Assemblymember Reginald Jones-Sawyer told Fox News Digital California Reparations Task Force will be the "benchmark" for other states and cities considering reparations around the country.
"I genuinely believe as California goes, so goes the rest of the country," Jones-Sawyer said. "And so, our reparations task force … will be the benchmark that every state that's looking into this, every city, municipality across the country, and then the national discussion will take what we put together, our blueprint, and then try to determine as a base what the national reparations should be."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Reginald Jones-Sawyer is a member of the California Reparations Task Force which gathered to hear public input on reparations at the California Science Center in Los Angeles on Sept. 22, 2022. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
In 2020, California Assembly Bill 3121 established a Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. The task force, which consists of nine members, has met over the last year to discuss appropriate reparations for the state.
These reparations, Jones-Sawyer said, should be more than financial compensation. He added that there are 13 areas that the committee is looking at in terms of appropriating remedies for African-Americans. Among them are housing discrimination, education and public safety.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Vernon AME Church Pastor Robert Turner holds a "Reparations now" sign after leading a protest from City Hall back to his church in the Greenwood neighborhood on Nov. 18, 2020, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Getty Images)
Furthermore, Jones-Sawyer said the task force will be looking into "regulatory things that have kept African Americans down" like "redlining, mass-incarceration, over-incarceration," and educational disparities.
He also encouraged the public to wait to read the final report before making judgments on what the task force will recommend. "Let's just sit, listen to what the final report will say," he told Fox News Digital.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Once the task force makes its recommendations later this year, Jones-Sawyer said there needs to be "an honest conversation about what don't you understand about how what happened in the South with slavery, how that morphed over here to California and how those policies, procedures, and laws actually had a negative impact and deterred African-Americans here in California from advancing."
Jones-Sawyer said the committee's final recommendations will not be ready until later this summer.
"Then it goes to the legislature where I am at," he said, adding that it will then go to the Senate and, if passed, the governor's desk.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"Hopefully he'll sign in 2024. And once whatever is developed or signed and agreed upon by both those Houses and the governors, then whatever actions that take place will be in January 2025."
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Longtime Los Angeles resident Walter Foster, 80, holds up a sign as the Reparations Task Force meets at the California Science Center in Los Angeles on Sept. 22, 2022. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s reparations committee has proposed paying each Black longtime resident $5 million and granting total debt forgiveness due to the decades of "systematic repression" faced by the local Black community.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, which advises the city on developing a plan for reparations for Black residents, released its draft report last month "to address the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery."
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Financial compensation numbers that come from outside the state's task force can present challenges for the group, Jones-Sawyer said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"When some group says, ‘African Americans in California should get X amount,’ that number becomes the target… when groups like mine are still deliberating," he said.
Fox News' Jessica Chasmar contributed to this report.