Lineage, Not Race: California’s Strategy to Advance Equity for Descendants of Slavery

Last year, a similar bill proposed to prioritize Black Californians for professional licenses was shelved ahead of a committee hearing, in part due to legal concerns. Another bill aimed at weakening Proposition 209, California’s ban on affirmative action, also failed to advance.

Andrew Quinio, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a group opposing the bills, said the legislation is searching for a loophole to enact policies that benefit Black Californians.

“I think it is absolutely being used as a proxy of a race,” Quinio said. “Not only is the origin and the purpose of AB 7 demonstrative of the fact that it is trying to benefit a racial category, but the ultimate effect will be that only a particular racial category will benefit.”

Quinio said the bill’s authors have been block about their goal of enacting recommendations of the reparations task force, which was created “to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans.”

“The bill package, which includes AB 7, among the other bills, is about repairing centuries of economic damage [and] abuse that was inflicted on Black Californians,” Quinio said. “So it’s very clear as to who the bills were meant to benefit and what the purpose is.”

Quinio pointed to a 2000 Supreme Court decision that struck down a Hawaii law restricting voting for a particular state office to people with Hawaiian ancestry. But he acknowledged the nation’s highest court has not ruled definitively on the kind of reparations policies being pursued in California.

To invite such a legal showdown, the Legislature will first have to p*** Senate Bill 518, a bill that would create a Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery. The new agency would be tasked with verifying an individual’s status as a descendant.

A similar proposal stalled last year after opposition from the Newsom administration over cost concerns.

Dr. Marcus Anthony Hunter, a professor of sociology and African American Studies at UCLA, said his hope for the legal survival of the reparations movement has been buoyed by an unlikely source: conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

In his concurring opinion in the Students for Fair Admissions case, Thomas argued that laws p***ed by Congress around the time of the 14th Amendment, particularly the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau, were race-neutral.

If laws meant to ***ist freed slaves were considered race-neutral and constitutional, Hunter wondered, could the same be true of laws meant to support their descendants?

“Part of what’s happening in the atmosphere is to test that theory out,” Hunter said. “There’s a lot of fear about what they’re going to accept or not accept, but they haven’t yet been made to come into the waters.”