October 11, 2025
The California governor signed the bill five years after forming a task force to examine the impact of racist policies on descendants of enslaved people.
Five years after California Gov. Gavin Newsom created a task force to study the legacy of enslavement in California, a state agency has been created in order to facilitate restitution for the descendants of those who were enslaved in the state, despite not approving cash payments for the wrongs visited upon their ancestors.
According to Politico, in an episode of Van Latham and Rachel Lindsay’s “Higher Learning,” which was released on Oct. 10, the same day Gov. Newsom announced the creation of the agency, he noted that the office is a necessary step to further action concerning reparations.
“I signed a bill two days ago with the Black Caucus as it relates to creating a new office to address these systemic issues,” he told the hosts.
Previously, in 2024, Newsom signaled that part of the reason he vetoed a bill that would have compensated the victims of the state’s past use of racially-motivated eminent domain was because there was no state agency to disperse funds to Black Californians.
Notably, the renewed push for reparations in the wake of the 2020 murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor has been slowed considerably by the anti-DEI sentiment coming from the White House, something reflected by the California Black Caucus referring to their latest bill package as the “Road to Repair” in lieu of outright referring to it as reparations.
As Erin Aubry Kaplan noted in a column for Capital & Main, the tactic of advocating for reparations without explicitly calling it reparations is at once cynical and reflective of the lessons learned in 2024, when disagreements between the Caucus and reparations advocates led to some members of the Caucus pulling support for its own initiatives.
Kaplan spotlights Assemblymember Isaac Bryan and his bill, Assembly Bill 7, which notably turns the argument from the Supreme Court’s most vocal conservative, Clarence Thomas, that policies (like college admissions but notably not immigration enforcement) should be colorblind, on its head.
As Kaplan noted, “It’s an exquisite irony that a left-leaning Black elected official is using Thomas’ reasoning, even in small part, to argue for reparations, something Thomas decidedly does not support.”
Another notable development is the reintroduction of a bill targeting the restoration of the land or payment of homeowners whose land was taken by eminent domain by Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, which seems in part, inspired by the creation of the new agency.
As McKinnor pointed out in May, “existing programs aimed at promoting homeownership do not specifically address the unique historical injustices faced by the descendants of formerly enslaved people. Without targeted measures, the state cannot adequately address the wealth gap and housing disparities rooted in these injustices and discrimination.”
In addition to these two initiatives, another standout player in the package from California’s Black Caucus is another bill that might look familiar to Newsom, as much of its substance is identical to one he vetoed in 2024.
At the time, Newsom argued that without the existence of an agency to disperse funds, he could not create a Bureau for the Descendants of American Slavery, which is a callback to the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was shuttered after only seven years of existence during the truncated Reconstruction period.
The Freedman’s Bureau is most notable for its responsibility in coordinating Field Order 15, which was to offer Black Americans parcels of land taken from white Southerners as restitution for the Civil War and their enslavement. However, the election of America’s worst president, Andrew Jackson, heralded yet another broken promise America would leave unfulfilled to the people who were responsible for building American wealth with forced labor.
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