California Focus: Reparations drive won’t produce much this year

Try taking an apology to the bank and see what the teller says, or even the bank president. One thing for sure: No apology will directly produce a bank deposit. Thousands of Black Californians knew this when they attended hearings across the state last year aiming to develop an aid package for descendants of slaves who still suffer poverty and other after-effects of bondage. So they responded far more enthusiastically to the possibility of cash reparations than anything else mentioned. Not preferential college admissions or affirmative action in hiring, nothing else drew crowd approval like cash. But there is no cash in any proposal for reparations now being floated in the state Legislature, even the 14-bill package announced earlier this year by the legislative Black caucus. That’s partly because there’s no cash to be had in this year of huge budget deficits amounting to somewhere between $38 billion and $73 billion. It’s also due to a seemingly definitive poll which found last fall that California voters by more than a 2-to-1 margin oppose paying descendants of the enslaved cash reparations for atrocities against their forebears. That survey by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found 59 percent of voters...