If California wants to solve homelessness, it’ll have to support reparations

By Erika D. Smith, Anita Chabria It’s hard for some Californians — maybe many — to wrap their heads around the idea that the homelessness we see on our streets has any connection to slavery.  We are California, after all, supposedly a “free” state. We like to think of ourselves as far away in both ideology and from the brutality that built the South — although slavery was common during our Gold Rush era, ensnaring not only Black people, but also Latinos and Indigenous communities.  But researchers at the respected UC San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative have no doubts that the historical trafficking of 12 million Black people to American shores is directly tied to the Black poverty and pain on our West Coast streets today. “The overrepresentation of Black people in the homeless population arises from 400 years of anti-Black racism entrenched in the structures, institutions, ideologies, and social norms of American life, starting with slavery,” the researchers said in a study released recently. Read more at: LA Times Related