The Twisted Logic of Racial Arithmetic

California’s reparations plan is impractical, unethical, and illogical.

Photo by Tyler Merbler from Flickr

Last week, a government task force in California voted to advance a reparations plan that would compensate the state’s black residents for a history of slavery and discrimination. If the task force’s recommendations became law, it would cost the state a minimum of $800 billion, and some recipients would get well over a million dollars. A 70-year-old black person who’s lived in California all their life would be owed $1.331 million. The plan is just a recommendation, to be clear. It’d have to pass the state legislature, receive the governor’s signature, and survive a battalion of court cases before becoming the law of the land. 

But I’m still pretty concerned. Governor Newsom initially indicated that he was not on board with cash payments, but then backed away from that and is reportedly “not ruling anything out” when it comes to reparations. On top of that, Democrats have veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislatures. If any state were to pass something this reckless and ill-conceived to appease progressive activists, I’m sad to say that California is a likely contender. 

I want to explain what’s in the plan before getting to my criticisms of it because some conservatives have already muddied the water with false information. 

The Task Force and Its Recommendations

Three years ago, during the summer of 2020, the California legislature passed a bill establishing a Reparations Task Force. The key part of that task force’s charge was to study “the institution of slavery and its lingering negative effects on living African Americans” and then recommend to the state legislature “appropriate remedies of compensation, rehabilitation, and restitution.”

Last Saturday, the panel voted to approve their final report. There’s one more pro-forma meeting scheduled for June 30, when it will be officially passed along to lawmakers. But, in effect, we have the report in its final form. 

That report is quite long. There are many pages dedicated to detailing California’s long history of discriminating against its black residents. There’s also a laundry list of general policy recommendations that would amount to an overhaul of the state’s entire economic, social, and legal systems. But the part of the report that’s received the most attention is by far the cash reparations scheme, which is where I want to focus as well. 

So, let's focus on “Chapter 17: Final Recommendations of Task Force Regarding Calculations of Losses to African American Descendants of a Chattel Enslaved Person, or Descendants of a Free Black Person Living in the United States Prior to the End of the 19th Century, and Forms of Compensation and Restitution.”

You can read the full chapter here, but these are the basics: 

1. Reparations are reserved for people who can trace their lineage back to a black person living in California in the 1800s. So immigrants who came after that and the children of those immigrants are not due compensation. 

2. There are five categories of historical “atrocities” for which black people deserve reparations:

   

3. The plan includes two forms of reparations. The first is for “a particular loss or injury” that a person can point to — a house that was unjustly expropriated by the state, for example. The second form of reparations is for “cumulative compensation,” which is owed to all black people eligible under point #1, whether or not they can point to any particular loss or injury.  

4. To determine the amount owed for this “cumulative compensation,” the plan tries to calculate the monetary value of the relevant gap between the average white person in the state and the average black person. This, for example, is how the plan calculates the yearly amount owed for health harms:

   

   And here’s how it calculates the harms of mass incarceration and over-policing:

5. This is the calculation for a 70-year-old black person who has lived in California continuously from their birth:

   

Impractical, Unethical, Illogical

The first concern I have with the framework is also the least interesting, so let’s get it out of the way. This plan would destroy California’s finances. In total, this would cost around $800 billion dollars. That’s nearly three times the state’s annual budget. If California were to pay for this, it’d have three options: 1) crush its residents with even higher taxes 2) shred other state-funded programs 3) burden future generations with crippling amounts of debt. 

All of those options would be terrible for the state. People are already fleeing California because of its enormous tax burden and extreme unaffordability. There’s just no way the state can shoulder another $800 billion without accelerating its self-perpetuating cycle of unaffordability and population decline. It’s important to note also that this cost estimate is a lowball. According to the task force, its estimates “are intentionally conservative, [and] the Legislature may need to provide compensation in sums greater than the amount calculated.”

So, yes, this plan is financially impractical. But that’s not particularly unique. Lots of policy plans are costly to the point of being reckless. What sets this plan apart is the more existential problem of being, to put it delicately, impractical, unethical, and illogical. 

The best way to weigh the pros and cons of reparations is to begin with the arguments in favor of paying them. From there, you can determine what reparations are meant to accomplish and whether the plan under consideration is a logical and ethical way to get there.

The first argument for reparations is that people who are unjustly harmed by the government deserve to be made whole. 

I agree with this. I think it’s right that Japanese Americans were paid reparations for their internment during the Second World War. The black men whose syphilis was purposefully left untreated as part of the Tuskeegee Experiment deserved the reparations they received. In that spirit, I also think that black Americans who can point to specific harms they suffered at the hands of the government deserve reparations. This goes for people who had their land unjustly expropriated or home mortgages rejected, who suffered at the hands of police or were unfairly imprisoned — and everyone else who faced clear forms of government abuse.

Where I deviate from the California reparations plan is that I think that reparations need not be bounded by race. Anybody who suffered at the hands of the government deserves to be made whole, regardless of race. 

Without this more expansive vision, we’d find ourselves in a very strange circumstance where black people who were not directly harmed by something like the drug war would get financial compensation while non-black people who faced direct harm would not. Consider, for example, the case of Sara Rodriguez, who spent two years in prison for having ten small packets of weed on her in the 80s and still has a felony on her record. In the twisted logic of the California reparations plan, Sara would get nothing, while a black person who lived in the state since 1980 but was never arrested would get $94,000 to compensate for the war on drugs.

Similarly, it’s important that people be able to point to a specific and identifiable injury. It makes sense for a person to be paid reparations for harm that they themselves suffered directly. I’m even open to the idea that direct descendants are owed reparations since their lives were directly impacted by the injury, as well. But going beyond that becomes impractical.

With each generation, identifying the harm of any particular action becomes increasingly difficult. Trying to calculate the influence of slavery on an individual’s life today is like trying to measure the effect of a butterfly flapping its wings. The unfortunate truth is that history is full of terrible misdeeds.

The second argument for paying reparations is that black people today have much worse living conditions than non-black people. Reparations is a way to balance the scales. 

To an extent, I can see the logic of this argument. Some of the racial inequality that exists today is undoubtedly downstream of slavery and its aftermath. The problem is that this argument treats people not as individuals but as avatars of their race. Under such an arrangement, the needs of a wealthy black person would be elevated above the needs of a poor non-black person. 

In a world of scarce resources, government policies that distribute resources are, to some extent, zero-sum. If our goal is to help those who are in need, I see no reason that the color of their skin should play a role in whether or not they get the help they need. If you are homeless or hungry or can’t afford lifesaving medicine, I want society to help you. That’s true, no matter your race. The idea that we should treat a person’s suffering as more or less important because of their race seems to me flat-out immoral. 

The third argument for paying reparations is that non-black Americans owe a collective debt to black Americans for slavery and other historical injustices. 

The central problem with this argument is the idea that guilt and suffering can be passed down through generations. But the truth is that none of us can claim ownership over the crimes or suffering of our ancestors. To say otherwise would be to declare that every baby born today is stamped at the moment of their birth as either a criminal or a victim. 

It’s an enormous historical injustice that our country didn’t pay reparations to freed slaves and their families in the 1800s. They deserved their 40 acres and a mule. But we should not attempt to resolve that injustice 150 years later on, when the people who actually suffered it are long gone. 

A Better Way

The California reparations plan is flawed in other fundamental ways, too. 

For one thing, it assumes the simplistic logic of Ibram X. Kendi, which says that all disparities between groups can be traced back to racism and oppression without reckoning with the fact that inequality of outcome is the worldwide and historical norm. (The idea that racism is the root of all inequality breaks down when you consider the more surprising disparities that exist. For example, does racism explain why Americans of Russian ancestry have average incomes $10,000 higher than Americans of English ancestry? Does it explain why Asians in California have a far higher life expectancy than any other ethnic group?) 

The task force also introduced a big logical error when they decided to limit reparations only to people who can trace their lineage to a black American in the 1800s. If the reparations are meant to be compensation for recent harms in things like health care and housing, why would the plan exclude black people whose families came here more recently? Banks were not assessing a black person’s ancestry before declining their mortgage application during the era of redlining. 

I think you get the point, so I’ll stop there. Suffice it to say that the plan put forward in California is replete with logical errors and ethical oversights. 

What I wish California would learn above all else from this experience is that using arbitrary racial categories as a proxy for hardship is always going to create more problems than it solves. If the State of California wants to help those in need, the most effective and least divisive way to do that is to treat people as individuals. If someone is hungry — get them food. If someone is homeless — find them shelter. If someone was directly wronged by the state — make them whole with reparations. 

None of this needs to involve the twisted logic of racial arithmetic.

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