SECTION 1.
The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:(a) Even as it represents perhaps the most successful project of modern democracy, the United States Constitution was itself also an instrument of a racist society that embedded inequality, violence, and trauma into our nation’s founding document. The “Three-Fifths Compromise,” an agreement by delegates to the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention that would count three-fifths of each state’s slave population for the purpose of apportioning United States House of Representatives seats, is the clearest expression of the Constitution’s structural racism. It is an ugly stain that continues to haunt our nation and that we must confront and actively dismantle.
(b) As the United States reckons with this shameful history, California also must confront its record of creating, upholding, or exacerbating racial inequalities and violence against Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) through the state’s laws, policies, and actions, including, but not limited to, all of the following:
(1) Even before officially becoming a state, the Spanish missionaries seized land from Native Californians and forced conversions to Christianity and European traditions. Moreover, the missionaries brought disease that killed many thousands of Native Californians.
(2) The decades after California became a state in 1850 were marked by violence towards and exploitation of Native Californian communities. In 1850, the state passed an Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which allowed White Californians to forcibly remove Native Californians from their lands and into indentured servitude. California’s first Governor after becoming a state, Governor Peter Burnett, said in his 1851 address to the Legislature: “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected.” Accordingly, Governor Burnett and other state leaders called for and subsidized militia campaigns against Native Californians, and generally propelled a dispossession and genocide of Native Californians.
(3) Even though California was ostensibly founded as a free state, there were efforts by California’s leaders before and after its founding to formally ban Black people from moving to or living in the state. Furthermore, even though California’s Constitution banned slavery, in 1852, California passed its own Fugitive Slave Law, which declared that any Black person who came to California as an enslaved person prior to California becoming a state was, nonetheless, to be considered the legal property of the slaveholder. The Fugitive Slave Law, which led to the forced deportation and return to enslavement of Black Californians, was even upheld as constitutional by California’s pro-slavery Supreme Court.
(4) In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Law, which restricted “aliens ineligible from citizenship,” including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants, from owning, leasing, or cultivating land, with the intention of discouraging further immigration from Japan in particular. In subsequent years, the state made the law even more restrictive, including by banning even American-born children of Asian immigrants from owning or leasing land. It was not until 1952 that the laws were struck down by the California Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
(5) California has a long history of both de jure and de facto discrimination in housing. In the first half of the twentieth century, the state government took a hands-off approach to housing policy and did not intervene to stop local governments or entities throughout the state from adopting restrictive covenants, redlining, or other measures to segregate housing. It was not until 1963 that the state passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Even then, however, California voters passed Proposition 14 in 1964 by more than a two-to-one margin to repeal the Rumford Act. Property owners in California were allowed to freely discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity until the California Supreme Court struck down Proposition 14 in 1966.
(6) Starting in 1929, California began a program to deport persons of Mexican ancestry from the state on a mass scale. In the end, approximately 400,000 American citizens and legal residents of Mexican ancestry living in California were forced to leave the state and go to Mexico. Throughout the state, there were raids of Mexican-American communities, resulting in the covert deportation of thousands of people, many of whom were never able to return.
(7) In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, under which the United States forced more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry into 10 concentration camps, including 2 in California. At the time, California’s leaders both supported and facilitated the internment of thousands of Californians of Japanese ancestry. The Legislature also passed discriminatory measures against Californians of Japanese ancestry, including a resolution calling on Congress to identify individuals holding dual citizenship in the United States and Japan, force them to forfeit their citizenship, and prevent them from becoming American citizens.
(8) California’s vast highway system was often built to break up BIPOC communities within cities, forcing the destruction of homes and displacing residents. For example, in 1963, the Santa Monica Freeway in the City of Los Angeles was built right through the center of the Sugar Hill neighborhood, destroying dozens of mansions owned by African Americans in what had been a thriving, predominantly Black community. The neighborhood was broken up, and Black residents were forced out.
(9) Under former Governor Pete Wilson’s tenure, California passed several measures that contributed to, or otherwise furthered, racial inequities, including the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, Proposition 209 in 1996, and Proposition 227 in 1998. Proposition 187, which Governor Wilson thoroughly supported, would have excluded undocumented immigrants from all public services before it was struck down as unconstitutional in 1997. With Proposition 209, California became the first state to pass a formal ban on affirmative action. Proposition 227, which Governor Wilson also embraced, essentially required English-only education.
(10) California’s prison and jail incarceration rates have grown exponentially since the 1970s. BIPOC Californians are overrepresented in the state’s prison system and jails, due to discriminatory state policies and practices, including in policing, convicting, and sentencing. One such policy that exacerbated the racial inequities in the prison system is the Three Strikes sentencing law, which was enacted in 1994, and was considered one of the harshest sentencing laws in the country. Under the law, thousands of Californians, and in particular Black Californians, have been sentenced to life in prison for only minor crimes, including petty theft, due to their prior felony record.
(c) Government policies and institutional practices have marginalized, disenfranchised, stripped resources and power from, targeted, and otherwise brought violence on BIPOC Californians. To the present day, government actions have created, failed to address, or exacerbated racial inequities and disparities in terms of housing, public health, economic, educational, employment, carceral, and environmental conditions. These disparities are manifest in, though not limited to, the following ongoing, harmful social practices and disparate outcomes:
(1) The persistent legacy of discrimination in housing, through practices such as redlining, which have prevented BIPOC communities from building intergenerational wealth or accessing living standards available to White communities. In September 2020, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve found that, while White families have a median wealth of $188,200, Black and Hispanic families have a median wealth of only $24,100 and $36,100, respectively.
(2) The development of highways in California which have repeatedly divided and destroyed communities and housing in BIPOC communities.
(3) The concentration of polluting facilities in BIPOC communities, which constitute a public health threat to BIPOC communities by threatening air quality and water quality and contribute to chronic respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, deteriorated brain health, including in children, and increased hospital visits, missed school days, and premature deaths. BIPOC Californians are therefore more likely to live near sources of pollution, breathe polluted air, and be impacted disproportionately by the effects of air pollution and climate change. In California, Black and Native American individuals have a significantly higher prevalence of asthma and are more likely to experience an avoidable hospitalization due to asthma.
(4) The concentration of poverty in BIPOC communities, which is the single largest social determination of public health and a significant contributing factor to the development of coincident socioeconomic burdens such as unemployment, social exclusion, lack of education, and low income, and thereby linked to chronic physical, mental, and public health challenges such as stress, anxiety, depression, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and cancer. Children who grow up in poverty, and especially those who are BIPOC, are more likely to experience food insecurity and malnutrition, face health-harming environmental exposures, including elevated blood lead levels, and increased adverse childhood experiences.
(5) The lack of access to quality health care in BIPOC communities, which is apparent in alarming disparities such as the experience of Black mothers, who are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women. These disparities persist in spite of income differences and result from health care providers dismissing symptoms raised by Black women or perpetuating racist assumptions about pain thresholds experienced by Black people, as well as the lived experiences of racism and discrimination in all other facets of society.
(6) Black trans women suffer from employment, housing, and educational discrimination and police brutality that result in the most acute health disparities. In recent years, the federal government took action to encourage homeless shelters, social services, educational institutions, and health care providers to discriminate against transgender people and overlook the deleterious impacts of racism. These and other government policies, among other oppressive systems targeting Black trans women, have actively prevented Black trans women from accessing services critical to achieving optimal health.
(7) On an individual physiological level, studies show that chronic stress from individual and systemic acts of racism and discrimination trigger high blood pressure, heart disease, immunodeficiency, and result in accelerated aging. The lived experiences of racism and discrimination, both explicitly and implicitly expressed, and across all facets of society, and not only those discussed in the aforementioned examples, contribute to alarmingly disparate health and quality of life outcomes in BIPOC communities, including for maternal care.
(8) Disparities exist in California’s system of mental health care, and the identification and incorporation of culturally and linguistically appropriate practices and data in public mental health is lagging.
(d) California is also home to the largest Armenian-American population in the United States. Many in the community have family members who experienced firsthand the horror and evil of the Armenian Genocide and its ongoing denial, which continues to inflict trauma and pain on family members and the Armenian community at large.
(e) The COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing economic crisis, and recent protests against institutional violence committed against Black communities again highlight the racial injustices and health inequities that have long threatened BIPOC communities.
(1) BIPOC people tend to work in essential jobs that may lead to a higher likelihood of being exposed to COVID-19, or in jobs that have an inability to work remotely and, therefore, are more severely impacted by the economic crisis. In California, Black and Latino individuals are also more likely to have existing health conditions that make them more susceptible to contracting COVID-19, experience more severe symptoms, and suffer from higher mortality rates.
(2) The COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating for working women, with almost 2,100,000 working women leaving the labor force altogether between February and December 2020, and for Black women and Latinas, in particular, with more than 1 in 12 Black women and 1 in 11 Latinas 20 years of age and older unemployed as of December 2020.
(f) Racism itself harms health. Racism results in government policies that reduce access to education, housing, health care, employment opportunities, and other resources and elements of a healthy community, while spurring overinvesting in disproportionate and inappropriate policing by law enforcement. On an individual, physiological level, studies show that chronic stress from individual and systematic acts of racism and discrimination trigger high blood pressure, heart disease, immunodeficiency, and result in accelerated aging. Racism endangers the health of individuals, the community, and public health and in doing this threatens the well-being of the whole society, and threatens to perpetuate a dangerously widening opportunity gap between the state’s BIPOC and White communities that is detrimental to the overall public good.
(g) Racism itself also harms the economy. Research shows that closing the racial wealth gap, which is the result of discriminatory policies, including in housing and education, is not only the right thing to do for BIPOC Americans, but it is the smart thing to do for the country. A 2019 report found that eliminating the racial wealth gap could raise the United States Gross Domestic Product by 4 to 6 percent by 2028.
(h) Accordingly, California, joining a growing list of cities and counties across the state and country to acknowledge the long-standing impacts of systemic racism, declares racism as a public health crisis. In order to advance and improve public health for all Californians, the state must approach laws and regulations with an antiracist, Health and Equity in All Policies focus that interrogates whether policies play a role in creating, maintaining, or dismantling racist systems, and it must secure adequate resources to address the crisis. This new policy framework and leadership will also help our state, local governments, and community-based agencies craft strategies for reducing mental health disparities in BIPOC communities that will become an estimated 62 percent of the state’s population by 2030.
(i) It is the intent of the Legislature to institute a new policy framework for racial equity that would provide an instructive model for local governments seeking to establish offices and infrastructure designed to remedy racial inequity and to facilitate further dialogue, exchange, and collaboration between the state and local governments that have already begun such efforts.
(j) Section 31 of Article I of the California Constitution shall not be interpreted as prohibiting action that must be taken to establish or maintain eligibility for any federal program, if ineligibility would result in a loss of federal funds to the state. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI) provides under Section 2000(d) that, “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” It is therefore the intent of the Legislature to enact legislation affirming California’s commitment to achieving and maintaining compliance with Title VI, including in matters that may conflict with the California Constitution.