6630.
The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:(a) California has begun the process of addressing the state’s role in accommodating and facilitating slavery, as documented in The California Reparations Report and sources cited therein, perpetuating the vestiges of enslavement, propagating state-sanctioned discrimination, and facilitating persistent, systemic policies and practices discriminating against living African Americans across its systems of government at the local and state level.
(b) As a result of this historic and continued discrimination, African Americans in California, especially those whose lineage can be traced to an enslaved person, continue to suffer economic, educational, and health hardships that have prevented them as a people from achieving equality.
(c) In order to maintain slavery, government actors adopted white supremacist beliefs and passed laws to create a racial hierarchy and control enslaved and free African Americans.
(d) After the end of slavery, although the Federal Constitution recognized African Americans as citizens on paper, the government failed to give them the full rights of citizenship and failed to protect them from widespread terror and violence.
(e) Along with a dereliction of the United States’ duty to protect its African American citizens, direct state and local government actions in California continued to enforce the racist lies created to justify slavery. These state laws and government-supported cultural beliefs have since formed the foundation of innumerable modern laws, policies, and practices across the state and nation.
(f) Even after the abolition of slavery, its badges and incidents remain embedded in the political, legal, health, financial, educational, cultural, environmental, social, and economic systems of the United States of America and the State of California. Racist, casteist, untrue, and harmful stereotypes created to support slavery continue to physically and mentally harm African Americans today.
(g) Without a remedy specifically targeted to dismantle our country’s racist policies and practices and heal the injuries inflicted by colonial, state, and American governments, the “badges and incidents of slavery” will continue to harm African Americans in almost all aspects of American life.
(h) The Legislature recognizes and accepts responsibility for all of the harms and atrocities committed by representatives of the state who promoted, facilitated, enforced, and permitted the institution of chattel slavery and its legacy of ongoing badges and incidents of slavery that form the systemic structures of discrimination.
(i) The Legislature intends that the benefits issued under this chapter be dedicated to policies or programs that address the harm that the State of California has caused to descendants of an African American chattel enslaved person or descendants of a free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.