There is, as they say, a lot here – including many points that illustrate serious problems with the overall idea of reparations. First, speaking as a businessman, it is unclear how many firms would actually be impacted by the bill. Roughly 99.9% of all America-based corporations were founded after 1865, the year the U.S. Civil War ended – and slavery with it. None of the ten largest U.S. firms by market cap – Nvidia ($5.15 trillion), Alphabet ($4.61 trillion), Apple ($4.52 trillion), Microsoft ($3.68 trillion), Amazon ($2.99 trillion), Broadcom ($1.99 trillion), SpaceX ($1.63 trillion), Meta ($1.50 trillion), Tesla ($1.29 trillion), and Berkshire Hathaway ($1.11 trillion) – appear to have any core-business connection to historical Black slavery.
This is, to some extent, unsurprising. Despite constant fever-pitched claims otherwise, slavery did not in fact build the contemporary economy of the United States. In the year that it ended, the nominal GDP of the United States was $10.012 billion – it stands today at $32,475 trillion, although the comparison is admittedly not in constant dollars – and the formerly slave-holding South was by far the poorest region of the country. Slavery certainly did not build California, given that the former Bear Flag Republic was not admitted to the USA until 1850, was admitted specifically as a free state, and immediately proceeded to ban “the peculiar institution” in the state Constitution.
Notably, a long history of brutality against groups other than Blacks does exist in California. Just a year after the founding of the state, the ironically titled Act for the Government and Protection of Indians made possible the “forced indenture,” “trafficking,” and even public “auctioning of Native Americans.” The early history of California also included “human trafficking of indentured Chinese laborers,” and multiple other abuses of this vulnerable Asian population. Most infamous, of course, were Manzanar and the other camps: remote regions like Owens Valley were used, with the full awareness and compliance of in-state officials, to incarcerate “more than 120,000 Japanese Americans…during World War Two.”
This historical truth poses a big problem for reparations as an idea, if these are no longer tied specifically to chattel slavery in the Southern/border states. Simply put, history was terrible for almost everyone. According to the Grok Heavy analytical engine, a list of non-Black groups who could fairly demand compensation for the past would include Native American Indians (“hundreds of broken treaties, land seizures covering a continent…massacres”), Hawaiians (“overthrow of the entire Kingdom of Hawaii”), Japanese Americans, and Mexican-Americans (for Operation Wetback). Majority-white groups with a strong case include Italian Americans (“the largest mass lynching(s) in US history”), Appalachians (all the obvious reasons), and even women.
The fact that rather few humans actually want to give all – or any – of these people their damn money likely explains the glacially slow rate of actual motion around this issue. Politico points out that, after creating “a state agency to administer” potential reparations, and authorizing a small-scale genealogical project at California State University, even Gov. Gavin Newsom bitterly “disappointed Black Caucus members by vetoing bills that would have allowed state universities to give preferential treatment to applicants descended from slaves.” Newsom’s probable successor, Xavier Becerra, seems even less likely to support extensive reparations or quasi-reparations packages.
Mr. Becerra’s behavior is symptomatic of yet another large-scale trend. At present, the population demographics of the United States are changing –massive numbers of today’s American citizens hail from groups that have no connection whatsoever to historical white/black conflict. The USA is now 19-21% Hispanic, almost exactly 7% Asian, 2-3% Arab and Sephardic “MENA,” and just 56% non-Hispanic white – although many Hispanics are also Caucasian. African Americans make up about 13% of the national population.
In California, the presence and power of “New Americans” is even more pronounced. Per the best current figures, the country’s most populous state is 41% Hispanic/Latino, 34% white, 17% Asian (and/or Pacific Islander), and just 5.44% Black. As I have noted in the past, middle-class Hispanics and Asian-Americans tend to be almost exactly as opposed to reparations – and indeed to political correctness overall – as white Americans are…and to feel rather less crippling guilt about this position. As their political power grows, these citizens serve as an increasingly stout barrier to any state-level reparations packages.
This growing reality makes it even odder that a single corporate reparations package is the primary Black Caucus-supported bill of 2026.A larger trend may be at play here, also. Seventy-two years (!) after Brown v. Board of Education, Black activism still remains largely focused on past racism as the cause of all problems in the African-American community. Activist Lisa Holder made almost exactly this claim in promoting the California bill – while simultaneously criticizing “this gaslighting narrative that says ‘Oh, the reasons why you have poverty, the reasons why you have homelessness…concentrated in certain communities is really the fault of individuals in the community.’”
But that very often IS the case! Racial discrimination has been formally illegal in the USA since 1964, and “slavery” frequently has nothing to do with the struggles of Blacks – much less poor whites or Inuit tribesmen – in a nation where 7-8 of the top ten income-earning groups are Beautiful People of Color.[1]
What does explain those struggles? Well, 36 years ago, the prize-winning economist June O’Neill found that simply taking into account things like the region where people live (i.e., more Blacks in the still-poorer South), age, and aptitude test scores (which are largely predicted by time spent studying tough material) almost entirely closed initially imposing racial gaps in income. Dr. O’Neill’s data – like equally important and uncontested figures showing the positive impact of a father in the home – has been cheerfully ignored ever since, in favor the racial fabulism of characters like Ibram Kendi and Jason Arday.
That is a tragedy.
In California, Ms. Holder declares that seeking compensation for abusive historical practices which ended in the 1860s is “not a sideshow,” but rather the entire legislative focus of the powerful Black Caucus for a season.
No doubt, that is true. And, that is the problem.
[1] Whether the total here is seven or eight depends, really, on how we count our South Africans.