Democrat lawmaker says California's 'benchmark' reparations recommendations will become national

California Assemblymember Reginald Jones-Sawyer said that the country should follow California's "benchmark" lead on reparations and provide financial compensation among other largesse to African Americans.

According to Fox News, Jones-Sawyer said, "I genuinely believe as California goes, so goes the rest of the country. And so, our reparations task force … will be the benchmark that every state that's looking into this, every city, municipality across the country, and then the national discussion will take what we put together, our blueprint, and then try to determine as a base what the national reparations should be."

As The Post Millennial reported in 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a task force that was tasked with developing a detailed plan for reparations for African Americans. The legislation made California the first state to mandate such a study, which created a nine-member task force to come up with reparations proposals. It was called the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.

Jones-Sawyer, who is on the task force, said they are looking into "regulatory things that have kept African Americans down" such as "redlining, mass incarceration, over-incarceration" and the education system.

"He added that there are 13 areas that the committee is looking at in terms of appropriating remedies for African-Americans. Among them are housing discrimination, education and public safety," reports Fox News.

The task force released an interim report that recommended delivering $223,200 each to black descendants of American slavery residing in California.

The full report is set to be released later this year and after it is out, Jones-Sawyer said America needs to have "an honest conversation about what don't you understand about how what happened in the South with slavery, how that morphed over here to California and how those policies, procedures, and laws actually had a negative impact and deterred African-Americans here in California from advancing."

The final recommendation from the task force will go to the legislature, the state Senate, and then the desk of Gavin Newsom.

"Hopefully he'll sign in 2024," Jones-Sawyer said. "And once whatever is developed or signed and agreed upon by both those Houses and the governors, then whatever actions that take place will be in January 2025."

A San Francisco reparations committee recently proposed that black residents be provided $5 million and debt forgiveness because of the city's history with "systemic repression."