Reparations Task Force's Final Report Covers Much More Than Money

The statewide task force studying reparations for Black Californians will submit its historic report to the Legislature on June 29. This conversation was produced as part of KQED’s Juneteenth reparations radio special airing June 17. For more on reparations and the task force, visit kqed.org/reparations.

Lisa Holder, president of the Equal Justice Society, an Oakland-based nonprofit, is a member of the California Reparations Task Force.

“The mission of the Equal Justice Society is to transform the nation’s consciousness on race through law, social science and the arts,” she told KQED. “All the work that I have done over the past 20 years, the various leadership roles that I played in civil rights, my experience as a civil rights litigator and as a civil rights activist really culminates in the work that we are doing around reparations.”

As part of our Juneteenth reparations radio takeover, Holder joined KQED’s Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman to talk about the final report and the recommendations being made to the state Legislature.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman: The task force has been meeting for two years now, including public listening sessions. Can you share some of the more notable moments for you over that time?

Lisa Holder: The scale and the scope of the investigation that we undertook is what stands out. As someone who has been a litigator and lawyer for many years, especially litigating cases around equal protection and the 14th Amendment, there’s been tremendous due diligence and an extremely detailed and sound methodology that we took in formulating this reparations package and curating 15 years of scholarship about racial injustice to serve as the scholarly foundation for the legislation that we’re proposing.

It was a massive undertaking, speaking to well over 100 experts from every field and every sector about discrimination in every field and every sector, and also speaking to and engaging with thousands of Black Californians who gave us their anecdotal experience. The fact that we worked with some of the most notable economists in the world. And we had access to brilliant Department of Justice attorneys and researchers from some of the most notable research institutes in the state of California, including the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center, and the Berkeley Othering and Belonging Institute. What has been most profound to me about this experience is the level of work, the quality of work and the seriousness and rigor applied to this process.

Were there any particular witnesses that stood out to you, or was there a moment where you felt like there was a really strong connection with the people that were coming to share their stories?

We had several witnesses come and speak to us at hearings, but we also held listening sessions all over the state of California that were facilitated by community-based organizations capturing the stories of Californians. The stories were profound. They were profoundly disturbing, profoundly emotive. And people made themselves very vulnerable in this process in terms of sharing their personal experiences with racism and discrimination and the legacies of inequality.

But one story that resonated with me is the experience of a Black professional who is a homeowner in Marin who basically did everything right. He invested in a home that accrued wealth over time. And when he went to have the house appraised, because he was Black, the house was appraised at half a million dollars less than it was worth.

He asked one of his white neighbors to basically pretend to be the homeowner, and then he stripped his home of anything that would give away the fact that it was owned by an African American. And sure enough, under that scenario, the appraisal went up for half a million dollars.

One of the things that we are trying to do in terms of repairing the harm is to look at the Black and white wealth gap, which is an abomination. For every $110,000 that a white household earns in wealth and assets, a Black household earns $10,000. That wealth gap is abysmal and it has to be reduced. That’s part of the work of reparations. And the way you increase wealth in the United States is through homeownership. And so this man’s story gives us a lens into what has been happening over time to reduce African Americans’ wealth. That was a very affecting story for this process.

The interim report contained 13 chapters, and this final report has over 30 chapters of recommendations from the task force. To you, what are some that you feel could have the most impact?

This is a book of truth that frames the contributions that African Americans have provided to this country, and also is honest and truthful about the incredibly vast experience of discrimination and racial terror. I think it’s very important to understand the pathologizing of the Black family, because that really goes to the narrative.

Until people can understand the origin and the depths of anti-Blackness in this country and the narrative around anti-Blackness that has been a dominant narrative for hundreds of years, they cannot understand the purpose of reparations. In terms of the narrative shift that this chapter and all of the chapters provide, it finally explains that Black people have been harmed and they need to be repaired.

Up until now, the normative narrative has always been and, even from the time of slavery, starting in the time of slavery, that Black people and Black bodies are a threat and Black people and Black bodies need to be punished. That has been the spectrum around which we deal with Black people as a threat that needs to be punished. Reparations shifts the narrative to Black people or people who have been harmed, and they need and must be repaired. But I do think the chapter on pathologizing a Black family helps to expand on that narrative framework.

Monetary reparations often gets a lot of attention. Can you talk about the case being made for that kind of reparations?

I tend to not talk about that because that’s really the only thing that gets attention. For instance, the final report is going to be about 31 chapters and about maybe one chapter is dedicated to financial compensation. And 30 chapters are dedicated to systemic change for every single sector. But the only thing that’s getting coverage is that one chapter.

There is this imbalance in the narrative that I feel obligated to push back on. Because, yes, reparations is about paying a debt in terms of financial compensation that’s owed to Black people. And we did have economists who grappled with that issue specifically and provide a formula for the Legislature to figure out how to do that. But reparations is much bigger than that. Reparations is about repairing systems. It’s about creating structures and supports and opportunity so the harm finally ceases and never happens again in the future.

And that’s about systemic change. And that’s what my whole career has been dedicated to creating — creating systems and changing systems so that they serve Black and brown people. So I will always underscore the systemic nature of reparations and am less likely to highlight the check, because that seems to be the only narrative that’s getting oxygen.