When a Black baby is born in the United States, their fight to live a healthy life begins. Compared to the white baby in the delivery room next door, they’re more likely to be impoverished as children and chronically ill as adults.

Even if they succeed economically, they’re still expected to live fewer years than white Americans.

My project for the Center for Health Journalism 2023 National Fellowship will explore how reparations for Black Americans could shrink the health gap.

Health disparities did not arise by accident – and they’re not explainable by genetics. They’re the result of the nation’s legacy of policy-driven racism.

Redlining is a prime example.

When the federal government denied Black residents homeowner loans beginning in the 1930s, and allowed mortgage lenders to do the same, it divided more than neighborhoods. It also segregated resources such as grocery stores.

The refusal of markets to establish stores in Black and low-income communities led to the creation of “food deserts.”

Today, one-in-five Black residents lack access to affordable, fresh fruits and vegetables. Just 8% of Black people live in a census tract with a supermarket, compared to 31% of white Americans.

In previous reporting, I spoke with an Atlanta farmer who invested his retirement funds toward land to grow food. He’d become tired of watching Black residents struggle to access groceries.

The area had only one “grocery store within miles from the area of the farm,” he told me.

Research has linked the legacy of redlining to high rates of chronic disease, lower life expectancy,poor COVID-19 outcomes and other health challenges that disproportionately affect Black Americans. But redlining is just one example of how policy fueled health disparities; Black people live with the consequences of racist policies that go back centuries. 

While some community members, such as the farmer I mentioned, find ways to address the issues impacting their health and quality of life, others call on the government to atone for Black suffering through reparations.

The U.S. planned to give freed Black people 40 acres of land after slavery ended, but that promise was short-lived.  Although several other groups have received federal funds for past harms, not a single dime has been given to Black Americans.

That could change — and so could health outcomes.

The movement for reparations has picked up speed, particularly in California. In 2020, the state formed the AB 3121 Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans.  The group’s work to create a state-level blueprint is arguably the furthest the U.S. has come to extending reparations in recent history. I will explore efforts to address health inequities in California through cash payments and other requests.

This project will look strongly at poverty-related mental health issues and how reparations may provide a remedy. Poverty is deemed a public health issue for a good reason. It can lead to stress and mental illness. It exposes people to violence, which can be traumatizing..

I will follow Black people with depression, anxiety and other illnesses. Additionally, I will look at the connection between generational poverty and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Reparations in the form of cash payments have the potential to ease the mind by increasing access to safer housing, better education, and healthy food. This could translate into overall better health.

The California task force and reparations advocacy groups aren’t asking for money alone — they also want policies to protect Black folks from future harm. That may involve removing lead in drinking water in redlined neighborhoods or reducing the rate of death among Black mothers and infants.  Such policies could benefit Black people who may not qualify for cash payments. I intend to explore the various requests from Black community members and organizations.

I also will look at the reparations conversation in the Christian community. During the civil rights movement, leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated for eradicating poverty to end suffering. While his vision has yet to come to pass, some ministers today have taken up the cause to push for reparations, while others oppose reparations. It is important to explore the split on this subject within Christianity in America.

Lastly, I’ll include a reporter’s notebook examining my experience producing this project. The piece will also have my own family history: a tale of generations of men and women who lived, fought, and died in Pensacola, Fla., after fleeing nearby southern towns after slavery.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — It could cost California more than $800 billion to compensate Black residents for generations of over-policing, disproportionate incarceration and housing discrimination, economists have told a state panel considering reparations.

The preliminary estimate is more than 2.5 times California’s $300 billion annual budget, and does not include a recommended $1 million per older Black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average life span. Nor does the figure count compensating people for property unjustly taken by the government or devaluing Black businesses, two other harms the task force says the state perpetuated.

Black residents may not receive cash payments anytime soon, if ever, because the state may never adopt the calculations. The reparations task force met Wednesday to discuss the numbers and can vote to adopt the suggestions or come up with its own figures. The proposed calculations and figures come from a consulting team of five economists and policy experts.

“We’ve got to go in with an open mind and come up with some creative ways to deal with this,” said Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer. He’s one of two lawmakers on the task force responsible for mustering support from state legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

In an interview prior to the meeting, Jones-Sawyer said he needed to consult budget analysts and others before deciding whether the scale of payments is feasible.

The estimates aren’t new. They came up in a September presentation as the consulting team sought guidance on whether to calculate damages using a national or California-specific model.

But the task force must now settle on a cash amount as it nears a July 1 deadline to recommend to lawmakers how California can atone for its role in perpetuating racist systems that continue to undermine Black people. The final decision rests with the state government.

For those who support reparations, the staggering $800 billion estimate underscores the long-lasting harm Black Americans have endured, even in a state that never officially endorsed slavery.

Several people who gave public comment Wednesday spoke of the urgent need to pay Black Americans for all that was taken from them.

“My family came from the South because they were running for their lives, they were fearful of being lynched, just for voting,” said Charlton Curry of Sacramento, California, who discusses reparations on his Big C Sports podcast.

“Cash payments are necessary. Money talks,” he said, noting that white people benefited from free U.S. government land through the 1862 Homestead Act, and Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II and Jewish Holocaust victims received reparations.

Critics pin their opposition partly on the fact that California was never a slave state and say current taxpayers should not be responsible for damage linked to events that germinated hundreds of years ago.

Bob Woodson, a prominent Black conservative, calls reparations impractical, controversial and counterproductive.

“No amount of money could ever ‘make right’ the evil of slavery, and it is insulting to suggest that it could,” he said in an email to The Associated Press, adding that Black communities relied on faith and family to build thriving communities following slavery. “Some of these communities only began coming apart after we lost sight of these values, which also hold the key to these communities’ restoration.”

Financial redress is just one part of the package being considered. Other proposals include paying incarcerated inmates market value for their labor, establishing free wellness centers and planting more trees in Black communities, banning cash bail, and adopting a K-12 Black studies curriculum.

Reparations talks are stalled at the federal level, but the idea flourished in California as well as U.S. cities and counties following the death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police. Newsom signed legislation in 2020 creating the reparations task force.

An advisory committee in San Francisco has recommended $5 million payouts, as well as guaranteed income of at least $97,000 and personal debt forgiveness for qualifying individuals. Supervisors expressed general support, but stopped short of endorsing specific proposals. They’ll take up the issue later this year.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday said from Ghana that she and President Joe Biden support a reparations study, but the president has so far sidestepped calls from advocates to create a federal commission.

The statewide estimate includes $246 billion to compensate eligible Black Californians whose neighborhoods were subjected to aggressive policing and prosecution in the “war on drugs” from 1970 to 2020. That would translate to nearly $125,000 for every person who qualifies.

The numbers are approximate, based on modeling and population estimates. The economists also included $569 billion to make up for the discriminatory practice of redlining in housing loans. That would amount to about $223,000 per eligible resident from 1933 to 1977. The $569 billion is considered a maximum and assumes all 2.5 million Californians who identify as Black would be eligible.

But they won’t all be. People must meet residency and other requirements for monetary compensation. They also must be descendants of enslaved and freed Black people in the U.S. as of the 19th century, which leaves out Black immigrants.

The consultants’ report suggests the task force “err on the side of generosity” and consider a down payment with more money to come as evidence becomes available.

“The substantial initial down-payment is the beginning of a conversation about historical injustices, not the end of it,” they said.

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I don’t know about you, but I am about ready to take the ruling-class enthusiasm for “reparations” and put it where the sun don’t shine.

The current push for reparations, I assume, has occurred because Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project has jumped from the New York Times to the Hulu streaming service.

And, of course, all of a sudden, California has decided to empower its black politicos to decide how much reparation is enough. Don’t know much about historee, but I think the Latinos of one-time “Alta California” might have a better claim to the loot.

But then, I thought, better check Google Ngram and Google Trends to see how the present Mass Formation Psychosis on reparations has arisen.

On Google Ngram, which is about books, “reparations” was going nowhere until a peak in the 1920s. Then it dropped away but shot up again in the 1940s. It is all about German reparations, the brilliant idea of the western powers to Make Germany Pay for World War One. But WWII reparations enthusiasm peaked in 1947. Reading the tea-leaves in books like American Occupation of Germany: Retreat to Victory by Edward N. Peterson, I get the feeling that our fearless leaders realized that, if post-Nazi Germany was going to be sent back to the Stone Age, we Yanks would have to feed it.

On Google Trends, which is about search, “reparations” was going nowhere until June 2019, the month of the virgin birth of the 1619 Project. Then it declined but shot up to a new peak in June 2020, right after the crucifixion of George Floyd. And now it is trending because of Gavin Newsom and the Hulu series.

Of course, to me, this fascination with “reparations” is just another confirmation of my idea that the left is a Great Reaction, a political lurch back to the primitive. “Revenge” and “Reparations” belong to stateless tribal societies where there is no legal system backed up by the state to enforce justice. How do tribal societies prevent escalation of blood feuds into general warfare? According to Francis Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order, stateless tribes tried to resolve blood feuds with a culture of revenge, arbitration, and monetary damages — called Wergeld by the Germanic tribes. But in our day, we have the glorious legal system and lawyers, backed up by government force, to assess damages and enforce payment without the intervention of the male relatives of the victim.

I want to say that “this is not that hard,” but in fact it is hard. Americans do not learn about the history of law and the state and justice in public school, nor in college. If you want to educate yourself so you can write what I have written here, you have to read the books and ignore the union teachers and the woke professors and tread where cupcakes fear to tread, outside the Overton Window.

But why, you ask? Why, a century and a half after the abolition of slavery, and fifty years after the abolition of racial discrimination, why is the New York Times poisoning us with a reactionary movement for “reparations?” What is the point?

The point is that under the present regime of the Anointed, there comes a time when the Mascots fall away from a blind devotion to their masters. It happened with the working class, left by their Anointed rulers to die of despair; it is presently happening with TERF women who really don’t like men in the women’s bathroom. One fine day, the descendants of the African slaves may tumble to the truth that, to the exalted Anointed, they are just the Benighted in blackface. Meanwhile, our Anointed ruling class is doing its level best — which admittedly is not that good — to keep its black Mascots all riled up and voting 90 percent for Democrats.

(With Anointed, Benighted, and Mascots, I am here using the notion of economist Thomas Sowell in The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell, like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is sometimes accused by the Best and Brightest of being an “Uncle Tom.” Your mileage may vary.)

Okay. Now we are going to fly up into the heavens. Make sure your wings don’t melt.

It seems to me that almost all ethnic groups in America have started out as stateless tribes in their ethnic ghettos. They lived outside the law, with gangs instead of police and courts. Today we see black gangbangers obsessed by “dissing;” thus a lot of the killings in the stateless black inner cities are really honor killings.

A truly Anointed ruling class would help blacks advance beyond their stateless culture of gangs and honor killings and baby mamas and reparations. But our rulers don’t.

We know why. More important than a thriving American black middle class is maintaining the power of the Anointed educated ruling class.

• DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author’s articles on this Opinion piece or elsewhere online or in the newspaper where we have articles with the header “COLUMN/EDITORIAL & OPINION” do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints or official policies of the Publisher, Editor, Reporters or anybody else in the Staff of the Hemet and San Jacinto Chronicle Newspaper.

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The idea of reparations for African Americans due to slavery began during the Civil War when General William Tecumseh Sherman, on January 16, 1865, issued Special Field Order No. 15 that called for allocating up to 40 acres and lending mules to newly emancipated slaves. President Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, ignored the order but the idea has nevertheless lived on. Not much happened on reparations until 1988 when Representative John Conyers introduced HR 40, a bill to establish a national commission to study reparations, but this bill died in committee.

In 2019, however, with the murder of George Floyd and COVID-19 impact on communities of color, the dam has burst. The House of Representatives has again taken up the idea of a national commission and countless cities such as Boston, Chicago, San Francisco plus the state of California have created official reparations commissions. Evanston, Ill has awarded $25,000 each to 15 Black resident to make amends for past housing discrimination. The Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States in 2021 pledged $100 million in reparations for descendants of those enslaved by the order.

A major justification for reparations is to equalize the racial wealth divide. As the Brookings Institution, hardly a radical thinktank, put it, “Central to the idea of the American Dream lies an assumption that we all have an equal opportunity to generate the kind of wealth that brings meaning to the words ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”

Will awarding large sums of money to Black people equalize the racial wealth gap? The answer is “no,” and the political damage of this effort will far outweigh its immense monetary cost.

This wealth gap is massive and enduring. According to recent Federal Reserve data, the average White family has eight times the wealth of the average Black family with the average Black family’s wealth being 15% of what the average White family possesses. Nineteen percent of Black families have zero or negative net wealth. The gap extends far beyond income differences though this is significant. Differences exist in inheritances, multiple savings and investment plans, plus how Whites gravitate toward investments that appreciate over time, especially home ownership and education.

Can reparations close or at least narrow this gulf? Much, naturally, depends on the size of this wealth transfer, and payment details while per person award figures have ranged from a about a quarter million to, in San Francisco, five million. Nevertheless, regardless of the final sum, given what we know about how people manage money, there is little cause for optimism.

Spending among Blacks will, for political reasons, likely be discretionary versus restricted to “good things.” Recipients also cannot be forced to heed advice from financial experts. Given this discretion, there can be no rule that money only goes towards diminishing gaps in assets. Conceivably, at least some Blacks will prefer spending reparations on short-term items that rapidly depreciate. This likelihood is hardly hypothetical. One study shows a distinct proclivity among affluent Blacks for spending to achieve “style” and social standing, notably designer luxury brands. Data also show that Blacks are less likely than Whites to save money — half of all Blacks have no retirement accounts.

Meanwhile, studies of all-too-common bankruptcies among super-rich professional athletes (many of whom are African American) revealed a weakness for conspicuously showing off, for example, gifting exotic cars to families and friends, over-the-top personalized jewelry, and hosting big-time nightclub extravagances. Even a half-million-dollar windfall can vanish in a year or two, as these bankruptcies illustrate.

Similar evidence of misspending comes from those winning mega lotteries. A website even catalogues the worst disasters. Accounts often tell of winners being overgenerous to charities, extravagant vacations, ill-advised business ventures and otherwise acting foolishly. Particularly troublesome was the difficulty of saying “no” to friends and family. Eventually, everything ended thanks to going broke. Indeed, the tribulations of the new super-rich are sufficiently common that psychologists even have a name for it — the sudden wealth syndrome.

It hardly helps that these recipients will often have limited experience managing large sums versus just paying monthly bills. Building a diversified stock portfolio and then patiently waiting years for it to double will not be easy. It might be too tempting to wait decades to pass wealth to progeny. The financially unsophisticated may also struggle with the ultimate safe investment for building wealth — buying a house. Will those receiving a $250,000 check and then spending half on a down payment for a half million-dollar house be able to calculate the yearly maintenance expenses, property taxes, and insurance? When the federal government encouraged banks to offer mortgages to previously unqualified minorities, foreclosures skyrocketed, and this may occur again. Nor can there be any guarantee of increased value. Markets fluctuate and value can decline if nearby schools deteriorate, crime rises, and potential buyers find the house in ill repair. Home ownership hardly guarantees increased wealth.

There is also the possibility of a renewed effort by swindlers to target the newly rich. Even without all the money that would flow from reparations, many Blacks, especially those with limited education, are often victimized by the lure of easy money. According to one study, 41% of African Americans say they were targeted by scammers, and this figure would undoubtedly soar after billions were distributed via reparations. Tellingly, many of these fraud artists were fellow African Americans, often claiming a common religious affiliation and played on current issues of particular relevance to Blacks, notably support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

The quest for reparations is a risky fool’s errand. The awaiting legal problems that derive from laws banning racial discrimination cannot be swept aside by appeals to historic White guilt. Nor are the administrative details, for example, who exactly qualifies and standards of proof of slave ancestry, similarly easily resolved. Moreover, reparations paid over decades can create dependency across multiple generations, a sure-fire recipe for yet more racial strife. Most of all, the public soundly rejects the entire idea of reparations and these sentiments are unlikely to soften, regardless of how many commissions are created. This public antipathy is also likely to increase as these commission devise ever and ever larger “payment due” bills for slavery — $14 trillion in one case — when hardly any Americans alive today have ancestors who owned slaves.

The reparations crusade can become an electoral disaster for the Democratic Party. Its candidates may be pressured to take stands on the issue, and the choice will be a difficult one. That Blacks comprise a significant voting bloc in several primary states might make it tempting to favor this massive wealth transfer even though the chance of it coming into being is nil (President Biden has already expressed his support). But this pandering may well alienate millions of opponents, many of whom believe that Whites have done more than enough to help Blacks. For them, the trillions spent on public welfare, the war on poverty, and education plus affirmative action are, in fact, reparations and since their impact is uncertain, why spend trillions more?

Yes, many Blacks will find pushing for reparations psychologically satisfying and there is always the hope of a massive windfall, but the pushback from opponents may well be costly. It is hard to imagine Democratic candidates winning majorities by embracing an unpopular policy with scant likelihood of achieving its goal while costing hundreds of billions if not trillions. There are better ways to overcome the tribulations of African Americans.

• DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author’s articles on this Opinion piece or elsewhere online or in the newspaper where we have articles with the header “COLUMN/EDITORIAL & OPINION” do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints or official policies of the Publisher, Editor, Reporters or anybody else in the Staff of the Hemet and San Jacinto Chronicle Newspaper.

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