One morning a few months ago, I began to understand the true meaning of reparations.

I spoke with Gloria Holland, one of the survivors of Section 14, the black homeowners’ neighborhood that burned down Palm Springs in the 1950s and 1960s to make way for the luxury hotels and restaurants that define the city today.

Holland’s family, like many other families, was forced to resettle in a dusty, desolate stretch of desert miles away. Her voice still cracks with emotion when she talks about it.

“I’m a young girl and look at this man standing in this doorway, helped

–

dressed in only his underwear, begging not to kill him or burn down his house,” she told me. “They did it anyway.”

Since those dark days, life has been especially kind to Holland. Money is not really an issue for her. But money and lots of it is

the

issue in the survivors’ legal claim against Palm Springs, as it should be in any claim of reparations.

It’s not because a specific amount of money makes up for what someone has lost, Holland explained, but because it’s a necessary statement from the government about the value of black life.

“They underestimate us. And they’ve been that way for over 400 years.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about what Holland said this week as I watched conservatives react with outrage and liberals with conspicuous silence to calculations by the California Reparations Task Force about how much money black people have lost and may owe for enduring decades of systemic racism.

We’re talking hundreds of millions

by

dollars maybe even, according to one circulating estimate, hundreds of billions of dollars. That would go both to black people like me whose ancestors were enslaved and to black people like Holland who suffered a specific injustice, in her case by the city of Palm Springs.

“The breadth and depth of the historic and ongoing harm done to this group of people makes it clear that the relevant question is not whether compensation should be given,” the task force said in a recent draft report, “but how much is needed.” .”

On Saturday, the nine members of the task force will vote on a series of recommendations that would justify that compensation, citing a long list of racist laws and government policies that harmed black people and robbed us of wealth, health and, in many cases, freedom.

But it won’t be easy to get the state legislature and government. Gavin Newsom to actually follow the task force’s recommendations and make reparations by agreeing to pay. Consider that California’s total annual budget is only about $300 billion and there’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately in Sacramento over a growing number of shortfalls as the economy slows.

So “impossible” is a word I’ve heard thrown around quite a bit this week. “Absurd” is another.

Meanwhile, polls show that public opinion on reparations continues to weaken.

A

questionnaire

conducted late last year by the Pew Research Center found that only 30% of Americans are in favor of providing compensation to the descendants of people enslaved in the US, with a full 68%

from Americans

opposite.

As might be expected, a majority of Black people (77%) believe that offspring should be repaid in some way. But only 18% of whites, 39% of Latinos, and 33% of Asian Americans say the same. And cash payments were ranked as the least popular option for all forms of reparations.

This is still a country that, when it comes to dollars and cents and almost anything else of significance, doesn’t value black life. And so even liberal California is fast approaching a crossroads with its burgeoning reparations movement.

What is morally right is about to collide with what is politically possible. It won’t be pretty, but it will be revealing. Compromises will likely be necessary to get close to what is owed, despite historical facts and the careful calculations of losses established by the task force’s economic advice.

e

ors, led by William Spriggs, chief economist of the AFL-CIO.

Few understand the coming political landscape better than Senator Steven Bradford

(D Gardena)

and Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer

(D-Los Angeles)

,

both Los Angeles Democrats and

the only legislators in the repair task force.

“It’s one thing to be ambitious,” Bradford told me recently. “It’s another thing to be rooted in the reality of what you can get.”

The task force is required by law to complete its work by July 1 and will then be disbanded after nearly two years of monthly meetings. When that happens, much of the work in keeping California reparations alive and oxygenating the parallel work going on in many cities, including LA, will fall to Bradford and Jones-Sawyer.

As the latter put it: “There are recommendations and then there is the implementation of legislation. And that [implementation] will probably be the hardest part.”

It is still unclear what their legislative strategy will be. Bradford believes it will come in the form of multiple bills, some of which will be considered next year.

“This is probably going to take years,” he said. “It’s too much here in this report for anyone to believe it will be addressed in one legislative cycle, let alone one bill.”

Jones-Sawyer isn’t so sure.

“Is it one big bill with everything in it? Is that too much for the legislature to follow? Or should we break it up so we know we’re getting something done?” he said, thinking aloud. Or is the best plan just one big plan and they vote

It

up or down as one? … Mr. Bradford and I will have to make that decision.

Whether “a substantial initial down payment” for black residents eligible for reparations will be included in any of those bills remains to be seen. But Bradford is more optimistic about improving homeownership and

healthcare healthcare

.

Some of the people who have been our harshest critics

you know, who says, ‘

W

here’s my check

?

‘

I don’t want to give people the disappointment of never getting a check,” he said.

And yet, gaining support from many of these same critics, along with millions of other black Californians, will be critical to Bradford and Jones-Sawyer getting anything legislated in Sacramento. This can also be a problem.

In the many months that I have accompanied the task force and attended meetings in cities from Southern California to Northern California, it has become alarmingly obvious that many people don’t even know about the members’ work or activities.

do not understand

that it is the legislature and the governor, not the task force, who are the ultimate decision makers on reparations.

“Everyone will have different expectations,” Jones-Sawyer acknowledged, “so it’s going to be hard to meet those expectations.”

To work

in

the legislators’ favor will be that providing reparations is really morally right

thing

To do. If there’s ever any doubt about that, the draft report the task force is discussing Saturday in Oakland makes that abundantly clear.

Based on months of research and expert testimony, five categories of damages have been identified that are appropriate for adding up potential compensation given the available government data.

One such category is “unjust deprivation of property by eminent domain”, an evil the Netherlands knows all too well, as do many others, including the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce, whose beachfront property was confiscated a century ago by the city of Manhattan Beach.

So hundreds of millions or even hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations for black Californians is not “absurd.” It is a sober representation of what we have given or, rather, been forced to give to this state and country, and what has been taken from us in return.

It’s about the value of black life.

“You took our valuables,” Holland said. “You separated our families.”