Posted on December 23, 2022

The California Tar Baby Punches Back

Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, December 23, 2022

Reparations are a slippery slope.

This video is available on Rumble, BitChute, and Odysee.

In April, I made a video called California Punches the Tar Baby.

It was about the state of California’s task force that’s trying to decide how much in reparations the state should pay for all the bad things California did to black people. The state is now covered with tar.

The task force was supposed to be “drawn from diverse backgrounds,” but it’s not diverse. Eight of the nine members are black, with one Asian.

But they have been busy. In June, they issued a 500-page interim report. Please note the chain link, which appears at the top of every page — a reminder of slavery.

The report uses the words “slave,” “slavery,” or “enslave” 2,116 times, which is odd because California wasn’t a slave state, and there were practically no blacks living there when it joined the Union 1850.

I didn’t read the whole report, but I looked at the pictures. Here’s the very first one: It explains that 12 of the first 21 US Presidents owned slaves. They’re colored red.

The report also has this famous photo of the scarred back of a slave.

I suppose this is why this is the first government report I ever saw that comes with a “graphic content warning.”

Why all this talk of slavery that never happened in California? The best I can make out, we have to shudder at the horrors of slavery in order to grasp the report’s basic logic: find any difference between black and white outcomes in California, blame it on white people and slavery, and add it to the bill.

Here are examples the report found important enough to highlight. “In 2019, white households owned nine times more assets than Black households.”

Note the reverential capitalization of black and lower-case for white. “Compared to white Californian men, Black Californian men are five times more likely to die from prostate cancer.”

“Compared to white children in California, Black children are three times more likely to spend time in foster care or experience a termination in parental rights.”

This is all our fault.

I just skipped around in the text, but it’s lurid: We have a “healthcare system that destroys Black health through overt and covert discrimination by medical providers, public policies that neglect African Americans’ health needs, hospital systems that continue to be segregated, medical schools that systematically exclude African Americans, and a health insurance system designed to be inaccessible to poor African Americans.”

Every single idea in that sentence is wrong.

Another example: Black women are twice as likely as white women to be murdered by their husbands, and four times as likely to be murdered by a live-in boyfriend. But that’s only because black men take out the frustrations of racism on black women. And the women dare not call 911 because “There’s a genuine and legitimate fear that if they call the police, their partner could be killed or they, as the survivor, could be killed.”

I suppose they actually believe that.

The task force finds racism in places you wouldn’t think to look. There are sections on “Racist Censorship,” “Pathologizing Black Families,” “Discrimination Against Black Athletes,” “Deprivation of Intellectual Property,” “Restraints on Black Leisure,” “Discrimination Against Black Artists,” “Mental and Physical Harm and Neglect,” and on and on and on and on.

All of this goes into the bill, and every eligible black Californian should get the following amounts in the following five categories: Housing discrimination and houselessness, Mass incarceration and overpolicing, Health harms, Unjust property takings, and Devaluation of black businesses. As you can see, the task force hasn’t yet worked out the bill for the last two vague categories, but the total for the other three is $475,133 per black person.

That already sporty figure will only grow. If each California black collected, say, half a million, they would all, at a stroke, be worth more than 2-1/2 times the median white household net worth of $188,000. A family of four would be sitting on $2 million.

I promise you, this won’t happen. There are 2-1/4 million black people in California, so if they all collected half a million that would cost 1 trillion 125 billion dollars.

That is more than five times the annual budget of California.

So all this is not just folly — it’s absurd, insane folly, and a mind-boggling waste of time.

But the California task force is enjoying itself so much, it has spent months boondoggling around the state, asking black people what they want. The latest hearing was in Oakland. Only about 50 people showed up, but they weren’t shy.

Max Fennel, on the left, wanted 15 to 20 acres of land in addition to the cash. “We’re not asking,” he told the task force, “we’re telling you.”

Deon Jenkins, a “grassroots hip hop organizer for reparations,” explained that the check should cover the average California house price, or $800,000.

He explained to the San Francisco public radio station what happens if California doesn’t pay up. [[0:04 – 0:10]]

A woman by the name of Carol Williams insisted that the handouts be tax free so “the IRS won’t come after us.”

There has not been complete unity. A black actor named Faizon Love says black people shouldn’t get fat checks because they’ll just blow the money on fancy cars.

Instead, he says blacks should be exempted from all taxes for the rest of their lives.

The hearings roadshow goes next to San Diego and Sacramento. These sessions are important. As the chairman of the task force Kamilah Moore explains, “It is important to get this right because we are setting the precedent for other states and localities, and also for the federal government as well.”

Good luck, Kamilah.

You see, the real problem is that when Kamilah presents the final invoice for the sins of California’s white people, the state legislature will have to vote on whether black people get anything at all. That could get messy.

Whites — the villains of the piece — are only 35 percent of the population. When it finally dawns on Asians and Hispanics, who are 55 percent, just how brazenly they are being fleeced, I predict a tremendous fight in the legislature.

Or do I? There have already been certifiably crazy reparations in California. You probably missed this story from last summer: “Bruce’s Beach, seized by LA in 1924, returned to black family’s descendants.”

You will read in that article and in plenty of similar stories like this one from National Geographic, that back in 1924, the California city of Manhattan Beach stole the beach-front property of a black entrepreneur and drove him out of town.

So last year, Governor Gavin Newsome himself went to Manhattan Beach and signed a bill to reverse this outrage, return the land to black descendants of the owner, and pay them rent of $413,000 a year in perpetuity.

This is mouth-watering stuff for reparationists.

What’s the real story? The Bruce family bought two beachfront lots in 1912 for $1,225, and built a clubhouse for blacks, which you can see in the background.

Other blacks bought three lots nearby. In 1924, Manhattan Beach took that land though eminent domain to build a park. The Bruce family got $14,500 for their two lots — nearly 12 times what they paid for them — because of the improvements.

The city didn’t take just the land blacks owned. It took 30 lots for the park, 25 of them owned by whites. They had to clear out, too, just like the Bruces. The other black owners bought other properties in Manhattan Beach, but the Bruces left town. As this lonely little dissenting article asks, “Should white families who owned 25 of the 30 Bruce’s Beach lots in Manhattan Beach also receive reparation?”

Nobody was asking awkward questions when Governor Gavin signed the law to reverse a legal act of eminent domain.

Nobody asked awkward questions at the State House either; the bill passed without a single dissenting vote.

So, as I said, California keeps slugging that tar baby. The reparationists have until June 30 to present their grand-total final bill. How sweet will the kitty be? How many black people will move to California so they can cash in? Will racist Asians and Hispanics squawk and refuse to pony up? It’ll be a hot summer in California. I can hardly wait.