6630.
The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:(a) California has begun the process of addressing its role in accommodating and facilitating slavery, perpetuating the vestiges of enslavement, propagating state-sanctioned discrimination, and tolerating persistent, systemic structures of discrimination against living African Americans across its systems of government at the local and state level.
(b) As a result of this historic and continued discrimination, African Americans in California, especially those whose lineage can be traced to an enslaved person, continue to suffer economic, educational, and health hardships that
have prevented them as a people from achieving equality.
(c) In order to maintain slavery, government actors adopted white supremacist beliefs and passed laws to create a racial hierarchy and control enslaved and free African Americans.
(d) After the end of slavery, although the Federal Constitution recognized African Americans as citizens on paper, the government failed to give them the full rights of citizenship and failed to protect them from widespread terror and violence.
(e) Along with a dereliction of the United States’ duty to protect its African American citizens, direct federal, state, and local government actions continued to enforce the racist lies created to justify slavery. These laws and government-supported
cultural beliefs have since formed the foundation of innumerable modern laws, policies, and practices across the nation.
(f) Even after the abolition of slavery, its badges and incidents remain embedded in the political, legal, health, financial, educational, cultural, environmental, social, and economic systems of the United States of America. Racist, casteist, untrue, and harmful stereotypes created to support slavery continue to physically and mentally harm African Americans today.
(g) Without a remedy specifically targeted to dismantle our country’s racist foundations and heal the injuries inflicted by colonial and American governments, the “badges and incidents of slavery” will continue to harm African Americans in almost all aspects of American life.
(h) The Legislature recognizes and accepts responsibility for all of the harms and atrocities committed by representatives of the state who promoted, facilitated, enforced, and permitted the institution of chattel slavery and its legacy of ongoing badges and incidents of slavery that form the systemic structures of discrimination.
(i) The Legislature intends that the benefits issued under this chapter be dedicated to policies or programs that indemnify descendants of an African American descendants of a chattel enslaved person or descendants of a free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of
the 19th century.
6631.
(a) There is hereby created in the State Treasury the Fund for Reparations and Restorative Reparative Justice for the purpose of funding policies approved by the Legislature and the Governor that indemnify descendants of an African American descendants of a chattel enslaved person
in the United States or descendants of a free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.(b) The Controller shall transfer from the Special Fund for Economic Uncertainties to the Fund for Reparations and Restorative Reparative Justice an amount, as determined by the Department of Finance, equal to six percent of the transfers from the General Fund to the Special Fund for Economic Uncertainties, as specified in the annual Budget Act. Upon appropriation by the Legislature, the moneys in the fund shall be expended for the purpose described
in subdivision (a).
(c) The Fund for Reparations and Restorative Reparative Justice may receive moneys from any other federal, state, or local grant, or from any private donation or grant, for the purpose of this chapter.