Sacramento County resident sues to stop basic income funds for Black, Native families
A Sacramento County resident has sued to stop county officials and the United Way’s local chapter from handing out $725 a month in guaranteed income to 200 Black, Native American and Alaska Native families in six ZIP codes.
Plaintiffs Eva Zhou and the nonprofit Californians for Equal Rights Foundation filed a lawsuit late last year in Sacramento Superior Court alleging this guaranteed basic income program would disseminate government resources and public funds on a discriminatory basis.
“Plaintiffs seek relief to ensure that defendants cease using government resources or public funds to support this unlawful program so long as it discriminates on the basis of race or ethnicity,” the lawsuitstates.
The complaint lists Sacramento County and Kim Johnson as defendants, identifying Johnson as the director of the California Department of Social Services. Her tenure in that role ended in September when she was named secretary of the California Health & Human Services Agency. The Department of Social Services is the largest division of the state agency she now leads.
The county and the state Department of Social Services declined to comment on pending litigation. Macy Obernuefemann, a spokesperson for Sacramento County’s Department of Child, Family and Adult Services, said the department was working with its community partners to update and expand the Family First Economic Support Pilot.
How race plays a part
The United Way announced in September that it would be overseeing the pilot, providing added income to stabilize families at higher risk of having children removed by child welfare investigators.
The Zhou lawsuit notes that payments were scheduled to start distribution in December, but for several months, the county removed all criteria from a website dedicated to the program.
However, the ffesp.org site was updated this week to state that applications are coming soon and to update eligiblity. Among the rules, applicants must:
- Have an income at or below twice the federal poverty level — $40,880 or less for a family of two, for example, or $51,640 for a three-person household.
- Live in one of five ZIP codes — 95815, 95821, 95823, 95828, 95838.
- Be a parent or legal guardian of a child aged 5 or younger.
Gabriel “Jack” Chin, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law, reviewed the plaintiffs’ complaint at The Bee’s request. He said he was shocked to read in the lawsuit that the program’s selection criteria was race-based.
“Without a substantial additional amount of justification,” Chin said, “you just can’t have segregated benefit programs.”
He said the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, would interpret this as appropriate if it targeted the poor, but that it can’t do so on the explicit basis of race.
A race-based program must stand up to the “strict scrutiny” standard set by the courts, Chin said, so the government must show any race-based program is narrowly tailored to address a compelling state interest for its existence.
This is true for both state and federal courts, Chin said. In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, which held that “the state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”
The courts have held that correcting racial imbalance, by itself, does not meet the standard of a compelling state interest, according to Chin. Poor Black families, he said, are similarly situated to poor white families in the eyes of the court, so the Supreme Court has said there’s no need to focus on one group.
However, Chin said, the strict scrutiny standard could be met if a plaintiff can prove that a government agency or program has operated in a discriminatory manner against one racial or ethnic group. In those cases, the courts have taken steps to stop that illegal behavior and to provide remedies.
Generally, no state district attorney or attorney general wants to admit that a government agency has illegally discriminated because that could lead to a financial payout or mandated, monitored spending.
Consequence of past actions
African Americans and indigenous peoples say they have been left at a disadvantage after hundreds of years when their ancestors’ labors and property were stolen and racial preferences were extended to whites but denied to them.
The California Reparations Report, for instance, decried the consequences of past inequities on Black families and children. Child welfare authorities have acknowledged that they are almost five times as likely to remove Black children from their homes as they do white children, and they are nearly twice as likely to separate Native American parents from their children than they do in white families.
“In 2021, African American children were 18% of the children in foster care in California, the largest percentage by race, despite constituting only 5% of the overall population of children in California,” according to the reparations report. “Given the disparities, it is likely that racial bias impacts African American families at all stages of the process, including during the reporting of abuse or neglect, the investigation of the allegation, the substantiation of the allegation, the decision to the remove the child from the home, and ultimately where to place a child once the child is removed.”
California’s reparations commission, legal scholars such as Richard Rothstein and historians such as Andrew Kahrl have made strong cases for reparations, citing lengthy histories of government abuses, Chin said.
“(Rothstein) talks about the history of public mortgage support for individuals and public housing support through governments and how it was used to segregate,” Chin said. “Blacks couldn’t get the mortgages and whites could. A lot of the public housing was segregated for whites and not for blacks.”
The California Legislative Black Caucus introduced a legislative package in late February that they said is intended to begin “to repair the generational harms caused by the cruel treatment of African slaves in the United States and decades of systematic deprivation and injustice inflicted upon Black Californians.”
This story was originally published March 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: This story was changed March 21, 2025 to include new eligibility criteria for a Sacramento County basic income program.
