Gavin Newsom flip-flopped on CA slavery reparations. It’s no surprise | Opinion

Five years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom set in motion a process that would place on his desk a series of bills to advance reparations for California’s descendants of slavery. Their arrival has revealed the governor’s aversion to anything approaching reparations. Why study something to kill it?

Reparations have become a metaphor for too much of Newsom’s tenure as governor, with situational politics dominating any given day rather than actual and lasting actions and policies. He had a flashy day back in 2020 when he seemed interested in resolving California’s role in a painful legacy in our nation’s racist origins. But now, five years later, Newsom’s greatest legacy will be signing a bill to essentially study reparations.

The longer the governor refrains from advancing a reparations agenda of his own, the more this appears to be a one-time political stunt launched a half-decade ago that is now steadily backfiring.

Newsom undoubtedly faced enormous pressure from factions within his party to sign Assembly Bill 3121, the reparations study bill, in 2020. It was authored by Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a storied member of the California Legislative Black Caucus, who was in her final year of elected office. With his party squarely behind the bill, Newsom signed the bill to create a nine-member task force for California to confront reparations once and for all.

“As a nation, we can only truly thrive when every one of us has the opportunity to thrive,” Newsom said at the time. “California’s rich diversity is our greatest asset, and we won’t turn away from this moment to make right the discrimination and disadvantages that Black Californians and people of color still face.”

This task force, charged with providing recommendations by July of 2023, clearly took the governor at his word. It produced a 1,600-page report that was the road map to consider reparations that Newsom seemingly wanted.

“Compensation should be provided for any economically assessable damage, as appropriate and proportional to the gravity of the violation and the circumstances of each case,” the task force wrote, providing some ways to calculate the reparations.

That year, a spokesman for the governor said the issue of compensation “will be resolved” with legislators later in the year. Instead, when the McClatchy California Editorial Board talked to members of the Black Caucus near year’s end, it had no idea where the governor was on the subject. Ever since, it has taken a cautious, incremental approach with limited results.

In 2024, the governor did sign legislation issuing a formal apology on behalf of California’s role in slavery, and a bill to ban discrimination against any Californian’s hairstyles. But nothing passed in 2024 with a direct economic benefit to African Americans, as he vetoed a bill allowing slave descendants to challenge family land unfairly taken via eminent domain.

Newsom has continued this non-benefits approach to reparations this year by vetoing anything with an economic benefit. He rejected bills that sought to increase opportunities for slave descendants when seeking admission to a university, securing a professional license, or buying a home.

But he did agree for the next governor to continue studying reparations. He signed legislation that will create the “Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery” within the Civil Rights Department. It will create a Genealogy Division to set up a process to verify whether any Californian, if one applies, is a descendant of a slave. What California is to do with this new identification process is anybody’s guess.

There are many real reasons for a California governor to sidestep what is a divisive national issue with some state approach, given limits to state funds and public opposition to financial reparations. Newsom’s decision to take on reparations can only make sense through a highly political lens. He has been trying to placate an identity-based faction of his party without doing anything approaching true reparations that could be used against him in, say, a future run for president.

He could have easily rejected this idea of studying reparations back in 2020 and saved himself a lot of grief. Instead, he has set in motion a tortured years-long process that shows no sign of a meaningful end. Newsom’s tactics are proving worse than doing nothing.

This story was originally published October 15, 2025 at 10:33 AM.