It is difficult for some Californians — perhaps many — to wrap their heads around the idea that the homelessness we see on our streets has anything to do with slavery.
We are California, after all, a supposedly “free” state. We like to think of ourselves as apart from the ideology and brutality that built the South, even though slavery was common during the Gold Rush era, affecting not only blacks but also Latinos and indigenous communities.
But researchers at UCSF Benioff's prestigious Homelessness and Housing Initiative have no doubt that the historic trafficking of 12 million black people to American shores is directly linked to black poverty and pain on West Coast streets today.
“The overrepresentation of Blacks among the homeless population arises from 400 years of anti-Black racism embedded in the structures, institutions, ideologies, and social norms of American life, beginning with slavery,” the researchers said in a recently released study.
This is a fierce bit of truth-telling that may shock those who haven't paid attention to discussions of reparations—the need to right the wrongs of systemic racism and compensate black people for the lasting harms of slavery. But for those who followed the California reparations task force, and for most black Americans, the findings are not groundbreaking.
Slavery turned into Jim Crow laws and lynchings in the South. To escape, blacks fled to the North and, yes, to the West. However, upon their arrival, redlining and refusal to invest in Black communities led to generations of state-enforced poverty and a lack of housing that builds wealth and stability.
Poverty has become an excuse for surveillance and criminalization — including excessively violent policing, child protective services that break up families, and the mass incarceration of black men. And here we are, with black Americans in such a precarious economic and social situation, that one misfortune can end in homelessness.
“This did not happen by chance and it did not happen just because there were a few bad people. This was organized,” said Margot Kuchel, president of the Benioff Initiative and one of the authors of the study, which recommends that reparations in the form of cash payments should be needed to combat homelessness in the black community. .
“That's the strongest case for damages, isn't it?” She said. “This sounds like a conversation that, if we're being honest, we need to have.”
This is certainly the issue raised by the California Legislative Black Caucus. Last week, members gathered in Sacramento for a press conference to formally announce 14 bills they plan to introduce and return this year, in hopes of turning California Reparations Task Force recommendations into actionable laws and policies.
“This is a huge undertaking, so you can expect to pack year after year until we finish our work,” explained Assemblywoman Lori D. Wilson (D-Suisun City), chair of the Legislative Black Caucus. “Some will be systemic in nature. Some will require direct investments in people or communities. All will require the support of the Legislature and the governor.”
One of the initial bills calls for a formal apology from the state, another calls for compensation for lands taken in high-profile acts of racism like Bruce Beach, and another would ban involuntary servitude, specifically in prisons where inmates are often forced to perform labor For a small fee. hour.
All of which draw a direct line between the dire conditions currently facing millions of Black Californians — including homelessness and housing insecurity — and the accumulation of decades of discrimination. Members of the Legislative Black Caucus were clearly tired and unmoved by the numerous excuses given for why reparations could not be made a reality.
“Our state needs to address those harms,” Wilson said matter-of-factly.
“America’s wealth has been built through the forced labor of trafficked Africans and their descendants, who were bought and sold as commodities,” said Rep. Akilah Weber (D-La Mesa). “The U.S. government, at all levels, has permitted or participated in the exploitation, abuse, terrorization, and murder of people of African descent, to the point that most white Americans [could] “Profit from their enslavement.”
“This Legislature has allowed slave owners to bring their enslaved property as long as they got here before 1850,” said Assemblyman Reggie Jones Sawyer (D-Los Angeles), mocking repeated objections that reparations were not due because California was not. Slave state. “Then the California Supreme Court said that slave owners were fine, as long as they were only staying temporarily. That's not freedom.”
But perhaps it was Assemblywoman Corey Jackson (D-Perris) who best summed up the issue of reparations — the same case made by Kuchel that emerged from her team's research.
“We have to understand that the era of a color-blind society is a failed era,” he said. “If you can't see us, you can't serve us.”
The fantasy that race doesn't matter, baked into law through Proposition 209, is one reason California has gotten the wheels turning on homelessness. And it will likely continue to do so — spending billions of tax dollars — until lawmakers and the governor begin to address the causes and policy decisions that affect those most likely to end up on the street.
While Black people make up about 7% of California's population, they represent 26% of those without permanent homes, according to data from the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness (CASPEH). This will come as no surprise to anyone who has taken a walk through Skid Row.
Yes, we need more housing. And yes, we need more services.
But what about the nearly 75 percent of California's unhoused black residents who are men, many of whom are straight out of a long stay in county jail or a stint in prison? They were released with a few hundred dollars from the state, with few, if any, options other than a quick slide into homelessness.
It's a demographic that Kuchel points out should be easier to help because we know who they are and where they were before they became homeless. We just choose not to do it.
What about the 80% of black people living on our streets who simply lost their homes? They have suffered an illness, for example, a job loss, or discrimination from landlords unwilling to rent to those with poor credit or complicated histories. Half of them are over the age of 50, facing their final years without shelter.
What about the fact that most black people living without homes came from extreme poverty? Those who had their own place, and whose names were on a lease before they lost shelter, were getting about $1,200 a month. Those who were living off the blessings of others earned only about $960 a month.
Not all blacks are poor, of course. far from it. But because of the lasting damage caused by slavery and discriminatory housing policies, poverty is still disproportionately predictable among black people — and not just in California.
According to the study, the average white family had $184,000 in wealth in 2019 compared to just $23,000 for the comparable Black family. Throughout the pandemic, the racial wealth gap has actually widened, with a gap now exceeding $240,000.
Unsurprisingly, home ownership numbers are equally bleak. 2023 Census data found that 75% of white households own their homes. Only 45% of black households own their homes — up just 3% from 1960, when discrimination against black homebuyers in California was legal.
While many elected officials were concerned about the relationship between addiction, poverty, and homelessness, it is worth noting that Black people were statistically less likely to report hard drug use than other demographics, despite stereotyping and criminalization.
The fact that so many black people were forced into homelessness without the added payment of drug use struck Kuchel as another example of how precarious black existence was. “It doesn't take pushing them into homelessness,” she said.
To combat this, UCSF researchers suggest cash payments as one possible solution.
Most black homeless people in California told researchers that ongoing payments of less than $500 a month (similar to a guaranteed income) or a one-time lump sum payment of $5,000 or $10,000 could get them into housing, said Cara Young Ponder, the study's lead author. The last concerns what is necessary for the deposit and the first month's rent for the apartment.
But in addition to the simple need for money shared by all homeless people, Young Ponder said black people also report facing anti-black bias within the homeless services system — less help in every area from housing coordinators to medical providers.
“They are still treated differently than people of other races,” Young-Ponder said, making cash payments a crucial way to “circumvent” discrimination.
In the context of reparations, the idea of cash payments has been controversial – to put it mildly. A poll conducted by the Institute of Government at the University of California at Berkeley and co-sponsored by The Times found that California voters oppose such payments by a 2-to-1 margin to blacks whose ancestors were enslaved.
“It's going to take a steep climb, at least from the public's perspective,” Mark DiCamillo, the poll's director, said after it was published in August.
With the general budget deficit that may soon reach $73 billion, there are financial constraints as well.
Wilson acknowledged that's one of the reasons she and other Black lawmakers decided to drop requiring cash payments now. But she said the biggest reason was a lack of public knowledge about why reparations were necessary and fears that a bill demanding a less popular form of it would fail, dealing a blow to what has quickly become a national movement.
“There's a lot of misinformation out there,” Weber said. “I'm born and raised in California. I thought all these problems happened in the South, and I had no idea about the things California did.
But members of the Legislative Black Caucus have not ruled out a bill requiring cash payments in the future. They say California's laws and policies have systematically oppressed black people economically, which is undeniable — and they're right.
Kochel, Young-Ponder, and their fellow researchers at the Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UCSF Benioff are only the latest to demonstrate that black people have been intentionally excluded from wealth and stability, and that reparations may be necessary to fix the hardships they have caused. The only question is when Californians will start believing it.
“America’s original sin is genocide and the enslavement of human beings,” Jones Sawyer said. “America’s second greatest sin is watching what happens and pretending it never happened.”
