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[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
When California’s reparations task force released its report recommending $1.2 million in total lifetime payments to every black person, it made headlines around the world.
California was not a slave state so what was the $1.2 million payout even based on? Even though the task force conveniently proposed limiting payments to the descendants of slaves (despite the lack of slaves in the state) it was mostly based on calculating the differences in life expectancy between black people and white people.
The meat of the 1,000 page report isn’t in the endless pages of virtue signaling, including a chapter on cultural appropriation, but the claim that “the difference in life expectancy between African Americans and white non-Hispanics in California can be interpreted as the cumulative effect of unequal treatment”. The report gets the amount of money from multiplying the value of a year of life, $127,226, by the 7.6 difference between the life expectancy of 71 years for black people and 78.6 years for white people to get $966,918 for most of the $1.2 million total.
There are any number of problems with this, but to start with the report has two different black life expectancy numbers. The reparations formula is based on a black life expectancy of 71. The opening of the report however states that “in 2021, the life expectancy of an average African American Californian was 75.1 years” while the reparations formula section describes “an African American Californian at the average life expectancy of 71 years of age”. Which is it?
Black life expectancy in California fell from 74.8 to 71 between 2019 and 2021 by some metrics, but the report uses two different numbers to show just how unreliable and selective it is.
Something else also changed during the pandemic. In 2019, Latinos had a longer life expectancy than white people. That number fell during the pandemic so that white people are now slightly ahead. Asians however are still in first place and far ahead of any other race.
The reparations task force was aware of these numbers, that’s why the report specifies “white non-Hispanics” and refuses to include any broader life expectancy context for other races .
In 2019, white people were in 3rd place in life expectancy behind Latinos and Asians, but ahead of blacks. Those numbers not only demolish the case for racial reparations based on life expectancy, but the entire underlying premise that lower life expectancy is evidence of systemic racism. If we go by the overall life expectancy numbers, before the pandemic skewed them, then white people in California are also an oppressed group alongside black people.
And white people should also receive reparations payments.
The same numbers and racial theories behind the task force’s reparations payments when applied to all the races in the state, not just the black and white ones in the report, appear to show that Asians run everything and oppress other races so severely that they die earlier.
That’s obvious nonsense. But so is the report.
The report points to a current 7 year gap between black and white life expectancy, but there is a nearly 6 year life expectancy gap between white and Asian life expectancy.
Should Asians and Latinos be forced to pay reparations to white people?
Life expectancy does not actually correlate with race, it does however correlate with income. A UCLA study found that “the gap in life expectancies between those living in the highest- and lowest-income census tracts increased, from a difference of about 11.5 years before the pandemic to more than 15 years in 2021.”
The wealthiest areas in California have a life expectancy of 86 years while the poorest have a life expectancy of 71 years. Those 71 years were seized on by the task force as evidence of racism, but the problem is that there are far more whites, Hispanics and even Asians living in the poorest areas than black people. The difference with black people is not that they are the only ones who are poor, but that there are fewer black people in the upper middle and wealthy classes to balance out the averages the way that it works among whites and Asians.
White people were in third place and are now in second place when it comes to life expectancy because there are still many poor white people in California. That’s odd if white people have built some sort of imaginary systemic racism machine to oppress people based solely on race.
According to the reparations task force, black life expectancy was reduced by everything from living near “toxic industries” to “food deserts” but there are plenty of poor white people living in industrial areas like the Inland Empire which is rated as having the worst air in California.
California’s poor population includes 1,176,700 white people, 2,340,600 Latinos, 600,800 Asians and only 379,200 black people. Blacks make up the smallest percentage of the poor of any race, they are also however, as a race, disproportionately likely to be poor. That’s the statistical sleight of hand on which the task force’s reparations numbers depend.
Reparations is a hoax based on bad math and an even worse media that could be counted on not to ask even the most basic questions when a politically correct agenda is on the table.
Not only isn’t California oppressive toward black people, but it has the 11th lowest poverty rate for black people in the country. Compare that to the 14th lowest poverty rate for Latinos and the 22nd highest poverty rate for whites. Black people are not disadvantaged in California.
White people however are.
California’s poverty rate for white people is within 1% of South Carolina, and 2% of Tennessee and Mississippi.
The same metrics as those in the task force report could be used to argue for reparations payments to white people.
California’s proposed reparations have nothing to do with slavery. Even as the task force denies up and down that the proposed payments are welfare, that’s exactly what they are. They’re payments based on social welfare statistics using numbers manipulated to favor one race.
Race-based welfare, like most forms of affirmative action, is illegal. Calling these payments reparations is a tricky way to limit proposed welfare payments to members of one race.
The 1,000 page report spends most of its time trying to distract everyone from what the reparations payments really are and what they’re based on.
The report’s task force members are mostly black, but the writers, editors and contributors are mostly white, Indian, Asian, Jewish, and Latino. The report’s lead editors, Xiyun Yang, a Chinese deputy attorney general, Robin Goldfaden, a Jewish former ACLU lawyer, and Anthony Seferian, an Armenian deputy attorney general, are diverse, but not one of them is black. Most of the actual work on the report was done by lawyers with last names like Chuang, Singh, Kaplan, Ghazzawi, McCarthy and Martinez.
What the media passed off as the work of a black group was actually produced by progressive prosecutors looking for a political leg up in California’s identity politics establishment. The state has been burdened with massive proposed race-based payments that are illegal and would bankrupt the state by a bunch of non-black aspiring politicians looking to boost their resumes.
The task force report is based on a lie about the state of black people in California. It was assembled by the usual political interests who run the state rather than black organizations.
While some black people are anticipating major checks every month, the reparations money is likely to mostly go into the social welfare system in the form of grants to community groups. Slavery will be used as a pretext for diverting even more taxpayer money to leftist political organizations whose real business isn’t social welfare, but ballot harvesting and voter turnout.
That’s why the task force was really convened and why a mostly non-black team put it together. Reparations, like all forms of social welfare, are just leverage for boosting black voter turnout.
It would not be the first time that distorted statistics were used to justify massive social welfare spending that made the problem worse, but provided a political advantage to one party. Most of California’s social crises, including the homeless problem, follow that same pattern. The original party of slavery has just figured out another means of turning out voting labor on its plantation.
What is next? Sentencing murderers based on the life expectancy of the victims? That would be making responsibility personal and contemporary. Of course that is not the goal of the reparations hustle.
Nah. On the average life expectancy of the race of the murderers. With adjustments for lower life expectancy rates based on the difference between maximum life expectancy for white and black men.
Thus a black murderer should only get 7/10ths of the sentence of a white murderer.
If some DEI think tank type hasn’t thought of it already, he will soon. And it’ll become an exciting new equity policy.
Thanks Daniel, excellent work!
Thank you.
Excellent points. Will save the article for when I do battles with Marxists online.
What a scam… from the start. If this came anywhere near reality, the backlash–even in CA–would see the Dems ousted. So, yes, the pay-off will be in the form of whatever programs (s). Then again, black Californians are being primed for a cash pay off and they’ll explode when they dont get it. I hope the Dems move full steam ahead with this and that the CA Republican party can leverage this political manna from heaven.
Ah, that’s when the Dems will blame Republican opposition for a lack of cash payments and time it just for an election season.
“You know why you’re not getting cash, because conservatives went to court to say it was racist. But we’ll take care of you by spending $10 billion on community groups… to turn out the vote for us.”
Mr. Greenfield:
You forgot to consider the expenses that should be deducted from the reparations that blacks demand. They include the following:
1. All the property damage they caused from 1787 to the present.
2. Section 8 housing cost they received.
3. The cost of Food Stamps they received and medical care under the Medicaid program.
4. Free legal services they received.
5. Free college education education thru the Pell Grant program.
6. Prison cost to house, feed, and provide medical care for crimes they committed.
7. Taxes they never paid because of their low income.
8. All the earned income tax credit money they received from the 1970s.
9. All the money they received thru the Child Tax Credit from the 1990s to the present.
10. All the cost that white people suffered from being victims of crimes committed by blacks from 1787 to the present.
Anything before 1787, the blacks will have to sue Great Britain to recover any money they feel they are entitled to receive.
I could add more to the list but I do not want to take up too much space. All in all, when you add it all up, I believe each white person should receive $5,000 per person from black folks.
Have a nice evening.
Oh, with all my heart, fuck you. Fuck your dog. And fuck you home town.
That should be “your home town.”
That should be his nomadic tribe.
Do you have something cogent to say? Say it. Otherwise, STFU.
What makes you think I’d let Roscoe anywhere near my dog?
Good point about the reparations being paid to white government officials.
Here in the UK the vast majority of homeless people are white men, there’s the odd white woman and occasional black man but 95%+ are white men who have left their homes usually because of drug abuse.
Thanks Mo, very interesting!
No matter the formula used to contrive this virtue-signalling result, it’s no surprise that it comes as the Democrat Party is looking for a savior, or an anti-savior if you will, in Gavin Newsom. It’s also unsurprising that it comes when the state can LEAST afford to pay reparations, with Cali losing BILLIONS in tax revenue annually to tax-free states and folks just having enough of the crime and the pro-criminal laws enacted and decide to look for greener pastures elsewhere.
It’s all political theater, but just like a theatrical performance, Dems once again use blacks as props for the staged event. It reminds me of orchard-picking jobs promised during the dust bowl and the throngs of people who ventured there only to be disappointed. Imagine the result when the checks never come? I see more fires and looting in California’s future.
I remember being a small child in Sunday School and learning that the devil didn’t have a red tail and horns, but was actually a beautiful creature, and it was his beauty and vanity that lead to him being cast out of heaven. I often think of that early lesson in “pride goeth before a fall” whenever I see Newsom for some reason.
It’s always the same game. Weaponized, radicalize and then profit. Leftists and their Dem skins can’t lose by spreading division, rage and resentment, they can only gain from it.
You forgot rig.
Black asking for reparations need to read some real history of how they became slaves and watch them try and deny that it was their own people who enslaved them. It was the Western White nations that put an end to slavery.
SO WE DON’T OWE YOU SQUAT. GET YOUR HEADS OUT AND TAKE YOUR PLACE AS DOES EVERY OTHER RACE IN AMERICA ! You blacks pulled this crap back in the seventies and it got you nowhere, but you did managed to win the enmity of the majority of white people. We are sick and tired of you wanting more from society when you are not willing to work for it.
Daniel does a good job identifying those who expect to gain some advantage from this reparations game. Adding the math used of calculations the difference in life expectancy, has nothing to do with slavery. Because of the wording, however, they have to try and sort those who were descended from slaves. That means tracking ancestry to a time before 1865.
By the time all these efforts to calculate, trace ancestry, determine eligibility and paying for the reparations task force all the money will have been spent.
Or is this really just a program to expand CA government bureaucracy?
That’s the purpose of ALL government programs.
It’s also about the different pressure groups set up to collect the cash. I wrote about this a few months ago.
African-American organizations want to be the only ones to collect and they want to exclude newer immigrants. They are after all the traditional Dem voting base.
Just ANOTHER DEMOcrat ploy to keep black Americans stirred up and looking for that “obama money”!! It’s NOT going to happen! Now there may be a few cities that are so leftwing nutcases that they will pay out a few thousand, but $1.2 MILLION?? Where will CA get the money? How DISAPPOINTED will they be when this DOES NOT HAPPEN? Will there be UNOFFICIAL “reparations” like the $950 per day variety?? CA crazies are setting themselves up for a RECKONING! I do pity the DECENT people of CA!!
OH – if they want to be TRUTHFUL about comparing life expectancies then compare black Americans with black Africans – I think they’ll OWE money back!!
Yes. This is just another manifestation of the “Obama’s going to make my house payment! Obama’s going to give me a phone!”
Mr. Greenfield has exposed how that wicked mindset is encouraged and used to enrich progressives who have the brains to take those grunts for reparations and do statistical magic to justify milking the taxpayers for their own benefit. They are only “friends” when it is profitable.
Most blacks have 20% white in them. Should the calculations be reduced accordingly? What if some of them can be traced to black slave owners in the U.S. (of which there were a shockingly high number!)
What about those who who have killed or maimed white people? Those numbers are huge! Should those payments be affected? And what about those who kill other blacks and hispanics?
Speaking of crime, what about reducing their reparations by any costs associated with their arrest, prosecution, incarceration and probation? A huge percentage of the reparations crowd have serious criminal history which is a significant financial burden upon society.
What about the welfare payments they have received already. Should a credit be recognized for the percentage of tax paid in by blacks? Decreased by the percentage paid in by whites?
They can’t pay out the money directly and they won’t. But imagine how much claiming $1.2 million in budget items for every black person can be used on a political level?
Expand this nationwide and you’ve got Dems funding their own political operations to the tune of $100 billion using taxpayer money in the name of reparations.
It’s actually brilliant and most conservatives still aren’t seeing it.
Excellent points. That way they can reduce the amount to a manageable level, while giving it to themselves. Excellent insights. The victims are math challenged anyway, so won’t understand the con.
They already do this. They’ve been doing it for years.
We need to quickly stop being stupid and realize that “they” are attempting to bankrupt the US more and take us down.
Of the few really good decisions I have made in my adult life, leaving California and the Los Angeles metro area when I had the opportunity back in the late eighties, was one of them. One could see, even then, that Ca. was already a lost cause that was only going to get much, much worse.
it all seemed so rootless to me.
The pedophile party (formerly democrat party) has done such a great job blurring the distinctions, if this goes through the number of people identifying as black will be astronomical.
With their every act, it looks more likely that those who will finally defeat the left are themselves. The republicans certainly aren’t up to the task.
People who never owned slaves owe nothing to people who were never slaves.
It’s theft and rip off in a large scale.
Free loaders will always be free loaders, and no sane person should encourage the behavior.
I don’t expect that the report looked at possible reasons for lower black life expectancy. Poor nutritional habits, failure to seek or obtain medical care, smoking, obesity, drug and alcohol use, and homicide may have something to do with it, don’t you think?
There’s already massive government departments dealing with each of those issues so they won’t listen, but there’s now going to be a new government department to deal with reparations. There’s a long line of government officials applying for the positions.
The premise of anti-racism is that any negative numbers for black people are the result of racism.
Anything else is a racist idea.
Ibram X. Kendi has been the biggest proponent of this black nationalist idea that there can never be anything wrong with black people (unlike all other humans on the planet) except that it was caused by white people.
If there’s more obesity in the black community, it can’t be lifestyle choices or genetics (you see a lot of variation in body types among different groups around the world), it must be white oppression.
Reading about Africa before the Colonial period, the Kings and Royalty were liable to get fat, while the commoners were thin.
CALIFORNIA IS BANKRUPT and still maintaing a $50 BILLION dollar La Raza welfare state (combining state, county and city handouts to illegals).
They’re not going to be paying out ‘reparations’ to anyone. It’s bomb for those who are victims of black crimes.
SAN FRANCISCO – ONLY 8% OF THE POPULATION IS BLACK, HOWEVER BLACKS PERPETRATE 40% OF THE CRIMES (THESE ARE DATED PRE-COVID STATS)
BELOW WE SEE BLACK GUYS DRIVING A LEXUS IN S.F. AND RANDOMLY STOPPING TO KNOCK OUT WINDOWS, ONE WHERE A PASSENGER IS LEFT SCREAMING
Cars Robbed as Politicians Hold Events on Car
the sins of the fathers should not be imputed to their children. none of today’s american blacks was ever a slave ergo none is eligible for whatever reparation or indemnity one can conjure up.
ironically, the descendants of black slaves are far better than their continental african kin today. what evil men meant for evil turned out to be beneficial in the end.
I want these demorats to tell a Vietnamese refugee, a Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Ukranian, Mexican, Salvadoran, Argentine, or Brazilian immigrant why he should pay for a black’s wealthy life style when they never owned a slave to people who were never salves nor even knew a slave, much less picked cotton.
I recall that the Japanese who survived losing all their property in FDR’s concentration camps were paid 20,000 in the eighties. FDR never explained why the Hawaiian Islands which were in far greater danger of invasion than the West Coast never imprisoned their 50% Japanese-American population.
As for blacks let’s just offer them a one way ticket to Africa where paradise reigns and blacks are so benevolent and superior. I am sick of the endless whining of these parasites and their white communist supporters.
They were internment camps, not concentration camps. And FDR did “explain” them. He “deferred to the military’s judgment concerning the possibility of Japanese/American subversion.
They also didn’t lose all the property while interned. The US military had bases and soldiers, sailors, Marines, crawling all over the Hawaiian Islands.
Beez you’re ignorance is amazing. They didn’t lose their homes, businesses and farms? Because the government refrained from collecting taxes while they were in FDR’s concentration camps?
Oh they weren’t concentration camps? Just like the camps the British put Boer women and children in weren’t concentration camps? They were “internment camps!” Where were the Italian and German internment camps skippy?
And there weren’t bases on the West coast? Your ignorance can be explained either by stupidity or a willingness to drink the Kool Aid. FDR believed the military’s opinion on subversion, right so he left the 50% populated Hawaiian Island’s Japanese roam free while those on the West coast represented a threat?
Really skippy? Now explain to us why the British and French declared war on those nasty Germans for invading Poland but didn’t declare war on the Russians who also invaded Poland at the same time.
Its ignorant , evil morons like you that defend no matter how outrageous or morally clear those actions are.
I lost one great uncle in Andersonville.
His brother returned to Wisconsin. Civil war disabled..
The other three-quarterers of my folks arrived from Scandivania around 1900.. They were loggers.in Northern WI.
Tell me. What do I owe blacks?
Native Americans were treated far worse.. I am married to a Muskogee.
Trail of Tears.
How about all the POC who chased who chased me home. Through ninth grade. “Let’s see if we can make jcr cry..”
POC. Until I know you. F* you. Stay away from me…
I’ve “enjoyed” enoungh of diversity..
“Reparations.” Yes.I earened on them the street.
The leftist are the carnies of the world with some loud mouth barker constantly trying to sucker you in on a good thing.
‘And white people should also receive reparations payments.’
I want mine in popcorn, because if these clowns keep it up it’s gonna be a great circus.
Everyone on the planet has an ancestor who was a slave and another who was a slave holder. If they start taking tax money to pay blacks only, there will be hell to pay even in California. I note a handful of cities are also toying with the idea. They are also fomenting a taxpayer revolt.