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CA Reparations: Remission or Restitution?
Over the last decade, Americans have debated the necessity of a racial reckoning. This impulse led to puzzling attempts to make amends for the past.
When spiritual guru Marianne Williamson launched her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, it was revealed that she led an audience in an apologetic prayer from white Americans to African Americans during a 2018 speaking tour. Williamson had the whites plead for forgiveness for slavery, lynching, white supremacist laws, voting rights denial, and all of America’s atrocities against black people.
It’s possible Williamson came up with this on her own, but she was most likely influenced by the black progressive intelligentsia. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson declared in his 2017 book Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America: Whiteness is an advantage and a privilege because white people have made it so, not because the universe demands it. Whiteness is killing us, and it is killing white people too.
That section of Dyson’s sermon was called Repenting of Whiteness.
After the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the nationwide riots that followed, California’s Governor created a task force to study and offer recommendations on slavery reparations. The governor said our painful history of slavery has evolved into structural…