California Reparations Task Force member vows their 'recommendations will be breathtaking'

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A member of the California Reparations Task Force vowed the committee’s "recommendations will be breathtaking."

Lisa Holder, a task force member and president of the far-left Equal Justice Society, published an opinion piece advocating for the reparations committee and writing that Californians "must be prepared for remedies on a scale approaching the Great Society programs of Medicare and Medicaid."

"Reparations is a paradigm for understanding harm and repair as it relates to people who suffered a human rights injustice because of government action," Holder wrote. "Harm and repair are the two sides of the spectrum." She added that reparations will "likely" include "monetary compensation to Black people who are descendants of enslaved and persecuted Black Americans." 

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Lisa Holder wrote that Californians "must be prepared for remedies on a scale approaching the Great Society programs of Medicare and Medicaid." (Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

"Consistent with this paradigm, the task force is evaluating the severity and articulating the scope of the harm to Black people, including all of the atrocities the government committed against Black people in California," she continued.

California was famously admitted to the union as a free state during the period leading up to the Civil War.

Holder wrote that the "task force will outline the method for repairing harm, including compensation for the harm that contemplates monetary redress, atonement and apology" and that for "an apology to be a meaningful act of repair and atonement, it must be concrete and tangible."

"Making the apology tangible ensures that the harm will cease and desist for good because the government is being held patently accountable," she wrote. 

"This mandate comports with the United Nations international conventions for reparations, which consists of five components: compensation, restitution, satisfaction or apology, rehabilitation and guarantees of non-repetition," Holder continued.

Holder wrote that reparations "to similarly situated groups are a good metric for understanding compensation" and that "Canada is paying almost $32 billion to living victims and descendants of Indigenous people as compensation for state-sanctioned cultural genocide."

Holder wrote that the "task force will outline the method for repairing harm, including compensation for the harm that contemplates monetary redress, atonement and apology." (Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

"The U.S. paid the current equivalent of $30 billion to Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II for state-sanctioned human rights abuses, property loss, forced removal and imprisonment," she continued. "Germany has paid $89 billion to Holocaust survivors in the Jewish diaspora to compensate for infamous human rights abuses."

"The task force delivered a 500-page interim report establishing that California was, in practice, a pro-slavery state, a Jim Crow state and a post-civil rights apartheid state. It’s appropriate that California became the first state to convene a reparations task force because the real story is that the wealthiest state in the union and the fifth-largest economy in the world was one of the principal purveyors and beneficiaries of anti-Black policies and narratives."

"In short, the Golden State garnered a windfall from Black oppression," Holder added.

Holder wrote that with "specific and tangible reparations initiatives, California is on the brink of a historic and seismic shift towards finally delivering justice for Black Americans."

"The task force recommendations will be breathtaking," Holder concluded. "They must be nothing less."

Holder’s far-left Equal Justice Society writes on its "About" webpage that it "is transforming the nation’s consciousness on race through law, social science, and the arts."

The reparations task force member’s opinion piece comes as Democrat California Governor Gavin Newsom is facing increased pressure to use his authority to unilaterally enact proposals that would dole out billions of dollars to Black residents in reparations as a way to make amends for slavery if the state legislature doesn't act. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

"Our legal strategy aims to broaden conceptions of present-day discrimination to include unconscious and structural bias by using social science, structural analysis, and real-life experience," the webpage reads. "Currently, EJS targets its advocacy efforts on school discipline, special education, and the school-to-prison pipeline, race-conscious remedies, and inequities in the criminal justice system."

The reparations task force member’s opinion piece comes as Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom is facing increased pressure to use his authority to unilaterally enact proposals that would dole out billions of dollars to Black residents to make amends for slavery if the state legislature doesn't act.

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The California Reparations Task Force, which was created by state legislation in 2020, is considering a proposal to give just under $360,000 per person to approximately 1.8 million Black Californians who had an ancestor enslaved in the U.S., putting the total cost of the program at about $640 billion.

The task force's final recommendations will be submitted to the California Legislature, which will then decide whether to implement the measures and send them to Newsom's desk to be signed into law. 

According to an expert and leading reparations activist, however, Newsom, a Democrat, should be prepared to use his own power to enact such measures for the state's Black residents if the legislature doesn't.

"The task force is doing the grunt work of preparing final recommendations, but at the end of the day these recommendations are non-binding and still require uncompromising political will to enact remedies that will begin to address centuries of compounded harm," Dreisen Heath told Fox News Digital. "Gov. Newsom has the authority to enact these recommendations, if they are in fact aligned with the entire descendant community's wishes, following the issuance of the final report on July 1, and should do so, if state lawmakers fail to act."

Fox News Digital's Aaron Kliegman contributed to this report.