California owes reparations for making Ronald Reagan president

America is in the birthing pains of a new racial age. The struggle is as old as the nation itself, as Black justice strives against white fears to shape our nation’s soul and shared future. 

And no two states better represent the competing visions for our national destiny than Florida and California. In the Sunshine State, the forces of white fear are banning books and censoring class conversations. In the Golden State, those committed to racial justice are dreaming of a racially equitable democracy and demanding reparations. 

In this struggle, today is a watershed moment after centuries of sacrifice and struggle for Black equality. Today, the state’s Reparations Task Force will present to the state legislature the most groundbreaking governmental report on race in America in the 21st century.  

There is a poetic justice to reparations gaining traction in California. California’s progressive reputation often hides its traumatic racial history, which included lynchings, the Klan and even at one point earned the admiration of the Nazis by its program of forced sterilizations.

But nothing out of California transformed race in America more than its upending of Civil Rights and the War on Poverty. We must not forget that the prophet who drowned Martin Luther King’s dream of ending our nation’s addiction to “militarism, materialism, and racism” was not a raging Southern politician like George Wallace. It was instead the amiable actor turned politician — California Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan.

Reagan opposed all Civil Rights measures and any governmental attempts to alleviate poverty. Yet Reagan declared he was neither anti-Black nor anti-poor. Racism and poverty, he argued, resided exclusively in the realm of personal relationships and decisions, not public policy. 

And in 1966, Reagan rode the thirst for anti-Black and anti-poor public policies, as well as the need among whites to feel innocent, to a landslide victory in California.  

In his final book, “Where Do We Go From Here?” (1967), MLK cited the Golden State as ground zero for a counter-revolution that crystallized his greatest fears. “White backlash had become an emotional electoral issue in California, and elsewhere,” King wrote. “Political clowns had become governors…their magic achieved with a witches’ brew of bigotry, prejudice, half-truths and whole lies.” 

As King witnessed the Reagan Revolution in utero, he and his colleagues “wept” for the destruction of their democratic dreams.  

Following his time as governor, Reagan ascended to the presidency. The Reagan revolution swept the nation, ushering in a new racial age under the banner of racial colorblindness. 

The Colorblind Age leaned fully into Reagan’s formula that called voters to feel compassionate while supporting anti-Black and anti-poor policies and politicians. The new racial era claimed equal opportunity. But even as public policies became less racially explicit, their devastating racial impact became more evident. 

Black people became the poster children of the perceived threats that drugs and welfare posed to our nation. And from Reagan’s 1981’s Economic Recovery Tax Act (which cut benefits to vulnerable families and children) to his escalation of the War on Drugs in 1982, Reagan placed Black people and communities in his crosshairs. Black poverty, homelessness and incarceration skyrocketed. The progress that the Civil Rights Movement ushered in, the Reagan Revolution ushered out.  

Despite the intensification of Black suffering, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush largely operated on the political, economic and racial train tracks that Reagan had hammered home. When the nation elected a Black president, many believed our nation had provided proof positive of its racial innocence. Yet Obama’s presidency only revealed the self-deception at the heart of our democracy. 

Today, that self-deception is no longer secure. Somewhere between the chants “Black Lives Matter” and “Make America Great Again,” between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, between George Floyd and Derrick Chauvin, the illusions of our innocence started to crumble. And from Florida to California, citizens across the nation began taking sides. 

And so it is poetic that California, the cradle of the Reagan Revolution, has opened the door to reparations’ revolutionary possibilities. Our nation’s crimes against Black people run deeper than economics can ever reach. So must our work of repair. Reparations call us to remake America and realize that striving to realize political, social and economic equity is what the work of democracy is all about.  

For many, the demand for reparations represents nothing more than a pipe dream. But from California, to corporations, to colleges, to courts, the sparks of reparations are spreading across our nation. Reparations are more than a dream. Like ending slavery and segregation, reparations are a moral necessity.  

Once again, we stand on the threshold of a new racial age. And once again we see the forces fueled by white fears fighting to ensure that the new racial age re-entrenches our racial divisions and injustices. But those forces are not omnipotent.  

The California task force’s report offers us the opportunity to welcome an age of reparative justice and, in Abraham Lincoln’s timeless words, “a new birth of freedom.”

Reparations provide a chance to heal our nation’s racial soul, remake our racial politics and transform dreams of a more egalitarian and interracial democracy into reality. 

Joel Edward Goza is a professor of ethics and the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Simmons College in Louisville, Ky. He also offers Simmons courses in Kentucky Prisons and works with the Jesse L. Jackson Sr. Center for Racial Justice. He is the author of America’s Unholy Ghosts: The Racist Roots of Our Faith and Politics and the forthcoming Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America.