That was then. We’re now eight months into a new, increasingly authoritarian Trump administration, and the great racial reckoning of 2020 feels like a vanished age. Reparations — a hard sell even in magnanimous times — are something of a political orphan. 

But that hasn’t stopped California’s reparations movement and the tough work of turning the more than 100 recommendations of the state task force into law. Last month the California Legislative Black Caucus announced that the Legislature was sending a new package of reparations bills to the governor’s desk. Overall, these bills, while fewer in number than in the first package of legislation last year, are bolder and more ambitious — likely a response to the rift between the Caucus and reparations advocates that happened last year after the Caucus ultimately pulled support from some of its own proposals. 

The most buzzworthy is Assembly Bill 7 by Los Angeles-area Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, which says colleges and universities may consider giving “preference in admissions” to descendants of people who were enslaved before 1900. The bill creates an option, not a requirement, but it offers a workaround in a state where affirmative action in higher education has been banned for 30 years. Not surprisingly, the proposal faced opposition in the Legislature and has been criticized by conservative organizations like the Pacific Legal Foundation.

What’s new about Bryan’s bill is that it recasts the idea of preferential treatment, an accusation white people have leveled at colleges practicing some kind of affirmative action (such accusations never take into account the fact that white people, still the nation’s largest ethnic group, might be recipients of favorable treatment). In AB 7, preference is based not on students’ color but on their lineage, specifically being descended from people who were enslaved before 1900. That would theoretically include descendants not just of Black people but of Chinese immigrants, Native Americans and other groups who all experienced slavery, indentured servitude or other forms of forced labor during that time. 

AB 7 is one of 16 reparations-related bills introduced earlier this year by members of the Black caucus in a package called Road to Repair. Notably, many of the bills don’t include the words “Black” or “African American.” Instead, they describe the population targeted as descendants of formerly enslaved persons, or those victimized by chattel slavery. While framing reparations around lineage rather than race is in some ways a novel strategy, it’s also what Black leaders and legislators have always had to do: thread the needle politically in order to more fully address grievances unique to Black people. 

That strategy will certainly be complicated by Proposition 209, the 1996 California initiative that banned affirmative action in college admissions, as well as the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that banned it nationwide. The complications, however, may have a silver lining. In 2025, things have gotten so extreme and upside down on racial justice that Bryan, a progressive Democrat, and other supporters of the bill’s lineage-based approach cite none other than Clarence Thomas. Why? It was Thomas whose concurrence on the anti- affirmation action ruling said that in the 1860s, when government aid was conferred on formerly enslaved people, that was a “formally race neutral category,” not “black people writ large.” He added that “freedmen” — a term widely used to describe emancipated slaves — was never synonymous with Black.

Thomas was referring to the fact that not all Black people at the time were formerly enslaved, therefore not all Black people were entitled to government assistance — or, extending that logic into the 21st century, entitled to assistance with college admissions. It’s an exquisite irony that a left-leaning Black elected official is using Thomas’ reasoning, even in small part, to argue for reparations, something Thomas decidedly does not support. 

In the bigger picture, Bryan is challenging the Trump-leaning Roberts Supreme Court to uphold its own view that color cannot be the main factor in college admissions or in any other setting that decides who gets benefits and why. With this higher ed bill, Bryan is insisting that reparations is one of those settings. (That “colorblind” view was contradicted by the court’s recent ruling condoning the use of skin color as a factor in rounding up Latino immigrants for deportation. The message is that race is perfectly applicable when doling out punishments, but not benefits.)

The Legislature passed three other reparations-related bills. All four must be signed or vetoed by the governor by Oct. 12. Newsom already has a spotty record on reparations. While he signed some reparations-related bills last year, he refused to entertain proposals on direct cash payments, a sore point for many activists, and undermined a key bill that would have established a state agency to administer reparations (the bill fizzled in the Assembly). It also looks increasingly likely the governor will run for president, and his efforts to  broaden his appeal beyond California mean the fate of this year’s bills are even more uncertain.

Two of them, authored by Inglewood-area Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, aim to narrow the 30-percentage point racial gap between Blacks and whites in home ownership. Assembly Bill 57 would set aside 10% of the funds available through a state program for first-time home buyers for descendants of enslaved people; Assembly Bill 62 seeks to restore land or pay back homeowners whose homes were wrongly taken by “racially motivated” eminent domain. A similar bill was vetoed by Newsom last year. McKinnor is bringing it back, she said in a statement in May, because “existing programs aimed at promoting homeownership do not specifically address the unique historical injustices faced by the descendants of formerly enslaved people. Without targeted measures, the state cannot adequately address the wealth gap and housing disparities rooted in these injustices and discrimination.”

Though Bryan’s higher education bill has garnered the most headlines, perhaps the most significant legislation in the package is Senate Bill 518, a reboot of a key bill that fizzled in the Assembly after Newsom threatened to modify it with amendments. It would establish a state Bureau for the Descendants of American Slavery that would determine who qualifies genealogically to benefit from California’s reparations programs, now and in the future. It’s a high-tech version of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the government office established after the Civil War to help the formerly enslaved transition into a free American society with, among other things, 40 acres of land and a mule. Its efforts lasted a scant seven years, ultimately doomed by the reluctance of white people across the reunified United States to enact meaningful reparations for its most methodically exploited and vulnerable people. 

One hundred and sixty years later, with that reluctance once again dominating political reality, California is betting on being the state that can help finish the job.