Gavin Newsom’s racial pandering knows no bounds
Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
In a 2002 Gallup poll, 14% of Americans favored the payment of cash reparations to descendants of black slaves. A 2019 Associated Press-NORC poll found 29% approval. In 2024, a Princeton University-Liberations poll found that 36% of Americans supported at least some form of reparations, with 15% strongly supporting cash payments. A 2022 Rasmussen poll and a 2025 YouGov poll had similar results. About a quarter of blacks oppose reparations.
At least 23 cities and states are considering paying reparations, including New York City, San Francisco, and Boston. Under most reparation proposals, the national cost would range from about $12 trillion to $20 trillion.
While polls usually ask about reparations for descendants of slaves, most commissions also consider payments to other black Americans. A Brookings Institution report justifies giving reparations to wealthy blacks and recent immigrants due to the wealth gap between black and white families.
Polls and partisan commissions aside, the 14th Amendment prohibits governments from allocating benefits based on race. The Supreme Court has been clear that our detour into justifying affirmative action and other race-based programs was a “pernicious aberration.” There have been trillions of dollars of transfer payments to black Americans through welfare, food stamps, loan payments, enterprise zones, minority contracting, and affirmative action. These giveaways deprive blacks of agency and create dependency, not a path toward self-actualization.
Chief Justice John Roberts said it well in the Supreme Court’s decision ending racial preferences in college admissions: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. … [T]he guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color.”
Gavin Newsom knows all this. He just doesn’t care.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
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