A member of California's reparations task force told Newsmax on Wednesday that she is "disappointed" by Gov. Gavin Newsom's reaction to the group's recent report, which recommended several measures to address the issue including cash payments.
Newsom declined to publicly state his support for reparations payments as recommended by the task force's report, saying in a statement: "Dealing with legacy is about much more than cash payments."
Cheryl Grills, a member of the California Reparations Task Force, told "National Report" on Wednesday "We as a task force were charged with shepherding a process to remedy the harms done over 400 years to African Americans in the state of California."
She added that "one of the problems is that the governor may have forgotten that in the Assembly Bill 3121, we were instructed to follow the guidelines of the United Nations on reparations."
Grills noted that one of the components of these guidelines "is, in fact, cash payments for the harms done. And so again, I'm disappointed."
She also said that a lack of support from Newsom is now a major blow to the goal of getting cash payments for reparations.
"The governor is one person, and we have the force of community behind us. We have the support of allies behind us."
Grills said, "We laid out in no uncertain terms the nature of those harms … in a near-500 page report. Then we had economists take a look at what might be the financial assessment of those harms in terms of a cash payment component. They did not do those calculations lightly. They grounded them in empirical data and in numbers, and they came up with some figures for the Legislature to consider."
She went on to say that the report did not "recommend a final figure, and I really wish that the media would uplift that piece. We're not saying each individual or each family should get X amount of money."
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Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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