California school district considers suing companies to pay for repairs

A Berkley school district has the ill-fated idea of ​​paying reparations by suing companies with questionable ties to slavery.

The Berkeley Unified School District’s reparations task force has proposed several ideas for funding possible reparations, including “unrestricted cash payments for BUSD descendant students.”

The task force suggests “filing a complaint against private entities whose historical activities related to the legacy of slavery, particularly redlining, have led to decreased BUSD funding today.”

The term “legacy” must be used because it is uncertain whether the district has any connection to any of the 1,500 slaves who lived in California.

“It is not known whether anyone who was enslaved at this time resided in what is now Berkeley,” the report said.

But the task force’s mission is to consider anyone who is descended from a slave, anywhere in the country. So companies that did business in Berkeley in the 1950s should be targeted for prosecution because of Georgia slave owners in the 1850s. It makes sense if you don’t think about it.

Housing discrimination, known as redlining, is a form of discrimination that developed primarily in the first half of the 20th century, in part because of federal regulations that encouraged it. While housing discrimination still exists, it has fortunately been illegal since the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The task force’s proposal is unfair for the same reasons that reparations generally are. They punish people today for actions committed decades, even centuries ago. There are probably few shareholders today who were involved in the banks’ practices in 1968. And even if there were, the length of time it would take for the trial to reach a conclusion would mean that younger shareholders would end up paying the financial penalty for actions they played no role in decades ago.

Legal costs could run into the “millions of dollars,” the task force estimates. But both examples of similar legal strategies have failed.

The June 6 report cites a case in Illinois where “descendants of individuals enslaved in the United States have sought redress from private companies that were accused of unfairly profiting from the institution of slavery.”

They lost.

He also cites a case, then pending, “brought by survivors and descendants of survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, based on Oklahoma’s public nuisance law.”

This trial also failed on June 12.

The problem may not be so much redlining as the school district, which has conveniently blamed low test scores on racist insurance companies and banks for decades.

The task force wrote: “It is clear that school desegregation, while an important step forward, did not address the impact of the legacy of slavery on BUSD students. Subsequent efforts to address these issues have also failed.”

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The reason the “later efforts” failed is that slavery is not the reason why 26 percent of the district’s black students are reading at grade level and why 20 percent are proficient in math, compared to 67 percent of their peers.

Some of these problems can be addressed through interventions like tutoring, parental involvement and other methods to keep black students in school. But the district will struggle to help its black students as long as it remains stuck in the past and focuses on suing companies on flimsy grounds that have yet to work.

Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner Beltway Confidential Blog. He is an associate editor at The College Fix and previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.