SACRAMENTO, CA – A lawsuit has been filed here in Sacramento Superior Court to block a guaranteed basic income program that offers $725 per month to 200 Black, Native American and Alaska Native families in six Sacramento ZIP codes, according to a recent report by The Sacramento Bee.
The lawsuit, filed in late 2024, states, “Plaintiffs seek relief to ensure that defendants cease using government resources or public funds to support this unlawful program so long as it discriminates on the basis of race or ethnicity.”
Sacramento County and Kim Johnson, director of the California Department of Social Services, are listed as the defendants, reported The Sacramento Bee.
Eva Zhou, a resident of Sacramento County, and the nonprofit Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, is listed as the plaintiff, the Bee writes.
In the Sacramento Bee’s article, a spokesperson for Sacramento County’s Department of Child, Family and Adult Services notes “the department was working with its community partners to update and expand the Family First Economic Support Pilot.”
Gabriel Chin, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law, told the Bee having segregated benefit programs is unlawful without “a substantial amount of justification,” adding a program would have to adhere to the “strict scrutiny” standard where “the government must show any race-based program is narrowly tailored to address a compelling state interest for its existence.”
Professor Chin cited, in the Bee story, California Proposition 209, where “the state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”
Chin also noted the strict scrutiny standard can be met if the plaintiff shows a government program to be discriminating against a racial or ethnic group, to which the court will take steps to stop such practices.
Nonetheless, Chin explained to the Bee there is a strong case for reparations given the government’s long history of discriminatory abuse, adding child welfare is “almost five times as likely to remove Black children from their homes as they do white children, and they are nearly twice as likely to separate Native American parents from their children than they do in white families.”
And, Chin said to the Bee, despite making up five percent of the population of children, 18 percent of children in foster care are African American, according to a 2021 reparations report
The Sacramento Bee reported a legislative package is being introduced that aims “to repair the generational harms caused by the cruel treatment of African slaves in the United States and decades of systematic deprivation and injustice inflicted upon Black Californians.”
So, Dr. Chin notes that it’s illegal to discriminate in this manner (which seems like a “no-brainer”), but then goes on to mention reparations.
Which begs the question: Are these legally-provided reparations?
“the state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”
I realize 209 was later, but back when this sort of wording was coming out in the 60’s to protect ‘minorities’, did anyone back then conceive that the wording would be used someday to prevent discriminating practices against ‘white/Asian’ people?
The removal of native children from their families is a long and twisted and complex and sordid tale. I’m not going to even try here, but it’s worth a deep dive for anyone interested.
Also, there was an incredibly well-done episode of “Reservation Dogs” in the middle of Season 3 that had this as their subject in regard to boarding schools (not the same mechanism as what’s been happening in more recent times). I recommend watching, but really watching the whole series which is a gem.
Honestly, they had to do “something” to assimilate native people (children) to ensure that they could function in a new country. Unfortunately, they didn’t simultaneously work toward dismantling the reservation system, as well. You can’t have “sovereign nations” indefinitely remaining within a country, and we’ve already seen the results of that (in more than one way).
Nowadays, someone might even call this “forced cultural appropriation”. (Appropriating the culture/language of the English.)
The establishment of the country (the United States) is not even where that issue began (see Spanish/Mexican colonial mission system, in the West).
“they had to do “something” to assimilate native people (children) to ensure that they could function in a new country.”
You need to look into this more rather than dismissing what was done as ‘helpful’.
I was speaking to the purpose, and I believe I have that part right:
“American Indian boarding schools, also known more recently as American Indian residential schools, were established in the United States from the mid-17th to the early 20th centuries with a primary objective of “civilizing” or assimilating Native American children and youth into Anglo-American culture.”
“In 1891, a compulsory attendance law enabled federal officers to forcibly take Native American children from their homes and reservations. The American government believed they were rescuing these children from a world of poverty and depression and teaching them “life skills”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools
Not sure why they’d bother doing this, if the underlying purpose isn’t as stated.
We’d all be speaking German or Japanese by now, if we lost that war. And we still may end up speaking one of the Chinese languages, some day.
But when Canada becomes the 51st state, at least they already speak English.
I doubt the purpose was as stated. When you break a people and kidnap and indoctrinate their children,f that is a power play. See: Russia kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children for ‘adoption’ or ‘evacuation to protect them from the war’.
Hard to know if there was also an ulterior purpose. It was already an unfortunate situation.
Perhaps they were also trying to dismantle the reservation system (which in my view, would have resulted in a better outcome overall).
I’ve heard some pretty bad things about Catholic schools when I was growing up, but they didn’t kidnap children.
Society did think “differently” back in the day. And actually, we didn’t even evolve out of that.
Regarding Russia/Ukraine, I haven’t looked into that. But truth be told, I don’t view those two sides as all that different (in regard to race, culture, language, shared/recent history under the Soviet Union, etc.). And I understand that some Ukranians see it that way, as well. (Probably a minority of them.)
So, I’d argue that the “mistake” began when the Spanish, Mexican, French, Russian and English governments initiated “colonies” in a sparsely-populated land. (I might have left-out a country or two.)
Then again, would it be “better” if sparsely-populated native tribes existed today in the same manner as they did before the arrival of the “colonists”? Fighting and displacing each other as well?
Ultimately, people suck at times. You can see that today, in regard to tribes fighting each other over the gambling monopoly that they’ve been provided.