California bill prioritizes slave descendants in public college admissions

(The Center Square) - A new California bill could prioritize descendants of slaves for admission to the state’s four-year university systems to address discrimination.

An earlier analysis of ancestry-based reparations shared by the National African-American Reparations Commission suggested there are more white than Black descendants of slaves in California, putting the bill at odds with its stated goal.

California Assemblyman Isaac Brian, D-Los Angeles, told the Associated Press he is soon proposing the reparations-related bill, which targets admissions at the highly regarded California State University and flagship University of California systems — the largest and seventh-largest four-year university systems in the nation.

“For decades universities gave preferential admission treatment to donors, and their family members, while others tied to legacies of harm were ignored and at times outright excluded,” Bryan said to AP. “When folks think about reparations, they think about just cash payments. But repairing the harm and the inequality that came from slavery and the policies thereafter is a much bigger process.”

According to the Census Bureau, 4.4% of children in California are Black, compared to 4% of Cal State students and 4.7% of UC students.

Andrew Quinio, an equality and opportunity attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian public interest law firm, spoke to The Center Square about the bill’s possible interactions with the recent Supreme Court ruling banning direct and indirect race-based admissions, California’s Constitution, and prior reparations bills.

“What SFFA also says you can’t do indirectly what you can’t do directly, and to the extent that one’s ancestry is a proxy for race, that would be unconstitutional,” said Quinio. “This ostensibly can be seen as race-neutral, because they’re saying descendents of enslaved persons would receive admission priority, but if that ancestry is simply just a proxy for race and ethnicity, then that would violate the Constitution.”

“The Supreme Court has determined before that ancestry is race — oftentimes when ancestry is being used to make distinctions among individuals it is meant ultimately as a stand-in for race,” Quinio continued.

Quinio also noted the bill could run afoul of the California state constitution’s ban on consideration of race, sex, ethnicity, color, or national origin in public employment, contracting, and education after the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996.

Earlier this year, the California Senate passed a bill that would have created the California American Freedman Affairs Agency, which would have established a “Genealogy Office” charged with developing a process for determining and assisting with determining individuals’ eligibility for “descendant” status. The bill passed the Senate but failed in the Assembly.

An analysis shared by the National African American Reparations Commission said that white Californians would likely outnumber Black beneficiaries of an ancestry-based program.

“California is 6.5 percent Black and 72 percent white. Imagine even half those Black people could prove their ancestry was tied to slavery. A large-scale DNA study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics concluded that, nationwide, about 3.5 percent of people who identify as white—including around 5 percent of white Californians—have at least one percent African ancestry,” wrote Michael Harriot. “If the task force incorporates the suggestion that lineage can be proven by establishing 'negative evidence,' it is entirely possible that white people could claim the bulk of reparations.”

Quinio wondered whether Bryan’s bill would involve creating a program for the state or its schools to determine whether or not an individual qualifies for admissions priority.

“Maybe there's going to be a companion bill with this that tries to bring that Freedman’s bureau back,” said Quinio. “Are they going to rely on the UCs and the Cal States to figure out who’s eligible on their own?”