California
‘As Goes California, Goes The Rest Of The Country,’ Except On Black Reparations
Through a series of films in the 1990s, from Boyz n the Hood to Menace II Society and Friday, the perception of Black Los Angeles became ingrained in the minds of people of all backgrounds across the nation. Palm trees and hood politics became synonymous with the neighborhoods. But in a rarity, the films also showed entire communities in a large American city where Black families owned homes for generations.
Today, nearly every majority-Black haven in the city brought to the big screen, like Watts, Compton, Inglewood, and Exposition Park, looks different. These areas across South Los Angeles, which was once 80% Black and home to upwards of 75% of all the Black folks in the city, have since become more than two-thirds Latino. In all, the city’s share of Black residents has dropped from nearly 20% to less than 8%.
It wasn’t by chance, residents and researchers say. “Black People are keenly aware,” said Khansa Jones-Muhammad, an LA resident who often goes by Friday Jones. “There’s a sense of feeling that people are being moved out. Black people know when we are being abused.”
On Tuesday, the city of Los Angeles released a policy report outlining why reparations should be enacted and funded for Black Angelenos.
The report, which took roughly three years to complete and included the surveying of Black Angelenos, found a series of policy decisions — aided by the housing crash of the mid-2000s, the rising cost of living, and the war on drugs — have made life untenable for many Black residents. The report explicitly named policy decisions like redlining, building highways through Black neighborhoods, unequal placement of hospitals, a 1996 law that eliminated the city’s ability to combat discriminatory hiring practices, and several policies around policing and incarceration that specifically hurt Black Angelenos.
Read More: Why the LA City Council Scandal Is About More Than Racist Slurs
A report with specific policy recommendations is expected later this year, although the city has already compiled an analytic report on how to fund the venture. It will come a year after similar assessments were released by the city of San Francisco and a California statewide policy task force. Currently, 14 reparation-based bills born from the statewide task force sit in the California legislature.
California has put forth the nation’s strongest reparations plans, with Los Angeles and San Francisco following suit. But California is not alone in implementing policies that have stunted Black life outcomes. How it proceeds could be a model for the rest of the country.
At a reparations event earlier this month, Cheryl Tawede Grills, the director of Loyola Marymount University’s community-based Psychology Applied Research Center, posed a simple question: “Where in the U.S. are outcomes for Black residents equal to their white neighbors? Think about it.”
“The answer is nowhere,” she said.
In California, Black activists, residents, and policy advocates argue that reparations are an electoral issue that can make or break Black participation in the voting process. Yet, despite a nationwide conversation around reparations in the aftermath of 2020, they believe national leaders have abandoned the fight because they don’t see the issue as a legitimate electoral priority.
“There’s a history of reparations in the United States. It’s just Black people have been excluded from that,” explained Rashawn Ray, a reparations scholar and director of the University of Maryland’s Social Justice Alliance. “It feels like Democrats think that by focusing on reparations, it will be political suicide for the party.”
He noted that many past champions of Black reparations are no longer in power or alive, such as former U.S. Reps. John Conyers Jr., Karen Bass (now LA’s mayor), and Sheila Jackson Lee.
But the national movement, he said, is “here and momentum has built up.” The various examples of California-based commissions have crafted a blueprint for making the local case for reparations nationwide, he added.
In California, a statewide survey released earlier this month found that more than 90% of Black residents say a politician’s support of reparations or lack thereof will dictate their likelihood of voting for them.
Are reparations “political suicide”?
Following the murder of George Floyd, both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris called for a federal examination of enacting Black reparations through a formal study. Yet despite this, policy around reparations has failed to advance this election season.
While a bill outlining the creation of a Black reparations commission and study has sat idle in Congress since 1989, the Biden administration failed to use executive orders to propel the movement.
Outside the Democratic National Convention last week, activists wearing bright orange shirts with the text “Reparations Now! We are far past 40 acres and a mule” called on Black Americans to withhold their vote without serious commitments from the Harris-Walz campaign. The campaign has not outlined a plan to conduct a formal study.
“Nothing happened after Biden was given all the tools to make something happen, and so now here he is stepping down, and Kamala Harris is the party nominee, and we have valid questions for her,” explained Jones-Muhammad, who is vice chair of Los Angeles’ reparations committee.
“We know that as goes California, goes the rest of the country, and we are at a historical moment where we can set the tone for what repair looks like,” explained Kevin Cosney, cofounder of the California Black Power Network. New York is the only state to join California at the state level in advancing task forces, reports, and legislative priorities around reparations.
The question that remains, he said, is: How can national policymakers and candidates “leverage and take the opportunity of reparations, interest, and motivation from Black Californians.”
California vs. America
A bill requiring a newly formed state agency, the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency, to implement some of the 115 policy recommendations by the state’s task force is being deliberated in California’s Senate. The bills currently in the legislature would do things like establish a fund for “community-driven solutions to decrease community violence” in Black communities, eliminate barriers for formerly incarcerated people to obtain business licenses, and craft a formal apology from the governor’s office for “human rights violations” against African slaves and their ancestors.
Read More: California’s Reparations Plan Exposes Deep Divides in Black Communities
Still, at the state’s current pace of closing the racial equity gap, it would take over 248 years until a Black child would have the same average life outcomes as a white one, according to a recent report by the University of California, Los Angeles. Experts say this slow progress underscores the urgent need for immediate and effective policy changes.
A 2020 statewide poll found that most state residents support at least some reparations-based policy shifts. As expected, the survey also found that Black and younger Californians supported reparations more than their counterparts of other races and ages. Still, while much of the state supports more structural elements of reparations, more than half oppose direct payouts for Black residents.
Still, last year, San Francisco abruptly axed its reparations office, effectively ending any legislative work around it.
Some activists and researchers have said the overwhelming concentration of Black people experiencing homelessness in the state and nationwide is the “strongest case for reparations.” Los Angeles’ reparations report found that about 60% of Black residents report being impacted by environmental injustices. The report also found that over 75% of Black residents say the city policies and law enforcement practices negatively impact them.
Read More: The Quiet Toll of Oil Drilling on Black Los Angeles
But not everyone is sold on the likelihood of reparations. Brooke Floyd, the co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly, a social justice organization in Mississippi, said the federal government is unlikely to pass reparations for slavery because it means federal agencies, like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency, would also be forced to acknowledge their modern-day failures in protecting Black people.
“These are whole communities that have been, over time, divested from and disinvested in, and these have led to things like lack of investment in education, health care, and housing with crippling effects over time,” said Floyd, a prominent activist around Jackson’s water crisis.
“When you have this happen, have these long-term ramifications for whole races of people, acknowledging it and providing reparations is going to open a whole can of worms. I don’t think the federal government wants to do that because it shows these things are all linked together.”
The post ‘As Goes California, Goes The Rest Of The Country,’ Except On Black Reparations appeared first on Capital B News.
Around half of California waterways tested by regulators are contaminated with pesticides considered Pfas, “forever chemicals”, a new analysis of state and federal records shows, highlighting a risk in the substances’ wide use that is only beginning to come into focus.
The pesticides are linked to a range of health problems, including cancer, and the review is the first to systematically check for the dangerous substances in streams and rivers, which include drinking water sources.
More than half of sediment samples also showed some levels of the pesticides, which are increasingly applied to California and the nation’s food crops.
The review of California department of pesticide regulation and United States geological survey data was released this week, just days before a proposal to eventually ban Pfas pesticides failed to make it through the state assembly. However, pieces of the legislation, including a moratorium on approvals of the new pesticides, passed.
The findings are “alarming but not surprising”, said Varun Subramaniam, one of the report’s co-authors with the Environmental Working Group (EWG) non-profit.
“It’s concerning that we’re finding these levels of Pfas pesticide … but they were applied at really high rates on produce, so it makes sense that they’re in the streams and sediment,” he said.
Pfas are a class of at least 16,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant. They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they can persist for thousands of years in the environment, and are designed to be indestructible.
The chemicals are added as an active ingredient to food crop pesticides to kill weeds or insects, or used as an inert ingredient. At least 60% of active ingredients in pesticides fit the most widely accepted definition of Pfas, a 2023 analysis of EPA data found.
California farms applied an average of 2.5m lb of Pfas per year on cropland from 2018 to 2023, a review of state records last year revealed. Recent regulatory testing found the pesticide residues on 37% of all produce. But about 90% of peaches, plums and nectarines contained Pfas, while 80% of strawberries and grapes showed them.
Public health advocates have said the pesticides almost certainly pollute nearby water sources, and the new analysis confirmed their theory. Regulators only tested streams from 10 counties, and found the highest concentrations in agricultural areas, including Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties.
Previous research showed the highest applications of Pfa pesticides in Fresno and Kern counties, but water pollution data was not collected in those regions. The results are “almost certainly an undercount” because of the limited scope, Subramaniam said.
At least 10 Pfas in pesticides were identified across the state. The pesticide bifenthrin, which is among the most toxic and linked to cancer, was found in all San Luis Obispo waterways, and more than 80% of samples in Stanislaus county, which holds Modesto and portions of the Central valley.
The health threat is difficult to determine because pesticide laws do not require companies to assess many of the health threats common to Pfas, like immunotoxicity, reproductive harm, or hormone disruption, in part because the regulators do not have proper resources, Subramaniam said. Regulators also do not consider the cumulative effect of drinking water contaminated with the Pfas, then eating produce containing its residues.
“The fact that the chemicals are permitted is largely because we’re not considering all the ways that they can harm us,” Subramaniam added.
Amid pressure from the powerful agricultural lobby, the proposal to fully ban Pfas pesticides by 2035 failed, but the moratorium on new pesticides survived. The California Farm Bureau, in its opposition to the bill, wrote that the legislation is an “overly broad and unworkable approach that departs from science-based regulation”. It argued that California farmers would be put at an economic disadvantage with little health benefit to the public.
The legislation still includes a new requirement that pesticides come with warnings to farmers that alert them that they are using Pfas with health and environmental risks. Susan Little, California legislative director for EWG, said most farmers are unaware that they are spreading Pfas on food crops.
The legislation also gives local leaders more power to limit the pesticides’ use, and defines the pesticides as Pfas, which is in line with most scientific definitions. California’s pesticide office currently uses a narrow definition of Pfas that is favored by industry in part because it excludes smaller compounds like those used in pesticides.
Advocates say the legislation is especially needed with the Trump administration rushing to approve more Pfas pesticides for use. California’s pesticide office also recently reapproved the Pfas insecticide sulfoxaflor despite that its approval has repeatedly been struck down by state and federal courts over its high toxicity to honeybees and other pollinators.
Little said advocates are “disappointed” the ban did not make it into the final bill, but added the bill, if approved by the state senate, “will continue to address and reduce the use of Pfas pesticides in California”.
California lawmakers are again considering A.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems.
The problem this year is the same as last year: it’s practically impossible to comply with this law. The bill demands information that often does not exist, and cannot realistically be obtained.
EFF submitted an opposition letter to the California Senate Privacy Committee explaining why we continue to believe A.B. 412 is simply unworkable. To the extent developers do follow this law, it will have the effect of locking in the power of the largest companies in AI.
A Burden That Can’t Be Met
A.B. 412 sounds simple: just have AI developers create and keep a list of all the registered copyrighted works they use in AI training.
That may seem straightforward. In practice, it’s anything but.
There is no machine-readable “list” of copyrighted works at the U.S. Copyright Office. And many copyright holders can get a copyright without even depositing a publicly viewable sample of the work—for example, software companies may register copyright on proprietary code without revealing it to the public.
And on the open internet, copyright information is often incomplete, unavailable, or impossible to verify. One image may be registered with the copyright office, while the next is licensed under a free Creative Commons license (like the images that EFF creates), and the next is public domain. A message forum user might post an original story, photograph, or poem without any indication of ownership or registration status.
The bill effectively asks developers to continuously cross-reference massive batches of online data against a copyright system that simply wasn’t designed to do so. If California passes A.B. 412, its impact will go far beyond the large AI companies we read about in the headlines.
Not Just Big Tech
Supporters often frame this bill as a way to help creative workers have some leverage against Big Tech, but the bill reaches much further than the big AI companies.
Its definition of “developer” extends to anyone who makes a generative AI model available to Californians. That includes indie developers tinkering with an existing model, open-source initiatives, nonprofits, and other non-commercial efforts. Recent amendments added exemptions for universities and government entities, which is important, but that still leaves out a vast swathe of non-commercial tech work that’s done by people without full-time jobs in government or academia.
Large companies will hire compliance teams and lawyers to navigate these requirements. Smaller organizations and independent developers usually can’t. The result will be fewer opportunities for startups and new entrants. Faced with this massive compliance burden, some won’t even try.
Courts Are Already Deciding These Questions
The bill is premised on the idea that copyright owners currently don’t have good remedies if they’re mistreated by AI companies. That simply isn’t true. And the growing wave of federal court filings in this space prove it. Content companies that want to sue tech companies, large or small, have no problem doing so. Those courts are still working through important questions about fair use and transformative use. Some courts have already concluded that many AI training activities qualify as fair use. Others continue to evaluate the issue.
California lawmakers should not rush to impose new state regulation while those questions remain unresolved. This is why copyright is governed at the federal level: both creators and fair users benefit from a single set of nationwide rules.
At this point, the bill remains a solution in search of a problem. Rights holders already have powerful tools to protect their interests under existing federal law. What this bill adds isn’t clarity or transparency, but a costly and essentially impossible compliance burden that will discourage small developers and researchers.
California has been able to support both artistic creativity and tech innovation for decades now. But A.B. 412 does not strike the right balance.
If you are a California resident and interested in speaking out about this bill, you can find and contact your representatives through this website.
Donald Trump has alleged without evidence that Democrats are cheating in California’s primaries and claimed in a late-night social media post that the US attorney’s office in Los Angeles was investigating.
As counting continues in the most populous state in the US, the president’s unfounded remarks are likely to further alarm election observers, who have warned of the risk of escalating misinformation in the absence of a final result.
Trump has a history of undermining election results that don’t go in his favor. He has repeatedly alleged that Democrats “stole” the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden, despite privately admitting his defeat, according to aides.
At 12.48am on Thursday, Trump posted: “The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.”
“There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California,” he said 17 minutes later in another post on his Truth Social platform. “Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY??? President DJT”.
The US attorney’s office said it had no comment on Trump’s claim that his allegations of cheating are “under investigation” by US attorneys. The Department of Justice in Washington DC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The president presented no substantive basis for questioning the legitimacy of the election.
Mail-in ballots factor heavily in California political races – typically about 80% of votes cast – and those ballots can be counted up to a week after election day, as long as they are postmarked before election day.
California uses a “jungle” primary process, in which the two candidates with the most votes advance to a runoff – regardless of their political party – unless one candidate wins an outright majority. A huge field of 61 candidates fragmented the vote in the race for governor, but Republicans have coalesced around Steve Hilton. Together with Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer, the three are in a contest that remains too close to call as votes are tallied.
Mail-in ballots tend to favor Democrats, which implies the possibility that Hilton – whom Trump has endorsed – may drop into third place by the time all the ballots are counted.
The last Republican to win the California gubernatorial race was Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. Republicans have polled just under 40% in each of the last four contests.
Last month Gavin Newsom sent a letter to elections officials to thank them for their work while warning that a long process invites disingenuous accusations of misconduct.
“We must acknowledge that the longer the vote count takes, the more mis- and dis-information spreads,” wrote the California governor. “That means we must do all that we can to tabulate votes quickly and accurately. Time is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking root.”
On Wednesday evening, election observers echoed those concerns. “Conducting elections with integrity and ensuring that every eligible vote is counted are fundamental to maintaining public confidence in our democracy,” said Mike DuHaime of the Democracy Defense Project, a bipartisan effort to combat election misinformation.
“At the same time, prolonged delays in ballot tabulation, such as those that have become increasingly common in California, can undermine public trust and create unnecessary uncertainty around election outcomes,” DuHaime added. “The longer election results remain unresolved, the greater the opportunity for misinformation and speculation to spread online, eroding confidence in our electoral process. Accuracy must always remain the highest priority, but accuracy and timeliness are not mutually exclusive.”
-
San Francisco, CA8 minutes agoFirst Thursdays kicks off Pride Month in San Francisco
-
Dallas, TX15 minutes agoDallas Cowboys Defense is ‘Annoying’ CeeDee Lamb and That’s a Good Thing
-
Miami, FL18 minutes agoTampa Bay Rays vs Miami Marlins Live Stream: How to Watch MLB
-
Boston, MA23 minutes agoOrioles news: O’s win series in Boston
-
Denver, CO30 minutes agoDenver Broncos roster review: OLB Dasan McCullough
-
Seattle, WA33 minutes agoYour Seattle-area weekend events guide: Pride, pinball, and car shows! – MyNorthwest.com
-
San Diego, CA38 minutes agoOpinion: The city should honor its agreements with the Padres
-
Atlanta, GA42 minutes agoWith World Cup, Atlanta Seeks to Show How It Has Moved on From 1990s Notoriety
