Last month, California’s state government made a new law. It will force everyone who is white, Asian, and Hispanic to pay quote “comprehensive reparations” to almost everyone who is black. It says this is required by quote “the legacy of slavery” unquote.

However, there was no slavery in California. Slavery was abolished there in eighteen ten when it was a mostly empty part of Mexico. Slavery remained illegal in California when it joined the United States forty years later.

Black communities in California have many problems. They include crime, poverty, and violence. However they have nothing to do with what happened in far away southern slave states more than one hundred fifty years ago.

Let’s talk about the real causes of those problems, and how to fix them.