Gavin Newsom’s Divisive Racial Pandering

Authored by Kenin M. Spivak via RealClearPolitics,

Leaders should seek to unify people. Instead, California governor and likely 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom is mired in identity politics, dividing his constituents into those entitled to privileges and subventions by reason of their melanin, sex, or sexual orientation – and those who are required to fund the largesse.

He opposed race neutral admissions to the California state university system (overruled by the people of California – twice), imposed gender and racial requirements on corporate boards (held unconstitutional – twice), required ethnic studies and ethnically dumbed-down math in K-12 curricula, and is carefully advancing a potentially multi-trillion dollar reparations plan for California’s black residents.

Newsom’s unconstitutional quest to curry favor with, undermine the confidence of, and potentially spend trillions of dollars on, California’s 2.5 million black residents began in 2020 when he signed AB3121 into law. That act required the state to study and develop reparation proposals for black Californians, with “special consideration” for descendants of slaves.

Then, in 2022, Newsom created a commission to develop policies that impact racial equity and disparities. The following year, it recommended payments exceeding $1 million for each descendant of slaves, as well as housing assistance, guaranteed wages, racially segregated education, and overturning California’s ban on affirmative action in college admissions, among hundreds of other racially abhorrent policies.

Now, Newsom has established a new bureau nominally to develop programs to implement the commission’s report, but with legislative authority to “expand” its mission to address remedies for the “lasting harms” of disenfranchisement, segregation, discrimination, exclusion, neglect, and violence impacting black Californians. The bureau is also authorized to collect nonpublic personal and genetic information to identify those who should obtain preferential treatment.

Newsom vetoed legislation to give admissions preferences to descendants of slaves, which he said colleges can already do; investigate racist property taxes, which is already within the new bureau’s mandate; and allocate 10% of state loans to slave descendants, which is clearly unconstitutional. An appearance of balance is important for a nascent presidential campaign.

Nonetheless, whether borne of intense self-loathing or kowtowing to the radical left, the arc of Newsom’s support for reparations is racist political pandering at its worst.

Reparations are particularly inappropriate in California. The state was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state, in which slavery was prohibited. Its population today is about 37% non-Hispanic white, 39% Hispanic, 16% Asian, and 6% black. Over a quarter are foreign-born.

There is no doctrine in the United States that holds children liable for the crimes of their parents, much less their distant ancestors; nor do children inherit their ancestors’ debts. In 1860, there were 395,216 slave-owners in the 15 states that permitted slavery, and none in the other 18 states. In total, about 5-6% of all U.S. households owned slaves.

Today, most blacks are at least middle class, live in diverse suburbs, and pursue the same careers as do whites. They are doctors, lawyers, and chief executives. With about 12.5% of the population, blacks account for a somewhat larger share of House members and about one-third of the mayors in America’s 100 largest cities. Blacks have held the highest offices in government, from president and vice president to numerous cabinet positions and 22% of current Supreme Court justices.

In a 2002 Gallup poll, 14% of Americans favored the payment of cash reparations to descendants of black slaves. A 2019 Associated Press-NORC poll found 29% approval. In 2024, a Princeton University-Liberations poll found that 36% of Americans supported at least some form of reparations, with 15% strongly supporting cash payments. A 2022 Rasmussen poll and a 2025 YouGov poll and had similar results. About a quarter of blacks oppose reparations.

At least 23 cities and states are considering paying reparations, including New York City, San Francisco, and Boston. Under most reparation proposals, the national cost would range from about $12 trillion to $20 trillion.

While polls usually ask about reparations for descendants of slaves, most commissions also consider payments to other black Americans. A Brookings Institution report justifies giving reparations to wealthy blacks and recent immigrants by the wealth gap between black and white families.

Polls and partisan commissions aside, the 14th Amendment prohibits governments from allocating benefits based on race. The Supreme Court has been clear that our detour into justifying affirmative action and other race-based programs was a “pernicious aberration.”

There have been trillions of dollars of transfer payments to black Americans through welfare, food stamps, loan payments, enterprise zones, minority contracting, and affirmative action. These giveaways deprive blacks of agency and create dependency, not a path toward self-actualization.

Chief Justice John Roberts said it well in the Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action in college admissions: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. … [T]he guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color.”

Gavin Newsom knows all this. He just doesn’t care.