EJS board member Donald K. Tamaki, a former member of the California Reparations Task Force, responded to The Washington Post’s editorial on reparations in Maryland. The Post published Don’s response (below) on December 30, 2025.
What California’s task force found
In its Dec. 20 editorial “Wes Moore is right about reparations,” the Editorial Board called Maryland’s commission to study Black reparations “foolish” because it is “too complicated to ascertain whose ancestors wronged whom more than 150 years ago.”
The California Reparations Task Force, of which I was a member, found that though slavery “was our nation’s ‘original sin,’ emancipation did not bring an end to the atrocities and deprivations visited upon African Americans. Through lynching and other terror, including the Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, segregation, discrimination, exclusion, and neglect in every facet of life, government at all levels has perpetuated the legacy of slavery. African Americans as a group … live with the persistent consequences of this legacy.”
The harms were not just the result of wrongs perpetrated by individuals 150 years ago, they were the result of government policies designed to systematically subjugate Black Americans.
The Post cited examples of individual Black success to dismiss even the study of reparations, but it ignored huge group disparities that persist. According to a 2021 report from the National Association of Realtors, Maryland’s Black homeownership rate is 52 percent while White ownership is 76 percent. And though Black people make up about 14 percent of the total population, they constitute nearly 40 percent of the federal prison population.
When Congress passed — and President Ronald Reagan signed — the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, they did not view reparations for Japanese Americans as “foolish” or “too complicated.” Nor did the Florida legislature view reparations as “foolish” or “too complicated” when in 1994 it approved them for survivors and descendants of the Rosewood Massacre of 1923.
Maryland legislators deserve praise for the courage of their convictions in advancing reparations as long-overdue simple justice.
Donald K. Tamaki