California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is facing backlash from progressives over his veto of a reparations bill that would have allowed universities to give preference to applicants descended from enslaved people.
Assembly Bill 7, widely supported by Democratic lawmakers, established that California colleges “may consider” preferential treatment for individuals who establish direct lineage to a person subjected to American chattel slavery before 1900. The legislation, one of several reparations measures Newsom has vetoed, did not compel institutions to change admissions policies, and supporters said it was carefully written to withstand legal challenges.
Proponents of the bill said that by focusing on connections to slavery, instead of race, the bill did not violate bans on affirmative action or the US supreme court’s 2023 ruling against race-consciousness in admissions. AB7 also made clear that preferential treatment based on race remained unlawful and institutions could not violate federal law.
In a brief veto message on Monday, Newsom, a Democrat, said the bill was “unnecessary” since “institutions already have the authority to determine whether to provide admissions preferences”. He “encouraged” colleges to “review and determine how, when, and if this type of preference can be adopted”.
AB7 supporters and racial justice advocates said on Tuesday that the veto was a discouraging setback in the long-running reparations movement in California and they were taken aback by Newsom’s opposition to a bill aligned with his stated commitment to address disparities stemming from slavery.
“As a Black Californian and Black American, I’m deeply disappointed,” Isaac Bryan, a Democratic assembly member and AB7 author, told the Guardian. “Black Americans are looking for deeper solidarity in this moment when the federal government is lethally rejecting our existence, our history, our employment in the federal government, our access to institutions of higher learning, and our rights to healthcare and nutritional assistance.”
Bryan said he was surprised by the veto, noting his bill had support from more than two-thirds of state lawmakers and compared with other bills this year, drew especially high numbers of supporters testifying in favor of it. Opposition did not show up to the final two committee hearings and Newsom never offered amendments that could have addressed his concerns, Bryan added.
“The greatest legacy of slavery is the wealth gap between Black Americans and other people in society,” Bryan said. “One of the ways we could have improved upward mobility would have been to allow greater access to institutions of higher learning … We’re going to have to go back to the drawing board and fight for the tangible repair that folks deserve.”
Bryan said he was skeptical of Newsom’s claim that the bill was “unnecessary”, noting that the legislature had previously enacted bills meant to bolster and codify existing state laws and policies. He cited Newsom’s support of his 2024 reform bill to explicitly authorize alternatives to jail that were already happening in some communities, as well as California enshrining established abortion rights into its constitution.
“The veto message was unsatisfactory and hypocritical,” Bryan said. “When you call something ‘unnecessary’ that is this important and meaningful, especially to Black Americans, that language is perhaps more harmful than was realized.”
Newsom’s spokesperson declined to comment.
A reparations rally outside city hall in San Francisco in 2023. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP
Legal scholars were divided about potential challenges the law might have faced. Two experts told the Los Angeles Times the bill was properly tailored to reduce legal risks by supporting a specific descendant community, while critics of the legislation said it was an unconstitutional workaround of affirmative action bans.
Bryan noted the state had poured significant resources into litigation to defend Californians and progressive policies during Donald Trump’s second term. The state, he said, would have been well-positioned to defend AB7, and a court battle could have affirmed California’s right to enact reparative policies, laying the foundation for future work.
He said he was also worried the veto would make California institutions less likely to pursue these kinds of admissions efforts without the explicit support AB7 offered.
The governor’s legacy on reparations is mixed.
In 2020, he signed a first-in-the-nation law establishing a taskforce to study reparations for Black Americans. Last year, he backed legislation offering a formal apology for slavery.
Newsom recently supported the creation of the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery, the first-ever permanent state agency dedicated to advancing reparative initiatives.
This week, however, he also vetoed a bill mandating the state investigate claims from families who say the government unjustly seized their property due to their race, with Newsom citing fiscal concerns. And he cited concerns about legal risks in his veto of a bill that would have set aside 10% of funds from a first-time homebuyers loan program for enslaved people’s descendants.
Dr David C Turner III, who helped coordinate a coalition supporting AB7, said Newsom’s veto “showed a lack of political imagination and lack of political will”.
Turner, a senior adviser for the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, a national network of advocacy groups, said the rejection of the bill by a governor with widely discussed presidential ambitions, was part of a pattern of mainstream Democrats being “afraid of looking too politically woke and too politically left”.
“His opposition is leaning into fascist values and makes no apologies about it. So he needs to lean into progressive values and leftist populism and do the things that are popular because that will actually get him elected,” Turner said. “He wants to position himself as a champion of social justice issues and diversity and higher education … He apologizes for slavery, but when bills come across his desk to actually rectify these things, he vetoes them.”
Turner, who is also a professor of Black life and racial justice at University of California, Los Angeles, said he had seen first-hand the impact of academia’s lack of diversity, noting that in his courses on social movements, community organizing, youth justice and other topics, he often has no more than six Black students in classes with 100 members.
“A lot of talented Black students opt to go to other places, because they want to feel as if their campuses are going to protect them,” he said. Signing AB7, he added, “would have sent a message to California’s Black students and students of color more broadly that we see you and we are going to work to rectify the harm that we the state have caused in your communities.”
Bryan and Turner said AB7 supporters would redouble efforts to get policies enacted that directly address the lingering consequences of slavery and were hopeful the state’s new bureau would create momentum.
Turner said campus groups should fight to make admissions more equitable at their institutions. While there will be discussions of adjusting language or strategies to get policies such as AB7 adopted, advocates’ core intent would not change, he said: “We’re fighting the long fight. This won’t be the last time the governor hears from us. We’re going to regroup and figure this out together, because that is the long tradition of organizing we come from.”
