Reparations Task Force Readies Recommendations Amid Concerns Over Outreach

California’s Reparations Task Force is about two months away from submitting its recommendations to the state Legislature.

As the deadline nears, some task force members and observers are expressing concern about whether the body’s research is reaching people. And the recommendations will require broad public support to survive the intense scrutiny they will likely receive — from members of the Legislature and the public.

On Monday, the task force released a draft of its recommendations (PDF), including calculations for up to $1.2 million in compensation for qualifying residents. The task force is expected to finalize recommendations at its next meeting on Saturday in Oakland.

At the last task force meeting in late March, callers during public comment spoke in opposition of reparations for the first time. In a few instances, the comments included racist stereotypes about Black people, revealing an ignorance of the state’s systemic discrimination against Black residents since its founding.

“The fight for public opinion is now,” Chris Lodgson, a community organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, said at that meeting in Sacramento.

Lodgson’s organization has been holding listening sessions throughout the state for two years to raise awareness in Black communities about the task force. He said he had hoped the task force would take on more of the work building public understanding of the state’s reparations endeavor.

The task force named public engagement as a central goal at its first meeting in June 2021. Then it backed it up with money: In November 2021, the task force entered into a nearly $1 million contract with the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies to develop a series of public listening sessions across the state, and bring in a communications firm to support the sessions and publicize the task force’s findings.

Given the controversial nature of reparations in the United States, task force members emphasized that clear communication with the public and wide buy-in would be essential to the ultimate success of their recommendations. But a year and a half later, the publicity work has been delayed by infighting and complications with communication firms. The first three communications firms quit, and a fourth, Charles Communications Group, only started in September.

“We are at the 11th hour, and the average Black person in California has no clue that this task force has been operating for the last two years,” said one unidentified caller during the late March meeting.

Dr. Cheryl Grills, the task force member initially selected to lead the community engagement effort, acknowledged that the revolving door of communications firms had created confusion.

“It cost the task force a semblance of credibility,” Grills, director of the Psychology Applied Research Center at Loyola Marymount University, told KQED during the March meeting. “People don’t know all the behind-the-scenes things that actually contributed to us being where we’re at with communications. They’re just looking at the surface.”

“We’re very late in the game, not because of the capacity or the skills of these communication firms, but because of the behavior of the chair,” Grills continued, referring to Kamilah Moore, the task force chair.

The first three firms left because of disagreements with Moore, according to Grills and the Bunche Center. The initial two, New York-based A—B and Los Angeles-based Young Communications, were hired together. A—B was to manage a national communications strategy while Young Communications would handle the statewide messaging. But by the winter of 2021, the relationship between Moore and the firms had soured.

In a recent interview with KQED, Moore said that she was skeptical of A—B because of the CEO’s comments critical of the African Descendants of Slaves movement. Moore is a strong supporter of lineage-based reparations for residents with ancestral connections to people enslaved in the U.S.

Grills has spoken in favor of race-based reparations, which would have widened the eligibility pool to include anyone in the state who identifies as Black, regardless of a familial connection to an enslaved person. Experts testifying before the task force suggested this approach would likely face greater legal challenges because of state and federal laws prohibiting policies that favor or discriminate based on race and gender. In March 2022, the task force decided to make its reparations plan lineage-based.

Support of lineage-based reparations is central to the ADOS movement, and Moore felt the CEO’s criticism of ADOS implied A—B would not effectively promote the task force after it committed to a developing lineage-based reparations plan.

At the April 2022 meeting, Grills reported that both firms felt their efforts were being questioned unfairly and in an offensive way by Moore. The firms said work with the task force had become toxic. Both firms resigned by the end of the month.

Young Communications did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In an emailed statement, A—B said that it had ended its “engagement with the task force amicably,” but did not expand further.

Last summer, the Bunche Center and Grills hired Fenton Communications, one of the largest public interest communications firms in the country. According to Grills, Fenton’s previous relationship with UCLA allowed the Bunche Center to avoid a lengthy on-boarding process which, she said, was important considering the task force was already a year into its work.

Moore, who was elected to help Grills direct the task force’s communications in April 2022, said she was excluded from the decision to hire Fenton. When she learned of the hiring, she said she asked for a meeting with the firm. Fenton quit during the meeting.

Moore said she raised concerns about Fenton that were similar to those she had about A—B.

“I pointed out that many of their clients are fervent advocates of race-based reparations, which is fine, but also on top of that have also been very critical of lineage-based reparations,” Moore, an attorney and reparatory justice scholar, said. “I was asking these kinds of questions about potential conflicts and then the person who was running Fenton got really mad.”

Grills said that professional communications firms are capable of representing clients with opposing views without taking sides.

“The way she was expressing her concerns about some of these other clients that Fenton had felt like an unprofessional attack on their clients,” she added. “And they said, ‘We will not accept that. We will not tolerate that. We’re gonna quit before we even get started. We’re done.’ Literally within an hour.”

Fenton Communications did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Charles Communications Group, directed by Shawna Charles, was hired with just 10 months left in the task force’s work. In the time between the departure of Young Communications and A—B, and Charles’ start in September, the task force released its preliminary report (PDF), the first government publication detailing the history and impact of anti-Black policies over more than 50 years. Its release received no communications support and, perhaps consequently, little fanfare.

Charles was recommended to the Bunche Center by task force and Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer. Within three months, Charles said, her interactions with Moore made her ready to quit, too.

Moore said Charles was producing low-quality work. Moore said she spent hours editing spelling and grammatical errors in press releases and social media posts Charles sent her, and that she was candid about her disapproval.

Charles said the mistakes were included in drafts, and that she expected editing to be part of the relationship between her firm and the task force. The errors, she said, were things that could be fixed.

“What’s a big deal to some people, isn’t a big deal to other people,” she told KQED.

Moore disagreed.

“It just feels like people think that Black Americans, particularly who descend from slaves, should be OK with third-rate services, like, ‘Oh, this is normal, you should be glad that there’s people who even wanna help with this type of thing,’” she said. “It doesn’t sit well with me.”

Charles told KQED that she sent an email to Moore and other task force members in December that said Moore’s criticism had become overwhelming and distracting from the work she was hired to do. “We expect you [Moore] to assume responsibility for the task force not having the support it needs,” she wrote.

“At that point, if they had fired me that would have been fine with me,” said Charles, reflecting on the email.

At the task force meeting in December, Grills read an email from the director of the Bunche Center to the audience, which said Charles’ errors in the drafts were editable. The email faulted Moore for driving away firms and stymying the task force’s efforts to engage the public.

That day, the task force voted to remove Grills and Moore from their roles supervising communications. Two other members, Jovan Scott Lewis, a UC Berkeley professor and chair of the school’s Department of Geography, and state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), were selected to take their place.

Charles said that with Moore no longer managing communications, things have gotten easier. “Now I’m not worried about every period, every comma,” she said.

But Grills said delays have cost the task force attention. 

“I think we would be in better shape if we had had a communications firm in place consistently pushing out the messaging and engaging the media,” she said.