Advancing Reparations
for Black Californians
ARRT's Reparations Principles
Impactful, Comprehensive, and Transformative
Reparations must fully address the scale of harm—delivering solutions that are meaningful, long-term, and rooted in justice.
Beyond Financial Compensation
Repair requires more than direct payments. It includes systemic change across housing, healthcare, education, and economic opportunity.
Confronting Ongoing Harm
The legacy of injustice is not confined to the past. Reparations must address the policies and systems that continue to shape inequity today.
Collective Responsibility, Collective Future
Reparations are a shared societal responsibility. Building a more just future requires collective understanding, investment, and action.
Strong Support in California
A May 2023 poll from UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies found strong support in California for a range of reparations measures for Black Americans, particularly those focused on systemic reforms and investments in communities.
Data shown sourced from UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs “Black Policy Project”
- Multi-Racial
- Multi-Sector
- Alliance Advancing Reparations in California
- Multi-Racial
- Multi-Sector
- Alliance Advancing Reparations in California
- Multi-Racial
- Multi-Sector
- Alliance Advancing Reparations in California
Five Requirements of Reparations
The United Nations defines five forms of repair: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition.
Together, these approaches recognize a fundamental truth: repair must be comprehensive. It must address what was taken, what was lost, what continues to harm, and what must change to ensure it does not happen again.
Reparations are not just about the past—they are about transforming the conditions shaping our present and future.
Restitution
Makes the victims whole, restoring them to their original position or situation before the human rights violations. It requires restoration of liberty, enjoyment of human rights, identity, family life, citizenship, and return of property.
Compensation
Constitutes economic compensation proportional to the gravity of the violation, meant to account for mental, physical, or other material and long-term harms like lost opportunities or wages.
Rehabilitation
Requires medical and psychological care and legal and social services to eradicate institutional anti-Black racism within healthcare.
Satisfaction
Requires acknowledgment, public disclosure, apology for the harm, and commemorations and tributes to the victims.
Guarantees of Non-Repetition
Requires the harm to cease and never happen again. Non-repetition entails reforming laws that contribute to or allow severe and gross violations of international human rights law and fixing policy and practice in systems of education, healthcare, housing, finance, judiciary, etc., so that these systems, which, by design, underserve Black people/ African Americans, begin to serve and, where necessary, center the needs of historically marginalized Black people.
ARRT In The Media
The point of ARRT is really very basic and straightforward. One, to shepherd the ongoing work of implementing the recommendations
- Los Angeles Sentinel
Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a reparations bill that would have established a process for compensating individuals whose property was
- The Observer
California’s governor signed a slate of bills today aimed at beginning the process of reparations for Black descendants of enslaved
- Cal Matters
