California lawmakers are moving to create a "genealogy office" that would help determine an individual's eligibility for reparations. 

The deep blue state has long flirted with ludicrous proposals to spend hundreds of billions of dollars they can dearly afford to those claiming to be the descendants of slaves.

While previous proposals indicated that they might be willing to hand out checks to anyone who merely identifies as black, lawmakers are now seeking to create an agency that would help assess eligibility. This would presumably involve testing the DNA of applicants.

The Center Square reports:

SB 1403, authored by State Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, would establish the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency. The bill would direct CAFA to implement suggestions from the state’s reparations task force, a body created by the state legislature, which recommended that eligible black residents of California could be owed up to $1.2 million, according to CalMatters.

Chief among the task force’s recommendations was the creation of CAFA as a cabinet-level agency to implement any of the Task Force’s recommendations that are enacted by the state legislature and signed by the governor. CAFA would also create a “Genealogy Office” charged with developing a process for determining and assist with determining individuals’ eligibility for “descendant” status.

Following approval by the Judiciary Committee, the bill retained its clause defining "descendant" as including "descendants of a free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century." 

However, it modified a section referring to "African American descendants of a chattel enslaved person [living in the United States]" to encompass "descendants of an African American chattel enslaved person in the United States."

According to an analysis by the National African American Reparations Commission, there is a very real risk that a lineage-based reparation program could result in thousands of white people also becoming eligible.

The analysis notes:

California is 6.5 percent Black and 72 percent white. Imagine even half those Black people could prove their ancestry was tied to slavery. A large-scale DNA study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics concluded that, nationwide, about 3.5 percent of people who identify as white—including around 5 percent of white Californians—have at least one percent African ancestry. If the task force incorporates the suggestion that lineage can be proven by establishing 'negative evidence,' it is entirely possible that white people could claim the bulk of reparations.

Last June, the California Task Force on Reparations released its final, 1000-page report on the reparations question, concluding that every black person should be eligible for a payment of $1.2 million for past injustices.

"Reparative apologies situate the harms of the past in society’s present injustices, pay tribute to victims, and encourage communal reflection to ensure the historic wrongs are never forgotten and never repeated," it stated. 

"Apologies alone are inadequate reparations to victims," it continued. "But when combined with material forms of reparations, apologies provide an opportunity for communal reckoning with the past and repair for moral, physical, and dignitary harms."

Despite their seeming determination to make amends for historical wrongs, California has never been a slave state. In fact, California's admission to the Union back in 1850 was contingent upon its entry as a free state, which meant that slavery was prohibited within its borders.