California is closer than any other state to realizing reparations for Black people. Now, the state faces a make-or-break moment.
In his 2020 book, Begin Again, Eddie Glaude Jr.’s meditation on the modern relevance of the writer James Baldwin, Glaude describes how Baldwin returned to the United States from Paris in 1957 to witness a civil rights movement that was seriously getting underway. Traveling through the South, Baldwin was struck by how American life was still defined by a belief in the inferiority of Black people, and further struck by how that enduring lie would likely prevent white people from transforming the nation. He believed that until he died in 1987.
Now, 37 years later, the lie that never went away has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in U.S. politics, overwhelmingly on the right, that threatens to engulf the whole republic. It has taken the form of attacks on Black history in education,…