The fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 positioned the country for a new era of equality and prosperity.

After nearly a half-century of apartheid, however, South African leaders argued that formal equality wasn’t enough. Instead, as the argument went, a transitional period of redress was required. These efforts included affirmative action, land reform and “black economic empowerment,” among others.

South Africa created a dense system of race-based policies across employment, procurement, land rights and licensing. The country embedded racialism throughout the political, educational and economic systems, making identity central to how the government, schools and businesses hired employees, enrolled students, prioritized benefits, bid on contracts and assessed the success of initiatives. 

Today, the hope that followed the fall of apartheid has all but evaporated. And the South African model is being replicated in an unlikely place: California.

During the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom, California’s racialist project has kicked into high gear. Race is becoming an organizing principle of public policy, shaping everything from education and data collection to bureaucratic decision-making and wealth redistribution. South Africa sorted its citizens by race to deny rights, and now California does the same to distribute benefits.

In September 2022, Newsom signed Executive Order N-16-22, which revolutionized the workings of the state government. Newsom ordered state agencies to create or update their strategic plans to “more effectively advance equity.”

What this meant, in practice, was that California would increasingly conduct government business on the basis of race.

Take, for example, the California Arts Council, a state grant maker that distributes funds to local art projects. In 2021, CAC published a training deck to help its members identify “the relationship between government, white supremacy culture, and racial equity practices.”

The California water board makes the state’s racialist ambitions even more explicit. Instead of colorblind equality, the board promotes an “equity approach,” in which “individuals and groups receive different resources, opportunities, support, or treatment based on their specific needs.”

Institution after institution, agency after agency, the effective message is the same: The United States of America is rotten with racism, the government must equalize outcomes and wealth redistribution is justified to achieve that end. This is what the racialist project demands. 

In 2021, the California Board of Education approved a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum “as a guide” for high schools. That same year, the state Legislature enacted a high school ethnic studies graduation requirement. The model curriculum was based, in part, on the “pedagogy of the oppressed” developed by Marxist theoretician Paulo Freire, who argued that students must be educated about their oppression in order to attain “critical consciousness” and defeat their oppressors. 

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin was co-chair of the committee tasked with developing the new curriculum. As one of us reported in 2021, Cuauhtin has argued that the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” 

The state’s updated model curriculum is still riddled with left-wing propaganda. While California doesn’t require school districts to adopt it, the very existence of an ethnic-studies requirement allows school districts to import racialism to the classroom.

None of this has anything to do with ensuring children are proficient in reading and math or are prepared to enter the workforce following graduation.

The May 2020 death of George Floyd, and the ensuing “summer of love,” served as a flashpoint for California’s racialist revolution. Not wanting to let a good crisis go to waste, Democrats seized the moment to push radical policy proposals that previously would have been unachievable, including the creation of the first statewide reparations task force in US history. 

In September 2020, Newsom signed AB 3121. The bill created a nine-member Reparations Task Force to investigate the effects of slavery and racial discrimination on people of African descent living in California and the United States more broadly. In 2021, the task force began its work, with meetings beginning in June and continuing into 2023. 

It is worth pausing to note some important context: The California Constitution of 1849 explicitly prohibited slavery, and when California entered the Union in 1850, it did so as a free state. California was never a slave state. 

Nevertheless, the task force pushed ahead.

In June 2023, the reparations task force released its final report, a 1,000-page doorstop of a document featuring a long list of recommendations. It amounted to a comprehensive vision for the South Africanization of California. 

The report called for a “down payment” on cash reparations, which would give the government time to settle on a final compensation scheme. The task force emphasized the need to communicate to the public that this “initial down-payment” was just “the beginning of a process of addressing historical injustices, not the end of it.” Preliminary calculations indicated cash payouts could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for some black residents; a conservative estimate put the total cost at $800 billion. For context, the entire California budget totals about $350 billion. 

In September 2024, Newsom signed an official apology. “The State of California accepts responsibility for the role we played in promoting, facilitating, and permitting the institution of slavery, as well as its enduring legacy of persistent racial disparities,” Newsom said in an accompanying statement.

California’s Democratic legislators have now set their sights on gutting the legal constraints that hold back the racialist revolution — most notably, Prop. 209, which bans racial discrimination in public programs. On June 9, California Democratic Assemblyman Corey Jackson was speaking at a state hearing on ACA 7, a proposed constitutional amendment that would limit the scope of Prop. 209. 

During the hearing, Jackson, who did not respond to our request for comment, received some pushback from Republican state Sen. Steven Choi, who argued that the “dark age” of discrimination was over. “The Constitution of the United States, [the] California Constitution, specifically states that no person shall be treated differently,” Choi said. 

For Jackson, existing constitutional protections weren’t enough: “What we’re saying is we don’t care what the constitution says.” 

To understand where all this is going, consider today’s South Africa. Since 2011, GDP per capita in South Africa has declined, infrastructure has deteriorated and the unemployment rate is the highest among G20 countries. The South African experiment also demonstrates that once a government chooses the racialist road, it must walk down it further and further. 

Newsom’s ambivalence may be the only thing holding California’s racialist revolution back. The governor has vetoed a handful of reparations bills backed by the state’s Legislative Black Caucus, in some cases citing budget and legal constraints. He probably knows such proposals are unpopular with voters.

But with the creation of California’s Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery, Newsom has built a permanent government agency with an explicit mandate to administer reparations programs. This agency will outlast Newsom’s governorship, allowing his successor to continue the racialist revolution. 

California’s racialist revolutionaries seem incapable of grasping a simple truth: All these heavy-handed policies will not work. No matter how much wealth is seized, no matter how much government spending is redirected to favored racial groups, outcomes in the real world will never look the same as a Census table. These policies failed in South Africa, and they will fail in California, too. 

Blue states take cues from California. What starts in the Golden State often ends up in other state legislatures — and sometimes on the floor of Congress. Americans should reject racism in California for the same reason they should reject it anywhere: because all men are created equal.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Ryan Thorpe is a senior investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute. 

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