(The Center Square) — California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed a number of controversial figures to California’s Racial Equity Commission, including activists seeking to overturn the state’s affirmative action ban and one who sought to use race to prioritize access to COVID vaccines.
Newsom established the commission in 2022 through executive order and secured funding through the state legislature for staffing and support totaling $3.8 million for fiscal year 2023-2024, then $3.1 million annually through fiscal year 2029-2030. The commission is set to “recommend tools and opportunities to advance racial equity and address structural racism.”
“At this moment of national reckoning on racial justice, I’m proud to appoint these diverse leaders to advise our ongoing work to ensure that all our communities have a fair shot at achieving the California dream,” said Governor Newsom.
In a press release, Newsom noted that each of the commission’s announced eight appointees are Democrats. They do not require confirmation from the state legislature.
Newsom appointed Dr. Larissa Estes as the commission’s executive director, for which she will earn $162,588 per year. Until now, Estes served as director of ALL IN Alameda County, an organization within the Alameda County Board of Supervisors formed on the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, to wage a “New War on Poverty.”
In 2016 Estes co-authored a pro-affirmative action article in a publication called Diverse Education titled, “White Privilege Undermines Diversity in Higher Education.” In the piece, targeting the United States Supreme Court’s initial decision to hear Fisher v. The University of Texas at Austin, an anti-affirmative action case, Estes wrote, “Continuing with business as usual — reflecting the mindset of Justice Scalia and his proponents — will regrettably reinforce the history of racism, classism, and exclusion in the U.S. and fail to recognize the overall purpose of affirmative action.”
California has maintained a ban on affirmative action in state government since 1996 that was reaffirmed by a majority of voters in 2020. The United States Supreme Court also recently imposed a nationwide ban on affirmative action in college admissions in late June.
The remaining seven appointees are unpaid, and represent activists from across the state.
Appointee Virginia Hedrick, Executive Director of Indigenous-focused health 501c(3) California Consortium for Urban Indian Health, went on NPR in 2020 to declare, ““When we think about the historical injustice of this nation, of California, isn’t now the time to say that for the first time we prioritized Indigenous people?” she says. “We started to make reparations in the way that we handled and treated the Indigenous people of this continent?” when advocating that Indigenous Americans be moved to “the front of the line” to receive vaccinations.
Appointee Manuel Pastor, director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California, however, is among the most conciliatory of the appointees, focusing more on data and bridging racial divides. In a column in The Los Angeles Times titled “Racial divides in Los Angeles politics are wrong morally and pragmatically.” Pastor promotes a rejection of “petty identity politics.”
The creation of this commission mirrors that of the Reparations Task Force created to outline rationale for and financial approximations of reparations to be paid to African Americans from the state’s coffers. First formed in 2020, the nine-member task force, according to analysis from CalMatters, met for over 200 hours of public hearings before deciding on a reparations recommendation of more than $800 billion, or more than two and a half times the size of the state’s annual budget.
