The Racialist State

With a whole-of-government effort tilted toward equity, California is poised to become the next South Africa.

It is hard to overstate the hope that followed the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The newly elected African National Congress was well positioned to move the country into a new era of equality and prosperity for all citizens. South Africa not only had abundant natural resources at its disposal but also boasted a well-developed industrial economy and the continent’s top university system.

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 for nonwhites was required. These efforts included affirmative action, land reform, and “black economic empowerment,” among others. For example, the government bought white-owned farms and distributed them to black South Africans, many of whom lacked the skills and knowledge to run them successfully. As a result, once-profitable farming operations fell into disrepair and underuse, weakening both economic productivity and food security.

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. South Africa now struggles—literally—to keep the lights on. Power outages are so common that many middle-class families buy generators. Suburban homes regularly feature tall security gates and electric fences to fend off violent thugs. The number of truck hijackings along the nation’s highways are “high even by global comparisons,” according to one scholar. Those who can afford it pay for private security to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.

Corruption is rampant. South Africa’s race-based procurement model shows “systemic signs of corruption and political interference,” according to the World Bank and the OECD. President Cyril Ramaphosa boasts an estimated net worth in the hundreds of millions as of 2015. Former president Jacob Zuma has faced a litany of corruption, fraud, racketeering, and money-laundering allegations.

Predictably, the measures deemed necessary in the aftermath of apartheid have become permanent. For many of the country’s leaders, the question is no longer whether racial redistribution is permissible; instead, the question is how extreme the racial redistribution will be. Race has been reinforced as a continual site of social conflict, instead of fading into the background of a multiethnic society.

Three decades later, the South Africa model is being replicated in an unlikely place: California. The state’s leaders have increasingly embraced a radical, race-based vision of politics that echoes South Africa’s post-apartheid experiment in racialized government.

For much of the twentieth century, California was a refuge for those fleeing the racism and discrimination of the Deep South. During the Great Migration’s second wave, black families set up in Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco, seeking middle-class jobs and a better life for their children. California was seen by many as a utopia, with stunning physical beauty, abundant economic opportunity, and a political culture that embraced individualism and meritocracy, rewarded risk taking, and upheld the equality of all people under the law. That era is over.

This City Journal investigation—based on an extensive review of government records, reports, and legislation, as well as interviews with leading legal scholars—reveals that during the past 15 years of one-party rule, California Democrats have worked tirelessly to import South Africa’s post-apartheid playbook to the Golden State.

During the administration of Governor 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.

The road between Pretoria and Sacramento is shorter than you would think.

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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.” When agencies “identified disparities,” the governor instructed them to respond by changing their organizational “mission, vision, goals,” and more.

What this meant, in practice, was that California would increasingly conduct government business on the basis of race. The order encouraged bureaucrats to adopt “inclusive practices,” help “disadvantaged business enterprises” access federal infrastructure dollars, and administer state programs through a racial equity lens. In other words, the executive order effectively enshrined the principle that California’s government would prioritize citizens based on the color of their skin.

Newsom’s order echoed talking points from post-apartheid South Africa. In California, the governor emphasized the need to “address[] disparities for historically underserved and marginalized communities.” In South Africa, the government sought to “remove discriminatory barriers of the apartheid past.” Both created a permanent bureaucracy devoted to the racial transformation of society: South Africa launched the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Commission to “enhance the economic participation of black people”; Newsom’s executive order established a Racial Equity Commission to develop a whole-of-government “Racial Equity Framework.”

Newsom’s executive order was predicated on the notion that racial disparities are presumptive evidence of systemic discrimination. That notion is increasingly embedded across California government: Newsom stacked the Racial Equity Commission atop a sprawling, preexisting DEI infrastructure that had already metastasized across public institutions. It is not an exaggeration to say that California’s public institutions—from state government down to school classrooms—have been infected by racialist ideology.

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.” CAC’s racial equity page defines “racial equity practices” as “closing the gaps so that race no longer predicts one’s success,” and claims the “power elite” in the American colonies—and apparently the modern U.S.—“constructed white supremacy (and construct it still) to define who is fully human and who is not.”

The California Water Boards make the state’s racialist ambitions even more explicit. “Providing the same resources, support, or treatment does not guarantee that everyone will have fair or equal outcomes,” a racial equity page published on CWB’s website reports. Instead of colorblind equality, CWB promotes an “equity approach,” in which “individuals and groups receive different resources, opportunities, support, or treatment based on their specific needs.” From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

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

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In 2021, the California State 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.”

Cuauhtin also developed a “mandala” that accuses whites of committing “theocide” against indigenous tribes and replacing their gods with Christianity. The solution, according to Cuauhtin and since-cut material from a draft curriculum, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” through “transformational resistance,” with the ultimate goal being to “decolonize” American society.

The model curriculum encouraged teachers to lead students in a series of songs and affirmations. One of those affirmations, “In Lak Ech,” encouraged students to chant “Tezkatlipoka”—a god whom the Aztecs worshipped with human sacrifice—asking for the power to be “warriors” for social justice. Then, students would chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, searching for “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Finally, the chant would climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, decolonization,” as students shout “Panche beh!” (In 2022, the California Board of Education and Department of Education removed the chant after a nonprofit and three parents sued the state for violating the First Amendment.)

The state’s updated model curriculum is still riddled with left-wing propaganda. The curriculum includes a sample Native American Studies lesson, for example, that hopes to “inspire” students to take “critically conscious action” and teach them to “identify counterhegemonic truth telling.” A University of California–approved course outline appended to the curriculum recommends that students study Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and examine issues like the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

While California doesn’t require school districts to adopt the state’s model curriculum, the very existence of an ethnic-studies requirement allows school districts to import racialism to the classroom. In San Francisco, for example, the local school district approved an ethnic studies curriculum that described Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther who murdered a cop, as a “political prisoner,” targeted “white male privilege,” and asked what “white males need to give up (or relinquish) in order to make a more equitable society.”

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. Rather, the point is to create foot soldiers for the racialist revolution.

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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 United States history.

In September 2020, Newsom signed A.B. 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. At a September 2022 meeting, the task force provided an update on community feedback it had received so far. One significant trend was “acknowledgment” that the “Black Community” had been “Exploit[ed] by ‘whitey.’” Another respondent called for “the redistribution of wealth, number one, bar none.” Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine Segal Professor of American Social Thought Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, submitted testimony for another meeting calling for just that: “The reparatory justice movement is needed to bring about a redistribution of the wealth in the United States and to repair the damage that corporate capitalists and federal and state government have done to individuals, groups, and communities in the past and present,” she said.

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 task force recommended, among other things, the creation of a reparations agency; compensation packages; subjecting all state laws to “racial impact” analysis; criminal-justice reforms; investments in housing and education; and initiatives to address health disparities and wealth gaps. It also recommended that the state legislature formally apologize “for the atrocities committed by California state actors who promoted, enforced, and facilitated the institution of chattel slavery and its ongoing legacy of systemic discrimination.”

For cash reparations, the task force suggested payouts not only to individuals who descended from enslaved people but also to anyone with a descendant who was black in America prior to the beginning of the twentieth century—even if that ancestor had been a free person. Since “discriminatory policies made no distinctions between” slaves and their descendants, the task force reasoned, “compensatory remedy must do the same.”

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 thousand dollars for some black residents; a conservative estimate put the total cost at $500 billion. For context, the entire California budget totals about $350 billion.

The report made a host of other recommendations to remake California. The task force called for the creation of a state agency to oversee existing government agencies, including the Department of Justice. It called for free tuition for postsecondary students, eliminating standardized test requirements for state-university graduate programs, and instituting single-payer health care. It urged the implementation of rent control in formerly redlined areas, adding green spaces in black neighborhoods, and greater investment in “food justice” initiatives for the black community.

The task force also demanded a “right to return” for black Californians whose ancestors had been displaced from neighborhoods or communities by the government. The task force elsewhere pointed to a case in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County, which served as an example of this “right” in practice. In the 1920s, a black-owned beachfront property had been seized by Los Angeles County via eminent domain. In 2022, the county returned the land to the heirs of the former owners, who then sold it back to Los Angeles County for $20 million.

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. “Building on decades of work, California is now taking another important step forward in recognizing the grave injustices of the past—and making amends for the harms caused.”

The governor didn’t stop there. In October 2025, he signed S.B. 518, which established California’s Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery. This permanent state agency is responsible for administering and verifying eligibility for reparations programs. Newsom also signed legislation earmarking up to $6 million in funding for the California State University system to study ways to verify descendant status, apparently to determine eligibility for future reparations payouts.

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When reviewing the demands made by the California reparations task force, an obvious question comes to mind: Are all these proposals legal? Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project and an adjunct fellow at Manhattan Institute, seemed to have doubts.

“I don’t think California’s legislators have been terribly committed to pretending to use racial proxies [as other states do],” Morenoff said. “By and large, the California legislature doesn’t play that game. They are very transparent in telling you what they are doing: ‘We are creating a benefit for a particular race’. . . . I always work with the rule of thumb that if the California Legislature is in session, someone is proposing some insane identitarian proposal that is obviously unconstitutional. And I can’t think of a single instance where I’ve been proven wrong.”

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, 2026, California Democratic State 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 received some pushback from Republican State Senator 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.

Jackson, who did not respond to our request for comment, suggested that existing protections weren’t enough: “What we’re saying is we don’t care what the constitution says.”

Despite all the progress that California’s racialist revolutionaries have made during the Newsom administration, progressive activists outside government, and Democratic legislators inside of it, want to go further.

The California Budget & Policy Center published a paper in April 2021 outlining how the state could use tax policy to pursue “racial equity.” The center argued in its summary of the paper that “[c]enturies of racist policies, from enslavement, land theft, and genocide,” among other policies, are responsible for “American Indian, Black, Latinx, and Pacific Islander Californians” being “less likely to have high incomes than white and Asian households.”

The solution, according to the group, is to use ostensibly race-neutral means to raise taxes on whites and Asians in order to funnel the money to preferred races. State Senator John Laird and Assemblywoman Mia Bonta both spoke at the California Budget & Policy Center’s annual conference this year.

In November 2026, the California Budget & Policy Center may get its wish. This fall, Californians will vote on a proposed “billionaires tax,” which would impose a one-time, 5 percent tax on anyone with a net worth above $1 billion. The tax would be retroactive, with significant anti-avoidance provisions. California has about 200 billionaires, most of whom are white or Asian.

If the proposal passes, it will be disastrous for California. It will result in a drain of human capital, as well as major capital flight to other jurisdictions, significantly reducing the state’s tax base. This would be especially devastating at a time when taxpayers are already fleeing California in large numbers.

Every year of the Newsom administration, California has suffered a net migration loss. Between 2020 and 2024 alone, the state experienced a net domestic migration loss of more than 1.4 million people. The mere proposal of a billionaires tax has prompted the state’s wealthiest residents to look elsewhere: Pirate Wires spoke to about 10 percent of the state’s billionaires and found that “[a]lmost all of them have either purchased property out of state or are in the process of buying property out of state now.”

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 in 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.

Since 1994, roughly 20 percent of freehold farmland formerly owned by whites has been transferred to or purchased by blacks. The government, however, doesn’t feel this is enough. By 2030, South Africa wants to bump that figure up to 30 percent. The nation’s government has also debated constitutional changes that would allow land expropriation without compensation.

Back in California, state Democrats are pushing A.B. 801, known as the California Community Reinvestment Act. If passed, the bill would create new obligations for state-chartered banks, credit unions, fintech firms, and mortgage lenders. Assemblymember Mia Bonta, the bill’s sponsor, said that it is “[d]esigned to narrow the racial wealth gap,” benefitting “historically underserved communities” and “communities of color.”

Last year, California’s Legislative Black Caucus introduced a suite of bills aiming to further the racialist revolution, including one that would prioritize higher education admissions for descendants of slaves and another that would “allocate a portion of Home Purchase Assistance funds to first-time home buyers who are descendants of American chattel slavery.”

On and on it goes. These measures are far more than the ad hoc diversity trainings common during the era of “peak woke,” or toothless symbolic announcements. These policies and proposals represent a concerted effort to strip wealth from whites and Asians and redistribute it to favored racial groups.

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.

We reached out to Newsom’s office for comment on this story. In an after-deadline response, an official suggested that we were not journalists and did not answer our questions about the state’s policies.

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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.

The revolutionaries also refuse to recognize another obvious fact: rather than being the racist nightmare they make it out to be, America has had formal legal equality among the races for more than 60 years, not to mention a robust welfare state and decades of affirmative action policies.

The effort of California leaders to forge a racialist state offers two warnings. The first is for Californians. If you believe that citizens should be treated as individuals, rather than as stand-ins for their group identity, then it’s time to punish politicians at the ballot box. If their incentives don’t change, their actions won’t, either.

The second warning is for the rest of America. 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 racialism in California for the same reason they should reject it anywhere: because all men are created equal.

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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.