California Wants Businesses to Confess Their Slavery Sins Under Penalty of Perjury

California just passed a law that forces companies to become amateur historians, and not the fun kind who get excited about old photographs. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Truth In Disclosure Act last week, requiring certain businesses to investigate and disclose under penalty of perjury whether they or their predecessors bought or sold enslaved people. The penalty of perjury part matters here. This isn’t a suggestion or a friendly corporate social responsibility exercise. This is the state government demanding sworn statements about transactions that happened before color television existed.

The law targets companies that were operating on or before December 31, 1964, and pull in more than $100 million in annual worldwide receipts. Those businesses now have homework: dig through records that may or may not exist, trace corporate lineages through mergers and acquisitions that predate spreadsheets, and swear to the accuracy of what they find. Then their findings go into a public online database where anyone can search them. Transparency sounds noble until you realize we’re talking about weaponizing history for modern political purposes.

Democratic Assemblymember Isaac Bryan authored this bill, and it sailed through on pure party lines with 60 Democrats voting yes. Not a single Republican joined them, which tells you everything about where this is headed. The legislation claims to address efforts “to eradicate slavery and human trafficking from its direct supply chain,” but let’s not pretend we don’t see the elephant in the room. This is groundwork for reparations, plain and simple.

Newsom created the nation’s first reparations task force back in 2020. That task force recommended California “disrupt the mental health crisis and county jail,” mandate K-12 Black Studies curriculum, and provide property tax relief to African Americans in formerly redlined neighborhoods. California lawmakers have floated numbers like $1.2 million per person in lifetime restitution. The Pacific Research Institute crunched the numbers and found the total cost would exceed $2.8 trillion. That’s trillion with a T. The state economy would shrink by 11%, and taxes would shoot through the roof. You know what’s funny? California was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state. Slavery was prohibited from day one.

The California Legislative Black Caucus pushed a series of bills last year including a formal state apology for slavery, which Newsom dutifully signed. Democratic Assemblymember Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer Sr. coauthored that apology, which will be “memorialized with a plaque in the State Capitol.” Nothing says meaningful change like a plaque in a building most Californians will never visit. Newsom praised the effort in a 2024 press release, saying “The State of California accepts responsibility for the role we played in promoting, facilitating, and permitting the institution of slavery.” Except California didn’t permit slavery. That’s the historical record speaking, not opinion.

This isn’t California’s first rodeo with disclosure laws tied to slavery. Back in 2000, Governor Gray Davis signed legislation requiring insurance companies to disclose policies issued to slaveholders that covered damage to or death of enslaved people. Those policies existed and they were horrific. But there’s a difference between making insurance companies own up to their specific business practices and casting a net so wide it catches businesses that might have done business with someone who did business with someone who owned slaves. We’re talking about investigative chains that stretch back 160 years through corporate structures that barely resembled modern companies.

The free market already punishes companies with ugly histories when those histories become public knowledge. Consumers vote with their wallets every day. But California Democrats don’t trust that process because it doesn’t guarantee the outcome they want. They want control, they want databases, and they want the power to shame businesses into compliance with whatever comes next. And something is coming next. You don’t build this kind of infrastructure just for transparency’s sake.

New York is watching and learning. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in July that the city must “repair” damage from the slave trade. He told journalist Charles M. Blow he’d consider whatever the city’s Commission on Racial Equity recommends, including cash reparations. That committee releases its findings next summer, and you can bet California’s playbook will influence their recommendations.

Here’s the real question nobody wants to answer: how does forcing modern companies to confess historical sins they didn’t commit actually help anyone? Individual liberty means individual responsibility. Limited government means not creating sprawling regulatory schemes that demand businesses become historians under threat of perjury. Free market capitalism thrives when companies compete on merit, not when they’re distracted by mandatory excavations of century-old ledgers that may not even exist anymore. The road to economic disaster is paved with good intentions and terrible policy, and California is speeding down that road with Newsom behind the wheel.