What Is FBA? Foundational Black Americans, Lineage Politics, and the Reparations Debate

# A Checkbox, a Lineage, a Fight: How “Foundational Black Americans” Moved From Hashtags to Policy

On a revised California state form, the question arrives with bureaucratic calm: if you identify as Black or African American, you may also indicate whether you are “a descendant of a person or persons who were enslaved in the United States,” **not** a descendant, or whether your status is unknown or you choose not to identify. ([CalHR Website][1])

The line is small. The argument it touches is not.

In the last few years, a set of debates that once lived mostly on social media—about ancestry, reparations, identity, immigration and entitlement—has begun to harden into something more tangible: data categories, eligibility rules, new state offices, and the slow paperwork of a society trying to decide what repair should look like.

One acronym has become a lightning rod in that shift: **FBA**, short for **Foundational Black Americans**.

## What “FBA” Is Trying to Name

On websites that advocate for the label, **FBA is framed as a lineage-based designation**: Black Americans whose ancestry is rooted in U.S. chattel slavery and the generations shaped by it. One FBA site emphasizes that it is *not an organization* and has *no designated leader*, describing the group as descendants of “Freedmen”—formerly enslaved people emancipated in the United States. ([FOUNDATIONAL BLACK AMERICANS][2])

Another platform, “USBA 2025,” describes FBA as “the lineage formed through U.S. chattel slavery,” and casts the project as a national identity framework tied to “restoration and reparative justice.” ([USBA 2025][3])

Supporters argue this is less about inventing a new identity than about **making a specific harmed class legible**—in language, in data, and eventually in policy. You can hear the underlying logic in the California form itself: the state is not merely collecting a race category; it is collecting a possible **eligibility key**. ([CalHR Website][1])

## The Policy World’s Version of the Same Question: “Who Qualifies?”

California has become the clearest example of how lineage debates migrate into government.

In 2022, California’s reparations task force voted—after hours of debate—to recommend that **eligibility for certain reparations be limited to Black Californians who can prove direct lineage to enslaved ancestors**, a decision supporters argued would keep resources targeted and withstand legal challenges. ([CalMatters][4])

Since then, the state has moved from recommendations toward infrastructure. In October 2025, Governor Gavin Newsom signed **SB 518**, creating a **Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery**—a permanent agency tasked, among other things, with confirming descendancy and coordinating reparative initiatives. ([blackcaucus.legislature.ca.gov][5])

Newsom also signed a separate law allocating **$6 million** for the California State University system to research methods for verifying whether someone is a descendant of enslaved people, while vetoing other proposals pushed by the Legislative Black Caucus. ([AP News][6])

The shape of the state’s approach is telling: before California tries to pay anyone, it is building the machinery to answer a question that has haunted reparations discussions for decades—**how you prove lineage, and what you do when the records don’t exist.**

Even outside the reparations arena, the state has experimented with collecting more detailed demographic information. Under SB 189, California updated its employee race/ethnicity questionnaire to include the “descendant” categories by January 2024. ([CalHR Website][1])

This is the world where hashtags become forms: your identity isn’t just a story; it becomes a checkbox.

## Why the Argument Keeps Igniting

The best argument for FBA is also the one that makes people nervous.

Supporters say reparations cannot be a metaphor. It must be a remedy with a claimant class, a documented injury, and a responsible party. A lineage-based category, they argue, prevents a long American habit: diluting specific harm into a general moral sadness that never produces material repair.

Critics hear something else.

Some warn that lineage politics can harden into boundary policing—an identity project that seems to require an “in-group” and an “out-group,” and that can become especially volatile when immigration enters the frame. A major flashpoint is the relationship between U.S.-born Black Americans and Black immigrants—who are often navigating the same racial hierarchy, but not the same historical path into it.

Pew Research has found that **one-in-ten Black people living in the U.S. are immigrants**, and it has also reported income differences between U.S.-born and immigrant Black households in certain years—facts that get cited in online debates as evidence that “Black” is not a single policy category. ([Pew Research Center][7])

But those numbers can do two very different kinds of work: they can help policymakers target interventions more precisely, or they can become rhetorical ammunition in a cultural war over who belongs at the center of Black politics.

That second use is what alarms many observers. Reporting on the related **ADOS** movement (“American Descendants of Slavery”) described fears that it could drive wedges in Black communities and electoral coalitions—especially when the rhetoric turns toward suspicion of Black immigrants. ([ABC News][8])

FBA, in other words, is simultaneously a **policy claim** and a **social sorting impulse**—and which one dominates depends on the incentives of the platform and the speaker.

## A Quiet Compromise Hiding in Plain Sight

It is easy to miss the most revealing part of California’s updated form: not “yes” or “no,” but **“unknown or choose not to identify.”** ([CalHR Website][1])

That third option is not a footnote. It is an accidental philosophy.

Because the truth is that slavery was not just theft of labor; it was also theft of records—names changed, families split, documents destroyed or never created. A reparations system that requires perfect paperwork is a system that risks punishing people for the very crime being repaired.

California’s SB 518 anticipates this by requiring the new bureau to create a **Genealogy Division**—an implicit admission that lineage verification is not a simple matter of personal pride, but a public project, with expertise, support, and guardrails.

The line between justice and exclusion may come down to who gets help answering the question.

## The Opinion Part: Precision Is Not the Enemy—Weaponization Is

A serious reparations agenda will almost certainly need **eligibility rules**—and those rules will almost certainly be challenged in court and politics. In that sense, FBA’s core instinct—*define the harmed class precisely enough to repair it*—is not radical. It is practical.

The risk is that “precision” becomes a moral pose rather than a policy tool.

If lineage becomes a way to sneer at immigrants, to turn Blackness into a purity test, or to treat coalition-building as betrayal, then the category stops serving repair and starts serving status. And the tragedy is that it would do so in the name of people who have already endured generations of loss.

A better frame is to **separate the policy question from the identity performance**:

* If the state is designing *cash compensation* or *targeted restitution* meant to address the specific afterlives of U.S. chattel slavery, it can build a lineage-based eligibility system—with public support for genealogical research and privacy protections.

* If the state is trying to address ongoing anti-Black discrimination in housing, health, education, or policing, it can also pursue broad remedies that do not turn on ancestry paperwork—because racism rarely asks for your family tree.

That two-track approach does something important: it refuses the false choice between **repair** and **solidarity**. It says you can target a remedy without turning the target into a weapon.

## The Checkbox Isn’t the Story. It’s the Doorway.

FBA’s rise is often treated like an internet phenomenon—another set of letters trending, another debate that burns hot and cools fast.

But the California form suggests something more enduring: the argument is moving from vibes to governance. Once a category enters official paperwork, it stops being only a slogan. It becomes a way the state sees you—and, eventually, a way the state decides what it owes.

A nation that cannot name the harmed group precisely will struggle to repair it. A nation that names the group and then turns the name into a knife will struggle to hold itself together.

The hardest work is not choosing between those outcomes. It’s building institutions that make the first possible—and make the second harder to profit from.