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San Francisco reparations advisory committee proposes $5M payment to each eligible Black resident [1]

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Date: 2023-01-23

The key word here is “draft.” The committee is to submit a final version of the reparations proposal to the city in June 2023, and it may undergo some changes before then. It will be up to the Board of Supervisors to decide whether to accept any or all of the recommendations, and they can also simply ignore the committee's proposals.

Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin told the San Francisco Chronicle that he hopes his colleagues will approve AARAC’s recommendations, although he did not specify whether all the recommendations would gain support. “There are so many efforts that result in incredible reports that just end up gathering dust on a shelf,” Peskin said. “We cannot let this be one of them.”

There is also a major legal roadblock under state law for adopting the committee's proposals. Proposition 209, approved in a 1996 statewide referendum, bans government institutions from taking affirmative actions based on race, sex, or ethnicity. The committee acknowledged that this "poses a challenge to the City to implement programs seen as giving preference.”

So it’s perhaps worth knowing what is going on with this issue rather than get caught by surprise when the committee submits its final reparations proposal later this year. The local ABC News affiliate KATU2 reported:

Even though California was never officially a slave state, the committee argued that both the state and the City of San Francisco have perpetuated "the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression." “[R]eparations are being demanded by members of the Black/African American communities not to remedy enslavement, but to address the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery,” the draft plan explains. “While neither San Francisco, nor California, formally adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of Black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement.”

The report also noted:

The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee has ultimately found that the effects of various programmatic and policy decisions by San Francisco's government have been generational and overlapping. Of particular focus has been the era of urban renewal, perhaps the most significant example of how the City and County of San Francisco as an institution played a role in undermining Black wealth and actively displacing the city's Black population. As the growth of San Francisco's African American population accelerated between 1940 and 1963, public and private entities facilitated and coddled the conditions that created near-exclusive Black communities within the city, limited political participation and representation, disinvested from academic and cultural institutions, and intentionally displaced Black communities from San Francisco through targeted, sometimes violent actions.

“Centuries of harm and destruction of Black lives, Black bodies and Black communities should be met with centuries of repair,” AARAC Chair Eric McDonnell told the San Francisco Chronicle. “If you look at San Francisco, it’s very much a tale of two cities.”

The committee made a number of financial recommendations but the proposal that has generated the most controversy calls for giving eligible Black residents a lump sum payment of $5 million each.

The draft reads:

Rationale: A lump sum payment [of $5 million each] would compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced, and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by City policy.

The committee also recommended reducing the “racial wealth gap” by supplementing incomes in low-income Black households with enough money to reach the area’s median income (AMI) which, according to the report, was $97,000 in 2022. It also recommended a comprehensive debt forgiveness program that "clears all educational, personal, credit card, payday loans, etc." to eliminate the “inescapable cycle of debt” and give “Black households an opportunity to build wealth.”

There were also structural proposals such as creating fairer banking options, establishing an investment trust fund for Black communities, and affordable housing initiatives for renters and homeowners.

The criteria for receiving reparations is that individuals must be 18 or older, and prove that they have identified as African American for at least 10 years. Individuals also must provide proof they fit into two of eight additional qualifying categories. These include: being born in San Francisco between 1940 and 1966 with proof of residency for at least 13 years; being personally, or the direct descendant, of someone incarcerated in the "failed war on drugs”; attending a segregated San Francisco public school; and/or being the descendant of someone enslaved before 1865.

Of course, Republicans and right-wing news outlets slammed the committee's recommendations. Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, a hard-line Black conservative, told Fox News Digital that the proposed $5 million payment and total debt forgiveness "is patently unfair and nothing but a distraction to cover for the incompetence of local Democratic leadership."

The conservative National Review published an editorial on the subject as well. Among the points raised was that "more than 34 percent of San Franciscans are foreign-born, having no historic ties to the American past." The editorial concluded:

Reparations programs that aim to benefit entire groups of people on the basis of long-ago injustices along racial or ethnic lines simply exacerbate racial thinking and racial resentment on all sides. We suspect that the exorbitant price tag will make it easy for even San Francisco to reject this proposal at a time when the city faces many more immediate and concrete challenges to the safety and quality of life of its population. It should also stand as a warning against the madness of reparations.

But Sage Howard, in an opinion piece for HuffPost, was supportive. He wrote:

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