San Francisco was the scene of lively controversy on Wednesday after the city council was presented with a “reparation plan” to compensate for the legacy of systemic racism, which proposes allocating $5 million to every African American.
That plan, discussed Tuesday night at a public meeting, was carried out by a commission charged by the city with making proposals to correct the inequalities suffered by African Americans in the United States since slavery.
“Black Lives Matter. You have an opportunity to demonstrate it today, do it with reparations,” Yulanda Williams, a black police officer who is campaigning for law enforcement reform, told the city council on Tuesday.
In addition to its flagship measure, it includes a hundred recommendations, proposing, for example, guaranteeing every eligible black adult a minimum annual income of nearly $100,000 for 250 years, a $1-per-family home in San Francisco, or debt relief for beneficiaries.
Your opponents denounce an “absurd” project.
“It’s not serious at all and besides being a huge waste of time, it’s also a complete distraction,” Republican Party leader John Dennis told AFP. “The city’s (annual) budget is $14 billion,” he said, estimating the cost of that plan at “50 billion.”
The idea of redress for systemic racism is on the rise on the American left amid studies showing that American public policies have increased the odds of being poor, unemployed, or in prison for African Americans for decades.
California established a commission on the issue following the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the report of which is pending. Several cities have done the same.
In 2021, the community of Evanston, near Chicago, became the first American city to enact a reparations plan that gave its African-American residents, in particular, financial aid to renovate their homes.
But the San Francisco plan is by far the most ambitious.
The city has tens of thousands of African American residents, and eligibility criteria have yet to be determined. A final report must be submitted in June, after which the municipal council must make a decision.
Civil rights activists urge you not to reduce this project to a single measure.
“To reduce this issue to a $5 million fight is wrong and dishonest,” Amos Brown of the NAACP association told AFP.
“It doesn’t show all the horror and pain that we went through. My position is that for everything we endured it’s $5 million plus specific programs,” he added, to support economic development, housing, health care and education.