Five million dollars a person? A hundred thousand dollars a year for a quarter of a millennium? One Dollar Houses? Righting the wrongs of history is quite a challenge, especially when we look at the greatest of all injustices: slavery.
Ron DeSantis would have preferred not to falter from the start in his race for the White House. The Kulturkampf must lead an anti-Woke crusade. And the Californians are about to impress him.
This spring, a San Francisco committee presented more than a hundred recommendations to the city council aimed at compensating African Americans for the country’s slave past. A working group has to clarify this and present its conclusions by July 1st.
The debate is not new; In Illinois, the city of Evanston became the first city in 2021 to establish a compensation plan for its black population. Boston recently launched its own reflection. However, San Francisco has proved more ambitious, quantifying its share of good intentions as strictly as possible.
WHO PAYS FOR ALL THIS?
The estimate is stratospheric: $200 billion for a city already struggling with a budget deficit of $728 million!
Summing up the first report’s proposals, we arrive at this pharaonic sum: five million dollars paid to each eligible Black adult; the guarantee of an annual income – always for these black adults, but also for their descendants – of at least $97,000 for … 250 years; the conversion of public housing into condominiums that would be offered to every family for…a dollar.
Statewide, $800 billion was to be disbursed, two and a half times California’s annual budget. The task force believes this would be fair compensation for decades of excessive policing, abusive incarceration and chronic housing discrimination.
Forty acres and a mule
Debates about the price to be paid for black slavery have a long history in the United States. In the midst of the Civil War, General Sherman had drafted a special order stipulating that Confederate lands confiscated in Georgia and South Carolina should be divided among formerly enslaved blacks in those states: 40 acres per family. African Americans turned it into a phrase that still stands: “40 acres and a mule.”
The promise was not kept, on the contrary. Black families were prevented from enriching themselves through access to property or higher education. Young black people are always warned to beware of law enforcement. And black companies still have a harder time getting credit than white companies today.
After analyzing only parts of the proposals, an expert from the Hoover Institute estimated the cost at almost $600,000 per non-black household in San Francisco. Even in Woke’s Paradise, the bill is a scandal. It is clear that what is at stake will shine during the battle that prepares for the presidency.
Four troubled centuries of living together
1619
Arrival of the first slaves in the British-American colonies
1863
Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln on the emancipation of slaves
1964
Passed the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting racial segregation in public places
“The descendants of the people enslaved in the United States should be repaid in one way or another. »
spaces
Black
republican
democrats
Source: Pew Research Center, Oct 2021
