Gloria Pierrot-Dyer, of Roseville, speaks during the public comment portion of the Reparations Task Force meeting at the CalEPA Building in Sacramento on Friday, March 3, 2023. The task force is studying reparations proposals for African Americans, with special consideration for U.S. descendants of enslaved persons. (Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
San Francisco politicians met earlier this week to mull over a reparations package that would pay eligible Black residents $5 million in lump-sum payments.
The city’s Board of Supervisors is currently and publicly considering the draft plan, which recommends eliminating tax issues and personal debt by giving out guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years to a yet-to-be-determined number of Black citizens, according to the New York Post.
That would be in addition to the $5 million, the outlet reports.
Under the plan, Black families could also purchase homes for just $1 in the notoriously expensive city.
The reparations package aims to make amends after centuries of systemic racism and slavery, all of which have disadvantaged Black Americans in all scopes of life.
“It is not a matter of whether or not there is a case for reparations for Black people here in San Francisco. It is a matter of what reparations will and should look like yet,” Supervisor Shamann Walton, who is Black, said at the hearing’s opening, “and still we have to remind everyone why this is so important.
The board is not going to make any decisions on the 100 recommendations noted in the plan until June, including the controversial $5 million-per-person reparations payments.
Only after June can the Board of Supervisors vote to reject, adopt or alter the recommendations put forth in the package.
Complicating matters is the fact that the report does not include any kind of feasibility study to ascertain whether the city can even afford to follow through with the massive reparations package.
And the plan is not without critics.
Those against the proposal deem it impossible, especially considering San Francisco is undergoing a huge deficit at the moment as the tech industry experiences an industry downturn.
But not all critics oppose reparations, as San Francisco Republican Party Chairman John Dennis said that while reparations are in order, $5 million per person is extremely unrealistic.
“This conversation we’re having in San Francisco is completely unserious. They just threw a number up, there’s no analysis,” Dennis said. “It seems ridiculous, and it also seems that this is the one city where it could possibly pass.”
As it stands now, one estimate projects the plan could cost the city upwards of $50 billion. The city only has a 2022-2023 budget of $14 billion, the Post reports.
Meanwhile, a conservative analyst claims the package would cost every non-Black family in San Francisco at least $600,000.
“There’s still a veiled perspective that, candidly, Black folks don’t deserve this,” said Eric McDonnell, chair of San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee. “The number itself, $5 million, is actually low when you consider the harm.”
There is no number of eligible Black San Franciscans as of this article’s publication.
Qualified applicants have to be at least 18-years-old and have identified as Black on public documents for at least a decade.
They will also have to prove that the meet at least two of eight additional criterion – which includes being born or migrating to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996, having proof of residency for a minimum of 13 years, being a direct descendant or personally imprisoned amidst the “failed War on Drugs,” as well as being a descendant of someone enslaved prior to 1865.
The rest of the state of California has also been mulling over its own reparations package that would pay $360,000 to eligible Black Californians.
That proposal would cost an estimated $640 billion, however no plan has been put in place that would see the project funded in an otherwise cash-poor state.
