A San Francisco committee to study the idea of paying reparations for slavery has proposed that each long-term black resident of the city receive $5 million, though California entered the Union as a free state in 1850.
The city created a reparations committee in 2020, amid nationwide protests and riots fueled by outrage over the murder of Geoge Floyd in Minneapolis, which in turn triggered a moral panic about “systemic racism.”
The State of California also established its own, separate reparations commission, which is due to report later this year to the state legislature.
The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Justin Phillips reports:
The Board of Supervisors created the committee, also called AARAC, in December 2020, amid a national racial reckoning. The board’s legislation, while innovative, was also narrow, allowing city leaders to reject or outright ignore the committee’s work.
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AARAC calls for one-time, lump-sum reparations payments of $5 million to each eligible recipient. The amount could cover the “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 draft states.
To qualify for the payments, residents must be 18 at the time the committee’s proposal is enacted, and have identified as Black or African American on public documents for at least 10 years. They may also have to prove they were born in the city between 1940 and 1996, have resided in San Francisco for at least 13 years, and be someone, or the direct descendant of someone, incarcerated during the war on drugs.
The city’s proposal comes amid a budget crunch that could see many municipal jobs cut, as the city faces a deficit of nearly $300 million in the next two years, despite lavish coronavirus relief funding from the Biden administration.
The state reparations committee is proposing a more modest payout of merely $233,000 per descendant of black slaves. It has also suggested a number of other controversial changes, such as black-only schools.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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