No mathematical calculations justify a San Francisco committee’s recent proposal to provide $5 million in reparations to long-term black residents of the city, according to a report by the Washington Post.
As Breitbart News reported last month, the committee, formed in 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter movement, “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 proposal came despite the fact that the city is facing a staggering budget deficit as businesses and residents have fled.
Now, the Washington Post reports, “conservatives” (among others) are questioning the price tag, which was largely invented out of thin air:
“There wasn’t a math formula,” said Eric McDonnell, chair of the reparations committee and the principal of Peacock Partnerships, a San Francisco-based consulting firm. “It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed.”
…San Francisco’s $5 million proposal, magnitudes larger than amounts being discussed in other communities, has drawn intense backlash from conservatives who lambaste the idea as financially ruinous for a city with an annual budget of $14 billion that is still recovering economically from the pandemic. The proposal doesn’t explain who would qualify, but if even a fraction of the city’s 50,000 Black residents met the criteria, it would consume a huge amount of the city’s annual budget.
Separately, the State of California has its own reparations committee, which recently considered a more modest proposal to pay each black descendant of slavery up to $233,000 in reparations.
The Post notes that San Francisco is only one of several Democrat-run governments — most in former “free” states — to be considering reparations policies.
Boston, MA – February 7: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, second from right, poses for a photo with members of her new reparations task force at the Museum of African American History. (Photo by Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The first was passed by the city of Evanston, Illinois, in 2021.
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.