A San Francisco committee recommended qualified black residents should receive $5 million in reparations — even though the city never had legal slavery.
The 15-member San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee released its hefty recommendation in January as part of a 60-page report that also includes debt forgiveness.
“Provide a one-time, lump sum payment of $5 million to each eligible person,” the report reads.
“A lump sum payment would compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced and will redress 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,” it added.
Eric McDonnell, the committee’s chair, said it wasn’t even something they calculated.
“There wasn’t a math formula,” McDonnell told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “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.”
Reparations activists argue the city’s policies have negatively impacted black residents.
Leaders of the Democrat-run city said the proposal is unrealistic.
“I wish we had this kind of money in San Francisco’s general fund but if we want to maintain the services that exist today, we do not,” San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen told The San Francisco Chronicle last month.
While some residents said cannabis taxes could be used to fund reparations, The San Francisco Standard reports it would only raise a little over $10 million annually.
To be eligible for reparations, an applicant must be at least 18 years old, “an individual who has identified as ‘Black/African American’ on public documents for at least 10 years.”
And they need to meet at least two criteria from the following list:
- Born in San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and has proof of residency in San
- Francisco for at least 13 years
- Migrated to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and has proof of residency in San
- Francisco for at least 13 years
- Personally, or the direct descendant of someone, incarcerated by the failed War on
- Drugs
- Record of attendance in San Francisco public schools during the time of the consent
- decree to complete desegregation within the school system
- Descendant of someone enslaved through US chattel slavery before 1865
- Displaced, or the direct descendant of someone displaced, from San Francisco by
- Urban Renewal between 1954 and 1973
- Listed, or the direct descendant of, a Certificate of Preference holder
- Member of an historically marginalized group that experienced lending discrimination
- in San Francisco between 1937 and 1968 or, subsequently, experienced lending
- discrimination in formerly redlined San Francisco communities between 1968 and
- 2008
View the full reparations report below: