Payments of $5 million to every eligible black adult, the elimination of personal debt and tax burdens, guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years, and purchasing homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family.
These were recommendations made by a reparations committee tasked with how San Francisco should atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the policy-making body of the city, was enthusiastic about the ideas. Some said money should not stop the city from doing the right thing.
Several supervisors said they were surprised to hear of pushback from politically liberal San Franciscans.
The committee hasn’t done a cost analysis of the proposals, but critics have slammed the plan as financially and politically impossible. An estimate from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution has said it would cost each non-black family in the city at least $600,000.
Fewer than 50,000 blacks live in the city. A possible criterion is to be descended from someone ‘incarcerated for the failed War on Drugs’.
Critics say the payouts make no sense in a state and city that never enslaved blacks.
John Dennis, chair of the San Francisco Republican Party, says: ‘This conversation we’re having in San Francisco is completely unserious. They just threw a number up, there’s no analysis. It seems ridiculous, and it also seems that this is the one city where it could possibly pass’.
The panel made the decision to limit reparations to descendants of blacks who were in the country in the 19th century. Others said, however, that this doesn’t take into account the harms that black immigrants suffer.
A person would have to be at least 18 years old and have identified as ‘Black/African American’ in public documents for at least 10 years.