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 homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family.
These are just some of the recommendations made by a city-appointed reparations committee tasked with coming up with payments for Black residents in a liberal city that has been desegregated since 1870 and never had slaves.
A first hearing before the city’s Board of Supervisors on Tuesday could offer a glimpse of the board’s appetite for advancing a reparations plan that would be unmatched nationwide.
Critics have slammed it as financially and politically impossible. One conservative analyst estimated that each non-Black family in the city would have to pay at least $600,000.
Some supervisors have said San Francisco can’t afford any major reparations payments, given the city’s deep deficit amid a tech industry downturn, but they still want to discuss the proposals and consider future solutions. The board can vote to change, adopt or reject any or all the recommendations.
But reparations committee members consider their results to be an accurate estimate of what it would take to even begin to repair the enduring damage of slavery — which was never in California — and they flatly reject that they should figure out how to pay for it.
“We are the harmed,” said Eric McDonnell, chair of San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee. “If the judge ruled in our favor, the judge would not turn to us and say, ‘Help them figure out how to make this work.’”
The idea of paying compensation for slavery, which ended 160 years ago, has gained traction across Democrat-run cities and universities. In 2020, California became the first state to form a reparations task force and is still struggling to put a price tag on what is owed.
The idea has not been taken up at the federal level.
Fewer than 50,000 Black people still live in San Francisco, and it’s not clear how many would be eligible. Possible criteria include having lived in the city during certain time periods and descending from someone “incarcerated for the failed War on Drugs” — as long as their skin color is correct.
Critics say the payouts make no sense in a state and city that never enslaved Black people. Opponents generally say taxpayers who were never slave owners should not have to pay money to people who were not enslaved.
At $5 million per Black resident, with a population of approximately 50,000, the payout would equal $250 billion dollars. San Francisco has an annual budget of approximately $7 billion.
Advocates for reparations say the $5 million per resident is barely enough.
“There’s still a veiled perspective that, candidly, Black folks don’t deserve this,” said McDonnell. “The number itself, $5 million, is actually low when you consider the harm.”
John Dennis, chair of the San Francisco Republican Party, does not support reparations although he says he’d support a serious conversation on the topic. He doesn’t consider the board’s discussion of $5 million payments to be one.
“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.”
Led by Supervisor Shamann Walton, the board created the 15-member reparations committee in late 2020, months after California Gov. Gavin Newsom approved a statewide task force amid national turmoil after a white Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a Black man.
At Tuesday’s hearing, the board could direct staff to conduct further research, write legislation or schedule more meetings. The committee’s final report is due in June.
California’s task force continues to deliberate recommendations, including monetary compensation. Its report is due to the Legislature on July 1. At that point, it will be up to lawmakers to draft and pass legislation, often a time-consuming process.
The state panel made the controversial decision in March to limit reparations to descendants of Black people who were in the country in the 19th century. Some reparations advocates said that approach misses the ongoing harms that Black immigrants suffer.
Under San Francisco’s draft recommendation, a person must be at least 18 years old and have identified as “Black/African American” in public documents for at least 10 years. Eligible people must also meet two of eight other criteria, though the list may change.
Those criteria include being born in or migrating to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and living in the city for least 13 years; being displaced from San Francisco by urban renewal between 1954 and 1973, or the descendant of someone who was; attending the city’s public schools before they were fully desegregated; or being a descendant of an enslaved U.S. person before 1865.
The Associated Press contributed to this article