San Francisco Council President Shamann Walton
California was never a slave state, but the San Francisco “Reparations Committee” is proposing to pay each longtime black resident $5 million and grant them total debt forgiveness for suffering decades of “systemic repression.”
“While neither San Francisco, nor California, formally adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of Black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement,” the proposed draft says.
“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,” the draft says.
The committee is also proposing the debt forgiveness plan because “Black households are more likely to hold costlier, riskier debt, and are more likely to have outstanding student loan debt.”
But wait! There’s more.
The reparations committee is also planning to supplement lower-income blacks so they can afford housing.
“Racial disparities across all metrics have led to a significant racial wealth gap in the City of San Francisco,” the draft says. “By elevating income to match AMI, Black people can better afford housing and achieve a better quality of life.”
San Francisco Council President Shamann Walton says the millions of dollars in reparations, debt forgiveness and supplemental income is not enough.
“In San Francisco, black families were not allowed to be taught but we still had to pay taxes for the education of white children. I would say that black neighborhoods and communities were created here in San Francisco without the benefit of representation. I would say that there were racial restrictions indoctrinated in city policy that said black people couldn’t buy or lease property,” Shamann Walton told The National Review.
In response to people who may argue they never owned slaves, Shamann Walton said, “wealth was transferred to generations of people who are ancestors of people who participated in slavery.”
Via The National Review:
A San Francisco advisory committee’s recommendation that the city pay out hefty reparations to the city’s longtime black residents does not go far enough toward making things right, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors told National Review on Tuesday.
Supervisor Shamann Walton, who wrote the legislation that formed the committee two years ago, said that the proposed $5 million payment per qualifying person is actually “much less than a lot of the projections that people say black people should receive for reparations here in the United States.”
“You can Google a lot of the reparations work that has been done and look at the monetary formulas that people have put together and most certainly the 5 million is a very minuscule number compared to a lot of research that has been done over the past couple of decades, quite frankly,” said Walton, who has represented the city’s 10th district since 2019 and previously served as board president.
Asked if there is a figure that he views as more fair or appropriate, Walton responded, “Definitely not.”
“I don’t think you can put a figure to taking someone from their country, raping and pillaging their communities, not allowing them the chance to reproduce, not allowing them the chance to raise a family and grow wealth, making them work for free,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a number you can put on what that does to a specific ethnic group or a specific race over the generations to come.”