In January, the San Francisco Reparations Committee decided each black resident should receive $5 million.
Why? Feelings.
Chairman Eric McDonnell admitted the panel didn’t use a “math formula.”
“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,” McDonnell explained to The Washington Post.
So can I use this as a reason to demand $5 million in reparations for the treatment of Italian immigrants and Catholics?
Legalized slavery never existed in San Francisco. Instead, the $5 million is for “the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery.”
The report states the $5 million “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 committee also demands the city to supplement the “African-American income of lower income households to reflect the Area Meridian income (AMI) annually for at least 250 years ($97,000 in 2022).
Economist William A. Darity Jr. has called for reparations but admitted the amount should be “somewhat realistic.” He said the $5 million payout “undercuts the credibility of the reparations effort.”
The $5 million proposal frustrates Amos Brown, a member of the reparations task force, because “[I]t distracts from the report’s other recommendations.”
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