A lively controversy shook San Francisco (California) after the presentation, Tuesday March 14, before the city council, of a plan of “reparations” to compensate for the legacy of systemic racism, which proposes to allocate 5 million dollars ( 4.7 million) to every African American in town.
Discussed at a public meeting on Tuesday evening, this plan was carried out by a commission charged by the municipality to make proposals in order to correct the inequalities suffered by African-Americans in the United States since slavery. “Black Lives Matter. You have the opportunity to show it today, do it with reparations,” Yulanda Williams, a black police officer who advocates for law enforcement reform, told City Council on Tuesday. .
In addition to its flagship measure, the plan contains a hundred recommendations and proposes, for example, guaranteeing a minimum annual income of almost $100,000 for 250 years for each eligible black adult, a house in San Francisco for $1 per family or canceling the debts of the beneficiaries. Its opponents, including elected leftists, denounce an “absurd” project.
“It’s not serious at all and besides being a huge waste of time, it’s also a complete distraction,” the leader of the Republican Party in San Francisco told Agence France-Presse (AFP). , John Dennis. “The city’s (annual) budget is $14 billion,” he said, estimating the cost of this plan at “50 billion.”
Eligibility criteria to be determined
The idea of ??reparations for systemic racism is gaining momentum among the American left, amid studies that show that public policies have for decades increased the odds of the African American population being poor, unemployed or in jail.
After the “Black Lives Matter” movement in 2020, California set up a commission on the subject, whose report is still awaited. Several American cities, including Boston (Massachusetts), have done the same. In 2021, the municipality of Evanston (Illinois), near Chicago, became the first city in the United States to adopt a reparations plan, in particular allocating financial aid to its African-American inhabitants to renovate their housing.
But the program envisaged for San Francisco is by far the most ambitious. The city has several tens of thousands of African-American residents, but eligibility criteria have yet to be determined. A final report must be submitted in June, and the municipal council will then have to decide.
Civil rights activists call for them not to reduce this project to a single measure. “Relegating this issue to a $5 million fight is incorrect and dishonest,” Amos Brown of the NAACP civil rights group told AFP. “It doesn’t show all the terror and pain we went through. My position is that for all that we have endured, it is $5 million plus specific programs” to support economic development, housing, health and education, he added.
