San Francisco residents lined up at a city board meeting last night to share their full-throated support of a wide-eyed reparations plan that would award every black resident $5million, wipe their personal debt, guarantee $97,000 incomes for 250 years and $1 homes.
But no one at the emotional meeting – where residents burst into song and begged to be made ‘whole’ – asked how the struggling, debt-addled city might pay for it.
Reparations are being considered in various Democratic cities around America as a means of providing compensation to the descendants of enslaved African-Americans.
Many say they are owed not just for the time their ancestors were enslaved, but also for generations afterwards, because African Americans have been incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates than white Americans.
The proposals put forward in San Francisco last night are among some of the most generous to be heard to date.
Those who advocated for them last night did so whole heartedly. One sang a verse from the 1964 Civil Rights anthem by Sam Cooke, A Change is Gonna Come.
The Board of Supervisors who heard the suggestions last night can vote to adopt some or all of the recommendat
The board will not decide on whether or not to adopt the recommendations until later this year, once the committee which put forward the draft plan has submitted a final report.
Another meeting has been scheduled for September.
The board however signaled its enthusiasm for the plan last night.
‘If you look at the (draft) report, you’ll see so many examples of how black folks were done wrong here in San Francisco, and all of that can really be traced back to the negative effects of slavery,’ Walton said last night.
Sgt. Yulanda Williams, the president of the police association Officers for Justice, told them: ‘My dad always taught me never to beg. And I am not begging you today.
‘It is time for you to do the right thing and provide us with reparations: make us whole.’
Tinisch Hollins, vice-chair of the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, alluded to those comments, and several people who lined up to speak reminded the board they would be watching closely what the supervisors do next.
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