- By Marcus White | Examiner staff writer |
- Mar 14, 2023 Updated 19 hrs ago (SFExaminer.com)
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors did not vote on giving some Black residents $5 million during a highly publicized hearing on Tuesday.
Tuesday’s hearing centered on a draft reparations plan, authored by a committee that supervisors directed in 2020 to explore and propose ways in which the city could acknowledge and atone for its role in perpetuating racial inequality.
It also included updates on the progress of the city’s “Dream Keeper Initiative,” which redirected millions of dollars in funding previously earmarked for law enforcement towards efforts to support Black residents.
Public comment about those updates and the reparations plan lasted for more than three hours, with the board ultimately adopting the resolution to accept the document at 9:21 p.m. on Tuesday night.
But accepting the document didn’t mean that city leaders also adopted its specific policy recommendations, which include a one-time $5 million payment to eligible Black residents to “redress the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have endured” after a number of “intentional decisions and unintended harms” stemming from city policies.
The draft plan was just that: A draft. The final recommendations are not due to the board, the mayor and the human rights commission until June. Only then will San Francisco leaders take action on the specific proposals, including the potential payments.
Shamann Walton, San Francisco’s lone Black supervisor, introduced the hearing by stressing it was intended only to serve as an “update” on the committee’s work.
Local and national conservative figures nonetheless blasted the potential $5 million figure leading into Tuesday’s hearing. Walton said he wasn’t alone in receiving “racist and disgusting” messages about San Francisco’s reparations work, and Board Supervisor Aaron Peskin said he received correspondence that was “antithetical” to the city’s values.
Committee chair Eric McDonnell told the Washington Post last month that the $5 million proposal wasn’t determined by “a math formula” but to put Black families on “a path to economic well-being, growth and vitality” that the legacies of institutional racism have made impossible.
“The charge of the committee was not to do a feasibility study,” McDonnell said during a presentation in Tuesday’s hearing, adding that the report intended to “chronicle the harm and determine the value” of that harm. The committee said in its presentation that it will “(continue) to work with experts to define and quantify harm.”
A number of supervisors expressed reservations about the potential payments to the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week, whether with the proposed $5 million sum or if the city can afford to make any such payments. Mayor London Breed’s office in January projected a $728 million budget deficit over the next two fiscal years.
Yet each of the supervisors on Tuesday agreed San Francisco has a chance, and an obligation, to right historical wrongs. Supervisor Dean Preston argued it would be costliest to do nothing at all, and Joel Engardio noted there are “dozens” of recommendations San Francisco can easily adopt within its budget from the report. Supervisor Rafael Mandelman said some of the “fury” the report generated within his own district demonstrated the importance of “actually making reparations.”
“Let’s put our money where our mouth is,” Supervisor Connie Chan, chair of the board’s budget and finance committees, said of implementing the report’s recommendations in the city’s forthcoming budget.
Under the draft proposal, Black San Franciscans would only be eligible for the $5 million payments if they met specific criteria, including showing proof that they were born in or moved to the city between 1940 and 1996 and had lived there for at least 13 years.
The draft report, prepared by San Francisco Human Rights Commission staffers on behalf of the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, found that “public and private entities” deliberately disinvested from Black institutions and displaced African American residents.
As a result, according to the authors, San Francisco’s Black population has declined dramatically and “Black people have fallen behind in household income and wealth-building opportunities.” A separate study published last month found the racial homeownership gap is even wider now in San Francisco than it was in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
“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 report reads, noting later that California’s first Ku Klux Klan chapter was founded in San Francisco.
The $5 million figure grabbed countless headlines, but it’s only one of a series of recommendations the committee put forth in the draft report and among dozens of specific actions centered on economic empowerment of Black residents. In all, the committee made 111 recommendations based upon the United Nations’ standards for reparations and covering four areas: economic empowerment, education, health and policy. Its final report is due June 1, and it will wind down its work in January.
@marcuspwhite
Marcus White
Marcus White is a senior digital writer and producer for the San Francisco Examiner.
