- By Marcus White | Examiner staff writer
- Sep 11, 2023 Updated 7 min ago (SFExaminer.com)
More than half of registered voters in the Bay Area oppose cash payments to descendants of enslaved Black people as reparations, according to a statewide poll published this week.
The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies on Sunday published poll results indicating that 59% of California voters, and 52% in the Bay Area oppose the California Reparations Task Force’s recommendation to create a guaranteed income program for Black Californians who are descended from enslaved people.
The 6,030 registered voters polled were not asked about reparations in San Francisco, but the findings could have an impact upon The City’s own reparations programs. Among the more than 100 policy recommendations San Francisco’s task force released in July, the committee suggested a one-time, $5 million lump payment for eligible Black San Franciscans to “redress the economic and opportunity losses (they) have endured.”
The legislative bodies that commissioned the state and city reports — the California Legislature and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, respectively — are tasked with enacting the recommendations, but neither has indicated that reparative payments are coming soon, or at all.
Mayor London Breed, the first Black woman to serve as San Francisco’s chief executive, said she opposed cash payments shortly before The City’s reparations report was released this summer. Amos Brown, a longtime civil rights leader who served on San Francisco and California’s task forces, told The Examiner in June that he opposed the $5 million figure, but not the idea of cash payments.
Both committees were assembled in the wake of the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, as leaders across the state sought to address persistent disparities along racial lines. Sixty percent of statewide respondents to the IGS poll, and 69% of those in the Bay Area agreed a little, somewhat, or a great deal that “the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in California today.”
Yet that agreement didn’t translate to majority support for financial remuneration among any of the groups polled, save for respondents who identified as Black (76%) or strong Democrats (52%). Reparations proposals in California and elsewhere have received prominent attention in conservative media, and 90% percent of respondents who identified as Republicans said they opposed the statewide proposal.
Public opinion polling on civil rights initiatives and legislation for African Americans has, historically, been nuanced and malleable.
Fifty-eight percent of Americans approved of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act in a Gallup poll shortly after it became law, for instance, but 68% said a month later that the law should be gradually, rather than strictly, enforced.
Poll after poll in the 1960s indicated opposition to the pace and tactics of the civil rights movement, and even leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. Six decades later, that’s largely not the case, the Pew Research Center found in a poll published last month.
Ninety-four percent of Americans polled last month had a favorable view of King, compared to the 41% in a May 1963 Gallup survey. Majorities of Americans whom Pew polled in August said boycotts (59%) and marches and demonstrations “that don’t disrupt everyday life” (70%) were always or often acceptable. In May 1964, months after the March on Washington, 74% of Gallup respondents said mass demonstrations were more likely to hurt African Americans’ pursuit of racial equality.
