By Cristina Laila
California was never a slave state, but the San Francisco “Reparations Committee” is proposing to pay each longtime black resident $5 million and grant them total debt forgiveness for suffering decades of “systemic repression.”
“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 proposed draft says.
“A lump sum payment 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 draft says.
The committee is also proposing the debt forgiveness plan because “Black households are more likely to hold costlier, riskier debt, and are more likely to have outstanding student loan debt.”