Plan to offer apology for racist laws ‘insufficient’

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco’s supervisors plan to offer a formal apology to black residents for decades of racist laws and policies perpetrated by the city, a long-awaited first step as it considers providing reparations.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors was scheduled to vote on Tuesday on the resolution apologizing to African Americans and their descendants. All 11 members have signed on as sponsors, guaranteeing its passage. It would be one of the first major US cities to do so.

The resolution calls on San Francisco to not repeat the harmful policies and practices. There are about 46,000 black residents in San Francisco.

“An apology from this city is very concrete and is not just symbolic, as admitting fault is a major step in making amends,” Shamann Walton, the only black member of the board and chief proponent of reparations, said at a committee hearing on the resolution earlier this month.

However, others say the apology is insufficient on its own for true atonement.

Amos C. Brown, a member of the San Francisco reparations advisory committee that proposed the apology among other recommendations, said: “An apology is just cotton candy rhetoric. What we need is concrete actions.”

An apology would be the first reparations recommendation to be realized of more than 100 proposals the city committee has made. The African American Reparations Advisory Committee also proposed that every eligible black adult receive a $5 million lump-sum cash payment and a guaranteed income of nearly $100,000 a year to remedy San Francisco’s deep racial wealth gap.

No action

But there has been no action on those and other proposals. Mayor London Breed, who is black, has stated she believes reparations should be handled at the national level. Facing a budget crunch, her administration eliminated $4 million for a proposed reparations office in cuts this year.

Reparations advocates at the previous hearing expressed frustration with the slow pace of government action, saying that black residents continue to lag in metrics related to health, education and income.

Black people, for example, make up 38 percent of San Francisco’s homeless population despite being less than 6 percent of the general population, according to a 2022 federal count.

Cheryl Thornton, a San Francisco city employee who is black, said in an interview after the committee hearing that an apology alone does little to address current problems, such as shorter life spans for black people.

“That’s why reparations is important in healthcare,” she said. “And it’s just because of the lack of healthy food, the lack of access to medical care and the lack of access to quality education.”