San Francisco apologizes to Black residents
SAN FRANCISCO — Supervisors in San Francisco formally apologized Tuesday to African Americans and their descendants for the city’s role in perpetuating racism and discrimination.
“On behalf of the City and County of San Francisco, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors offers its deepest apologies to all African Americans and their descendants who came to San Francisco and were victims of systemic and structural discrimination, institutional racism, targeted acts of violence, and atrocities,” the resolution reads in part.
All 11 board members signed on as sponsors of the resolution.
It is the first reparations recommendation of more than 100 proposals made by a city committee to win approval. 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.
But there has been no action on those and other proposals. Mayor London Breed, who is Black, said 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.
San Francisco joins another major US city, Boston, in issuing an apology. Nine states have formally apologized for slavery, according to the resolution.
The resolution calls on San Francisco not to repeat the harmful policies and practices, and to commit “to making substantial ongoing, systemic, and programmatic investments” in Black communities. 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,” Supervisor 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.
Others say the apology is insufficient on its own for true atonement.
“An apology is just cotton candy rhetoric,” said the Rev. Amos C. Brown, a member of the San Francisco reparations advisory committee that proposed the apology among other recommendations. “What we need is concrete actions.”
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.