San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Will plans for reparations get support and the funding?
The movement to morally and financially atone for slavery and its related impacts over generations is running into harsh fiscal and political realities.
The concept of reparations has come into sharper focus now that big dollar figures have been attached to it, particularly the proposal by a San Francisco committee that every eligible Black person in the city receive a $5 million payment.
A statewide panel is contemplating payments to a more defined group of Black residents that could total $640 billion, or $360,000 for each eligible person in California.
Such price tags would be controversial anytime, but more so now as California faces a $22.5 billion budget shortfall this year and cities are projecting deficits.
Even before such figures surfaced, polls found that paying reparations did not have broad political support.
But the evil of slavery and subsequent policies that have damaged African Americans both economically and physically have been such that that the question arises: Should politics and costs matter?
Some proponents of reparations have said when judges and juries determine victims must be compensated, the amount is based on an assessment of the harm done, not necessarily the financial wherewithal of who did it.
But the fiscal impact on states and cities and their populations will be an inescapable part of the equation. The Hoover Institution at Stanford University estimated the San Francisco proposal would cost the equivalent of $600,000 for each non-black family in the city.
On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors embraced the city reparations panel’s report of more than 100 recom
mendations, which includes the $5 million payment, though some members expressed concern about the costs. The board did not take action on the specific proposals, which it plans to do later this year.
The debate over reparations has been wide ranging.
Critics often say people who weren’t slave owners shouldn’t have to pay people who weren’t enslaved. In California, some opponents question why payments should be made in a state or city that didn’t enslave Black people.
Proponents of reparations point to a history that shows long after slavery was abolished in 1865, unfettered freedom for Blacks was hard to come by. Beyond Jim Crow laws in the South, government policies and practices led to imprisonment of Black people at higher rates, denial of home and business loans and restrictions on where they could live and work. That includes California.
Slavery was key to generating wealth in the United States.
“. . . by 1836 more than $600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves,” said Ta-nehisi Coates, an author who has written about reparations, citing historian Edward Baptist before a congressional committee.
“By the time the enslaved were emancipated, they comprised the largest single asset in America: $3 billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined.”
San Francisco Supervisor Joel Engardio was among those who voiced concern about whether the city can afford the proposals, but supported some form of reparations. He said some of the city’s neighborhoods used to be hostile to potential homebuyers who were Black, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, including Willie Mays, who had been rejected when he attempted to buy a home in 1957.
“Generations of Black families were denied the transfer of wealth that White families benefit from as their homes increase in value,” Engardio said at Tuesday’s hearing. “Many people who inherit a west side home today could not afford it on their own, but they get to stay in San Francisco because their grandparents were allowed to buy homes when it was cheap.”
That story can be repeated across the U.S.
Legislation seeking reparations for Black Americans has been introduced regularly in Congress since at least 1989, but has gone nowhere. Momentum in mostly liberal states picked up amid the Black Lives Matter movement that grew after a White Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a Black man, on May 25, 2020.
Later that year, then assembly member Shirley Weber of San Diego, now California’s secretary of state, carried a successful bill to create the nation’s first statewide reparations panel. In 2021, Evanston, Ill., became the first U.S. city to commit to reparations — using tax money from recreational marijuana sales to pay $10 million over a decade with the distribution of $400,000 to eligible Black households.
Former President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, spoke of the difficulty in enacting reparations nationwide on a podcast with Bruce Springs teen ,” renegades: Born in the U.S.A.,” in 2021.
“So, if you ask me theoretically: ‘Are reparations justified?’ The answer is yes,” he said. “There’s not much question that the wealth of this country, the power of this country, was built in significant part — not exclusively, maybe not even the majority of it — but a large portion of it was built on the backs of slaves.
“What I saw during my presidency was the politics of White resistance and resentment, the talk of welfare queens and the talk of the undeserving poor and the backlash against affirmative action… all that made
the prospect of actually proposing any kind of coherent, meaningful reparations program... as, politically, not only a non-starter but potentially counterproductive.”
In 2021, a Pew Research Center survey found that only 3 in 10 U.S. adults said some form of payment should be made to descendants of enslaved people. The concept was opposed by all groups surveyed regardless of age, economic status, education or race — save one: Seventy-seven percent of Black respondents favored such reparations. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were split, 49 percent opposed and 48 percent in favor.
In a surprise, the NAACP San Francisco chapter on Tuesday opposed the proposed $5 million payment and many of the other panel recommendations. Instead, the organization suggested broad and lasting investments in housing, jobs, education and health care targeted to improve the lives of Black residents.
Directing money to achieve equity for historically underserved populations is a largely accepted policy at all levels of government. Incorporating that approach as part of reparations seemingly could lessen the apparent opposition.
But the two California committees have raised expectations of substantial payments to individuals. Without them, the reparations may well be deemed another promise broken.
Tweet of the Week
Goes to historian Michael Beschloss (@Beschlossdc).
“It may be possible that future young Americans will be reading in textbooks about Stormy Daniels as a historical figure.”