S.F. debates reparations for Blacks: Is $5M each enough?

Tasked with calculating how much San Francisco should pay its Black residents for decades of discrimination, a government-appointed panel didn’t develop a mathematic formula. Instead, over the last year and a half, its 15 members have been studying the city’s history.

In the 1960s, city leaders demolished part of the Fillmore District, a neighborhood once known as the Harlem of the West, displacing 883 businesses and 20,000 people, most of them Black. Decades later, thousands of people remain displaced and the neighborhood has turned into a predominantly white enclave of multimillion-dollar homes.

To compensate for that and other instances of racial discrimination, the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee recently recommended that qualifying Black residents receive $5 million each in reparations.

“There wasn’t a math formula,” said Eric McDonnell, chairman of the reparations committee and the principal of Peacock Partnerships, a San Francisco-based consulting firm. “It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed.”

The proposed reparations program is not a recompense for slavery, which was never legal in San Francisco, but instead, the committee’s report says, for “the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery.”

Across the country, more than a dozen cities and states have begun developing reparations programs, attempting to quantify the financial damage brought by slavery and decades of Jim Crow laws. Some proposals envision offering scholarships, or housing vouchers, while others call for Black Americans to receive cash payments.

But many are still struggling to with one central question: How much?

Finding a price tag big enough to satisfy reparations advocates and politically palatable to the white voters polls have shown oppose financial restitution for Black Americans could determine the fate of a movement that gained momentum after George Floyd’s 2020 murder but has yet to find national acceptance.

San Francisco’s $5 million proposal, way larger than amounts discussed in other communities has drawn backlash from conservatives who lambaste the idea as financially ruinous for a city with an annual budget of $14 billion that is still recovering economically from the pandemic.