Charisa Bossinakis
A committee has proposed that longtime Black residents in San Francisco should receive up to USD $5 million (AUD $7.1m) each in a one-off reparation payment.
The monetary number has been proposed by the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, who has been looking at how they can assist the Black population in the city.
While California wasn’t a slave state, the proposal aims to address ‘the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery’.
The draft report reads: "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.”
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It added: “Reparation must be adequate, effective, prompt, and should be proportional to the gravity of the violations and the harm suffered.”
The report includes a long list of recommendations for those who have endured systematic racism, including the $5 million one-off payment.
The committee says this amount hopes to ‘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’.
To qualify, applicants must be 18 or over at the time of the proposal and have identified as Black/American for at least 10 years on public documents.
The report also said applications must meet two requirements on their list, including being 'the direct descendant of someone incarcerated by the failed War on Drugs'.
Applicants also have to have been ‘born in San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and have proof of residency in San Francisco for at least 13 years’ and been a ‘descendant of someone enslaved through US chattel slavery before 1865’.
The committee also recommends striking down the debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for low-income Black households.
The Daily Mail reported that the proposal would cost the city around USD $50 million (AUD $71.5m), which has a budget of USD $14 million (AUD $20m) from 2022 to 2023.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors Aaron Peskin welcomed the report and hopes his colleagues will enact it.
He told the San Francisco Chronicle: “There are so many efforts that result in incredible reports that just end up gathering dust on a shelf."
He added: “We cannot let this be one of them.”