Hearing on San Francisco reparations pushed back, other groups seek $

On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors of the City/County of San Francisco was scheduled to take up the proposal of the African American Reparations Advisory Committee.

The meeting was delayed until next month because the supervisor who sponsored the effort, Shamann Walton, was stuck down in Columbia, South America, due to a travel snafu.

You will recall that the proposal calls for an immediate lump-sum payment of $5 million per eligible person, plus an annual payment of $97,000 per year, for the next 250 years, for each eligible household.

An opinion piece published in the San Francisco Examiner argues that Chinese residents of the City by the Bay should be next in line for reparations. The piece cites the long history of discrimination perpetrated against this immigrant group over the centuries.

Chinese Americans represented over one-fifth of The City’s residents in 2020, more than 180,000. How to propose redress for that many people? One idea sponsored by three supervisors, to provide an $118 million equity fund for nonprofits, did not happen. 

The Committee’s work anticipates this scope creep. In addition to documenting the actions taken by the City/County against African-American residents, it also documents discrimination against Japanese (p. 28), Latino (p. 22), and LGBTQ (p. 16) residents, among others.

We’ll continue to monitor this effort as it moves along.