San Francisco has backed a plan to pay reparations to eligible black adults, including lump sum payments and homes from as little as $1.
More than 100 recommendations were made by an advisory committee on what forms the reparations should take, but they will not be known in full until later this year, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.
The first public hearing on the plan took place on Tuesday night, as San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors hammered out the proposals, which include a $5 million lump sum for every eligible black person and a $97,000-a-year guaranteed income for 250 years.
The draft of the plan was unveiled in December by the SF African American Reparations Advisory Committee after more than two years of development, with a final plan expected to be filed in June.
However, the extremely generous proposals were slammed as “unrealistic” and “disgusting” this week by a former Black Lives Matter activist turned conservative pundit Xaviaer DuRousseau, who formerly supported BLM, told Tuesday night’s hearing that the plan is a means by which to “indoctrinate people with victim mentality”.
Reparations movements have started spreading across multiple Democrat cities in the US since the death of George Floyd in police custody in 2020. The state of California, along with cities including San Francisco and Boston, are among jurisdictions who have vowed to atone for chattel slavery and decades of policies which systematically denied black Americans access to housing and education.
“As an American and someone who used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, it is disgusting to me that we are more focused on slavery which ended in 1865 then we are focused on the veterans who are on the streets of San Francisco homeless and begging for spare change in 2023,” DuRousseau, who used to live in the Bay Area, said.
“That’s where they need to start sending their money,” he said, adding that he perceived the proposals as part of a move to “indoctrinate” black Americans into dependency.
“This is 111 ways to gaslight black Americans into thinking that we need to be dependent on a system of handouts in order to be successful,” the former Democrat supporter said in an appearance on Fox News.
From BLM to PragerU: Xaviaer DuRousseau Debunks Reparations
“They're selling black people their own oppression because it's profitable to indoctrinate people with the victim mentality.”@XAVIAERD @IngrahamAngle pic.twitter.com/IZKiRXP8Fn
— UngaTheGreat (@UngaTheGreat) March 16, 2023
Critics of the plan have indeed described it as financially impossible – highlighting how the lump sum payment alone would cost $600,000 per household, according to analysis carried out by the Hoover Institute. There have been questions over how it is being discussed without proper consideration of how it would be paid for.
“This is never going to actually happen,” DuRousseau said, adding: “It is so unrealistic to think that the average family in San Francisco is going to be able to pay $600,000 extra a piece.”
Today, while fewer than 6% of residents in San Francisco are black, black people make up 38% of the city’s homeless population. Some supporters of the reparation scheme, including the San Francisco NAACP, have said that the board should reject the proposals to pay-out $5 million lump sums, and should instead focus on reparations through housing, education, jobs, healthcare, and a cultural centre for the black community in the city.
PragerU commentator DuRousseau said that black Americans have been “indoctrinated with these lies” for too long.
“I used to fall for the lies until I took a deep dive into the videos on PragerU.com and realised how easily debunked these fraudulent narratives around systemic racism actually are,” he said, blasting the recommendations as a form of “virtue signalling” by “white liberals”.
‘People are taking full advantage, they are selling their books, they are selling black people their own oppression, because it is profitable to indoctrinate people with a victim mentality,’ DuRosseau said.
However, many of those present at the ‘emotional’ meeting on Tuesday night, where a verse from the 1964 Civil Rights Anthem, ‘A Change is Gonna Come,’ argued that they are owed not only for the time their ancestors were enslaved, but also for generations afterwards.
The impact, they say, has led to African Americans being incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates than white people in America, and has stopped the black community from building generational wealth.
Recommendations discussed at the public meeting also included the cancellation of personal debt and tax burdens, guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years and homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family. Those arguing in favour of the elaborate proposals said money should not get in the way of the city “doing the right thing”.
Adopting any of the proposals would make San Francisco the first major US city to fund reparations. The recommendations lay out a number of possible criteria for those who would be awarded, such as living in San Francisco during a specific time period and descending from someone.
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