The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is about to formally apologize to Black residents for hundreds of years of “systemic racism,” although giant disagreements nonetheless exist over how the county will deal with previous wrongs.
On Thursday, members of the board gathered to place ahead a seven-page decision that spells out and takes duty for the historical past of discrimination towards Black San Franciscans by way of processes like red-lining and concrete renewal.
The apology decision is one motion taken from a report written by the county’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee, which put ahead greater than 100 suggestions.
“As we proceed this combat for reparations and this combat to proper the wrongs of the previous, this apology decision is simply one other step to attain that objective,” mentioned Supervisor Shamann Walton, who was the creator of the decision.
Walton referred to as the decision “very concrete and never simply symbolic.”
Supervisor Shamann Walton throughout a San Francisco Board of Supervisors assembly in San Francisco final month.
(Jeff Chiu / Related Press)
The decision, which is co-sponsored by 10 of the 11 members of the Board of Supervisors, was moved ahead Thursday to the complete board for a vote.
The reparations committee, which advises the town and county on a reparations growth plan, was fashioned in 2020. It submitted a report back to the mayor and board final July calling for lump sum funds of $5 million to every of the town’s Black residents together with supplementing the earnings of low-income Black households for the subsequent 250 years.
The monetary goals of the committee’s report should not prone to be realized quickly. Mayor London Breed has opposed the money funds, saying they need to be dealt with on the state or federal stage. In the meantime, Californians largely reject the concept of reparations by way of money funds for Black folks residing within the state, based on polling executed by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Research ballot, co-sponsored by The Occasions.
Black Californians, nonetheless, supported the money funds, based on the ballot, with 51% saying they “strongly assist” the concept.
The San Francisco decision was touted as historic by the board, however in the course of the public remark interval quite a few San Franciscans — together with some on the African American Reparations Advisory Committee — expressed skepticism that an apology would result in extra substantive motion.
Eric McDonnell, who chaired the committee, referred to as the apology “notable and important” and a “first step.”
“Nonetheless, it’ll ring hole if it isn’t adopted by lively and even aggressive efforts to handle the pains of the previous by way of financial restore and to disrupt the present inequities by way of coverage and programmatic reform and implementation,” he mentioned.
Some within the crowd thought that was not sufficient.
Former Supervisor Amos Brown referred to as on the board to go additional.
“It’s time we not take steps. We morally must be taking leaps,” mentioned the previous legislator. “An apology shouldn’t be sufficient. An apology is cotton sweet rhetoric. What we’d like is concrete actions.”
