The Patriot Post® · San Fran's INSANE Reparations Proposal
Where’s Rachel Dolezal when we need her? And Justin Trudeau? And Jimmy Kimmel?
Surely you remember Rachel. She’s the infamous white-as-Wonder-bread race-faker and NAACP chapter president who pretended to be black but was shamed back into relative obscurity in 2015. Apparently, though, the erstwhile Africana studies professor at Eastern Washington University still insists she’s black, and she now goes by the Nigerian name Nkechi Amare Diallo — which might just be enough to win her a share of The Great San Francisco Reparations Sweepstakes.
How about Justin and Jimmy, they of the blackface blackness? If they can convince themselves that they’re really black while at the same time tolerating the cool, damp, sea-air summers, the tent towns, the poop patrols, the used needles, and the sweet stench of urine, they might want to move to San Francisco and stake their claim.
Call it the Gold Rush of 2023.
About those reparations: The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee has recommended — SURPRISE! — that the city pay reparations to its black population. The 60-page draft plan was prepared by the city’s Human Rights Commission staff and submitted to Mayor London Breed and the city’s Board of Supervisors. While the recommendation for reparations isn’t at all surprising, the amount of those reparations is a stone-cold shocker: a minimum of $5 million to each qualifying black resident of the city over age 18.
In addition, the plan recommends total debt forgiveness for the city’s black residents “due to the decades of ‘systematic repression’ faced by the local Black community.” Such forgiveness would get blacks out of “an inescapable cycle of debt” and give them a chance to build wealth. As if such a chance never existed before, not even a tiny one.
The plan further recommends disenfranchising the city’s residents for the next two-and-a-half centuries by implementing a 250-year program of guaranteed $97,000 annual income to low-income black residents. Here, it’s hard for us to imagine what a “low-income black resident” might look like after having just received a lump-sum $5 million gift.
As the UK’s Daily Mail notes, the proposal could cost the city, which has a 2022-23 budget of $14 billion, roughly $50 billion.
As the proposal notes, “The United States was wholly supportive of and dependent upon the enslavement of African people and their descendants as the vehicle that established and propelled the country’s economy.”
Whoa, our nation was “wholly dependent” on black slave labor? And that slave labor was “the vehicle” of the U.S. economy? Someone needs to give the 15-member panel a little history lesson. The fact is, nearly 90% of the American population — including generations of farmers, inventors, and industrialists — provided labor other than the slave variety. (This, of course, isn’t to defend slavery — only to accurately depict its role in the overall American economy.)
San Francisco, which had fewer than 300 residents until 1846, certainly wasn’t built by slavery. San Francisco was built by the Gold Rush of 1849.
Beyond all this, more than a third of San Franciscans are foreign-born — meaning they have no historic ties to slavery anywhere on the American continent. How on earth are they to blame, even in a hard-Left, white-guilt fever dream? Indeed, as National Review notes, “It’s been 40 years since non-Hispanic whites made up a majority of San Francisco’s population, which as of the 2020 Census was 33.7 percent Asian American (including South Asian) and 15.6 percent Hispanic.”
Further, this San Francisco plan focuses heavily on legal discrimination against blacks in the 1940s and 1950s. But if we’re not talking about reparations for slavery, then San Francisco — and California in general — has “a much more egregious history of injustices [toward] Native Americans and people of Chinese and Japanese descent.” Why isn’t anyone beating the reparations drum for either of these aggrieved groups?
Back in July, our Emmy Griffin pondered whether there’s even a limiting principle to reparations once a decision has been made. That question comes up again here, as those covered under the San Francisco umbrella include blacks who came here from foreign countries “as late as 1996 and those who were personally, or the direct descendant of someone, incarcerated by the failed War on Drugs.” (Paging former California Attorney General Kamala Harris.)
As National Review dryly understated it: “Giving someone $5 million for being a heroin trafficker does not seem like justice.”
We covered California’s statewide reparations scheme just last month, as well as the push for reparations in upscale, do-gooding Evanston, Illinois, nearly two years ago. And our former colleague Arnold Ahlert called reparations for what it is back in July of 2020: a leftist-driven racket.
In any case, if you think the woke Democrat Party has inflamed racial tensions in this country already, just imagine how whites and blacks will get along when modestly incomed members of the former group are forced to pay $5 million or more to each and every member of the latter group.
But what are we saying? This proposal is just that — a proposal. Surely the citizens of San Francisco will come to their senses before committing to a course of such all-out idiocy and financial ruin, right? Before grifters like Rachel Dolezal move in, right?
Right?