$5M payment remains uncertain as San Francisco backs Black reparations

ISTANBUL

San Francisco lawmakers have shown support for a draft plan to provide reparations to the city’s Black community, whose ancestors suffered from slavery but the idea to provide them with a whopping $5 million each remains “financially not feasible” for now.

According to a report published by local newspaper San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday, the city’s Board of Supervisors unanimously accepted “the wide-ranging draft reparations plan crafted by a committee tasked with proposing steps the city can take to remedy harms that Black residents endured over generations because of systemic racism and the legacy of slavery.”

It, however, said multiple supervisors, including the board's president, Aaron Peskin, said the payments “are likely not financially feasible” for now. “Conservatives have panned the idea to local and national media outlets,” the newspaper added.

According to the report, San Francisco’s 60-page draft reparations plan foresees “far more than cash payments alone in its many proposals.”

“The full scope and cost of the potential lump-sum payments isn’t yet clear,” San Francisco Chronicle added.

To be eligible for reparations payments under the draft plan, recipients would have to be 18 years of age or older, and have identified as “Black” or “African American” on public documents “for at least a decade,” according to the paper.

“Recipients would also have to meet other criteria that may include proving that they were born in San Francisco between 1940 and 1996, migrated to the city during the same years, lived in the city for at least 13 years or were displaced from the city because of urban renewal between 1954 and 1973,” the newspaper also said.