San Francisco residents lined up at a city board meeting last night to share their full-throated support of a wide-eyed reparations plan that would award every black resident $5million, wipe their personal debt, guarantee $97,000 incomes for 250 years and $1 homes.
But no one at the emotional meeting – where residents burst into song and begged to be made ‘whole’ – asked how the struggling, debt-addled city might pay for it.
Reparations are being considered in various Democratic cities around America as a means of providing compensation to the descendants of enslaved African-Americans.
Many say they are owed not just for the time their ancestors were enslaved, but also for generations afterwards, because African Americans have been incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates than white Americans.
The proposals put forward in San Francisco last night are among some of the most generous to be heard to date.
Those who advocated for them last night did so whole heartedly. One sang a verse from the 1964 Civil Rights anthem by Sam Cooke, A Change is Gonna Come.
