Black lawyers slam San Francisco’s $5 million repair plan as ‘racist’
>
African-American lawyers have criticized the San Francisco reparations committee for its proposal to give every longtime black resident a $5 million payment in the summer.
Leo Terrell and former California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder called the proposal “outrageous, unconstitutional and illegal” and even racist in an interview on Fox News’ Hannity Monday night, vowing to fight it.
They demanded to know who will finance the large payment, which is estimated to cost the city at least $50 billion, noting that California was never a slave state.
But the awakened city is already preparing to go ahead with the proposal, and the reparations committee says it will submit the plan to Mayor London Breed, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in June.
Black lawyers criticized San Francisco’s proposal to provide $5 million to every black resident as racist in an interview on Hannity Monday night.
Under the proposal announced Monday, anyone who has been identified as African American in public records for at least 10 years and is at least 18 years old qualifies for the $5 million payment.
They must also qualify for two of a series of requirements, including being born in or immigrating to the city between 1940 and 1996 and then having lived there for 13 years.
But the $5 million payment is just the beginning of the draft proposals.
It would also involve the payment of a lump sum to ‘compensate the affected population for the decades of damage they have suffered, and will repair the economic and opportunity losses that African-American San Franciscans have suffered, collectively, as a result of intentional and not intentional. damage perpetuated by City policy.’
The proposal also says that qualifying low-income households should have their income supplemented to match the city’s median income – $97,000 in 2022 – for the next 250 years.
And African-American residents who qualify for the program can get their debts forgiven, including their home and student loans.
A host of other proposals include investments in San Francisco’s black community, financial education, legal protections from individuals’ reparations, tax credits, and black-owned banks to manage people’s money.
The proposal says that San Francisco must “issue a formal apology for past damage and commit to making substantial ongoing, systemic, and programmatic investments in Black communities to address historic damage.”
However, Terrell and Elder say the plan is racist: using taxpayer money to provide blacks with funds not available to residents of other races.
As Elder described it: ‘Reparations is the extraction of money from people who never owned slaves to people who were never slaves.’
Terrell, a Fox News contributor, vows to fight the proposed measure.
“It will never be implemented,” he told guest host Pete Hegseth. ‘I will be the first lawyer to fight this.’
He continued: ‘This is outrageous. It’s illegal. It’s unconstitutional. It’s racist. But no wonder he came from California on MLK’s birthday.
Fox News contributor Leo Terrell vowed to fight the proposal, calling it “outrageous, unconstitutional and illegal.”
Both he and former California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder criticized the proposal as racist, saying Democrats are playing the “race card.”
“We’re talking about a racist program to benefit people who are black — $5 million,” Terrell said, noting that “California was a free state.
‘Who’s going to pay for it?’ she asked. ‘Why should they get 5 million dollars? Because of the color of the skin? It’s insulting.
Elder, who is running for governor in 2021, also noted that California was never a slave state and San Francisco was never a slave city.
Furthermore, slavery was a democratic institution. Why don’t the Democrats pay up? he asked her, rhetorically. ‘Jim Crow was a Democratic institution. Why don’t the Democrats pay up?
He went on to state that “very few Republicans owned slaves” and asked why Republicans should “pay a pretty penny.”
This is all absolutely insulting.
Both lawyers accused the Democrats in charge in the wake city of “playing the race card,” with Terrell saying, “They need to keep black people on the government payroll because without black people, there is no Democratic Party.” .
“They have a race card problem and they’re never going to let that card go,” he said.
“This country does not have systemic racism,” he said. ‘That’s something in 1955. In 2023, we don’t have institutional racism.
“But you can’t say that to a Democrat.”
The proposal was compiled by the San Francisco African American Remedies Advisory Committee, chaired by Eric McDonnell.
A map of red lines cited in the proposal. The map was created for banks to rate the safety of loans made to residents of certain areas of the city. The most risky assumptions, the red zones, were the black neighborhoods.
Proponents of the proposal say it is necessary to correct the mistakes of previous generations, which still plague black communities today.
In a preliminary report issued last month, the San Francisco Reparation Advisory Committee said the proposal “will address public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of slavery.”
“While neither San Francisco nor California embraced the institution of slavery, the principles of segregation, white supremacy, and systemic repression and exclusion of blacks were codified through legal and extralegal action, social codes, and judicial enforcement.” .
The proposal also cites a number of city initiatives from decades past that studies show were racially motivated and had debilitating effects on the black population.
Some were as simple as the first legal restrictions on where blacks could live in the city and the kinds of jobs they could hold.
Others were as far-reaching as citywide zoning measures that left black communities effectively ghettoized, or completely bulldozed and unoccupied for years.
The proposal will be presented to Mayor London Breed and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in June.
People speak at a reparations task force meeting in San Francisco in April 2022
The proposal will be presented to San Francisco leadership in June.
“There are so many efforts that result in incredible reports that just end up gathering dust on a shelf,” San Francisco Board of Supervisors Chairman Aaron Peskin told the CF Chronicle.
“We cannot allow this to be one of them,” he added.
The proposal was compiled by the San Francisco African American Remedies Advisory Committee. [AARAC], which was commissioned by the Board of Supervisors. He first ran for leadership in December.
“Centuries of harm and destruction of Black lives, Black bodies and Black communities must be met with centuries of reparation,” AARAC President Eric McDonnell told the SF Chronicle. “If you look at San Francisco, it’s very much a tale of two cities.”
The city’s proposals come as the head of the California Remedial Task Force, Kamilah Moore, shared her demands for revenge.
He said that all black Californians descended from slaves were owed a million dollars each.
Moore also said that any black resident who has suffered housing discrimination at the hands of California is owed $223,500.
He claimed that the red line (refusing loans like mortgages to the poorest people) had kept many black Californians in poverty between 1933 and 1977.
Despite the enormous cost of complying with the proposals, Moore insists that they would actually benefit California’s economy by stimulating consumer spending.