OPINION:
Expect sanity to be in short supply in the new year. Two days before Christmas, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors decided to pay off their most reliable voting bloc.
Effective Jan. 23, the city will have a “reparations fund” ready to receive taxpayer cash for redistribution according to a scheme laid out two years earlier. Anyone who identifies as Black, a fluid concept among liberals, can eventually qualify for a lump-sum payment of $5 million if a set of nebulous criteria are met.
Democratic politicians take it for granted that Black residents will vote for them without question. The new fund demonstrates gratitude for that blind loyalty, which would be fine if these lawmakers were offering rewards from their own pockets. Instead, they intend to purchase future political allegiance with the public purse.
The devious solons behind the idea assume that historical illiteracy in Baghdad by the Bay has reached such epic proportions that the political party that instituted slavery will get away with championing reparations in a city and state that never participated in the pernicious practice.
Precise eligibility details haven’t been nailed down. San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee reviewed various proposals, including handing bags of cash to anyone who may have been caught committing drug crimes or whose parents may have been dealers.
The committee even looked at expanding the benefit to any “historically marginalized group that experienced lending discrimination in San Francisco” because finding actual slave descendants might be tricky.
Old San Francisco was hardly perfect, but it became a magnet for Black entrepreneurs who knew they could become landowners. They could run businesses and set up their own houses of worship.
In the words of a Black San Francisco newspaperman from 1857, “It was the spirit of avarice that instigated the purchase of our fore-fathers from the man-stealer in the Virginia colonies, where the demon of oppression planted its withering foot to wring from humanity unjust gain.”
He published freely in San Francisco, where the Mirror of the Times served the Black community until 1862. By then, Abraham Lincoln had announced that, beginning Jan. 1, 1863, “all persons held as slave … shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” With that, the paper’s primary objective was accomplished.
It wasn’t perfect. San Francisco’s Black citizens were still denied some social privileges because local politicians were “copying the most ultra slave-holding State in the Union,” as the Mirror put it. Those states were run by Democrats.
Today, Census Bureau records show 46,725 San Franciscans who are “Black or African American alone.” Cutting a $5 million check to each would cost $233 billion. Depending on the level of racial purity testing city supervisors implement, that number could double or triple.
Because city coffers contain a mere $16 billion, it might seem safe to classify this measure as an empty gesture toward a favored demographic group. Still, don’t underestimate the spirit of avarice in San Francisco.
The architects of the reparations grift are paying themselves salaries of $185,000 to $223,000 annually to produce glossy reports about the need for one race to transfer its wealth to members of another skin color because of something that was done in a bygone age in Colonial Virginia.
If anyone owes recompense for San Francisco’s offenses against its people, it would be the Democrats who extract the fruits of the labor of inhabitants for their own unjust gain.
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