Leo Terrell: California's reparations payments are 'racist,' 'insulting'
Fox News contributor Leo Terrell explains his opposition to the state's proposal that would ultimately pay out $640 billion in total to Black residents.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors met Tuesday in official discussions on reparations, with $5 million payments on the table for every eligible Black adult in the city.
The board expressed "unanimous" support for reparations during the meeting, even after Stanford University’s Hoover Institution calculated that the proposal would cost non-Black families in the city at least $600,000.
Members of the San Francisco Board also expressed interest in other forms of reparations for the city’s roughly 50,000 Black residents, including a guaranteed annual income of $97,000 for 250 years and a home "for just $1 a family," according to the Associated Press.
SAN FRANCISCO CONSIDERS REPARATIONS PROPOSAL TO GIVE $5 MILLION PER BLACK PERSON
Supervisor Shamann Walton, member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that expressed "unanimous" support for reparations. (Scott Strazzante/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
While San Francisco has notably never allowed slavery, some supervisors in the city argued that the "journey" toward justice was more important than exact calculations.
"There wasn’t a math formula," San Francisco's chair of the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, Eric McDonnell, reportedly told The Washington Post. "It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed."
The draft reparations plan also acknowledged that while both San Francisco and California never "formally adopted" slavery as a policy, "white supremacy" and other forms of oppression qualify as justification for mass reparations.
"While neither San Francisco, nor California, formally adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement," the draft proposal argued.
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"While neither San Francisco, nor California, formally adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement," the draft proposal argued. ((Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images))
The proposal continued: "A lump sum payment would compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced, and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by city policy."
Other officials have opposed the multi-million dollar recommendations for reparations, calling them "unserious."
"This conversation we're having in San Francisco is completely unserious," chair of the San Francisco Republican Party, John Dennis, told the AP News.
"They just threw a number up, there's no analysis."
San Francisco's City Hall in California. (Istock)
Dennis continued: "It seems ridiculous, and it also seems that this is the one city where it could possibly pass."
But some members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors fired back at critics, including among local constituents.
"Those of my constituents who lost their minds about this proposal, it’s not something we’re doing or we would do for other people. It’s something we would do for our future, for everybody’s collective future," Supervisor Rafael Mandelman said.
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San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Dan Peskin did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Fox News’ Aaron Kliegman and Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.