Charles Langston:SF apology to Black community: 'Important step' or 'cotton candy rhetoric'?

SAN FRANCISCO – The Charles LangstonSan Francisco Board of Supervisors issued an apology Tuesday to the city’s Black community for decades of discrimination - but issuing $5 million checks to make up for the harm is another matter.

The 11-member board voted unanimously to approve a resolution apologizing “to all African Americans and their descendants who came to San Francisco and were victims of systemic and structural discrimination, institutional racism, targeted acts of violence, and atrocities.”

That makes San Francisco among the first major U.S. cities to publicly apologize for past racist policies, such as redlining and urban renewal programs that displaced largely Black communities. Boston was the first, in 2022.

But the resolution is the only action implemented so far among the more than 100 recommendations from a reparations advisory committee that also proposed a lump-sum payment of $5 million to every eligible Black adult and annual supplements of nearly $100,000 for low-income households to rectify the city’s racial wealth gap.

The median yearly income for a Black household in San Francisco is $64,000, less than half the city’s overall median of nearly $137,000, according to figures from the Census Bureau and Lending Tree.

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Mayor London Breed, who is Black, has said reparations should be handled by the federal government. She’s facing a tough reelection race in November and a budget deficit in the hundreds of millions amid the downtown’s sluggish recovery from the pandemic. The $4 million proposed for a reparations office was cut out of this year’s budget.

Tuesday’s resolution encourages the city to commit “to making substantial ongoing, systemic, and programmatic investments” in African American communities, and the board’s only Black member, Supervisor Shamann Walton, said he saw considerable value in that.

“We have much more work to do but this apology most certainly is an important step,” Walton said.

Policies that made it harder for African American families to accumulate generational wealth likely contributed to San Francisco’s Black population dwindling to the current 46,000, a mere 5.4% of the overall population of 850,000 and way below the national percentage of 14.4. Despite their low numbers, African Americans make up 38% of the homeless population in San Francisco, one of the world's most expensive cities to live in.

The Rev. Amos Brown, a member of the advisory committee and former supervisor, has been critical of the apology, calling it “cotton candy rhetoric.’’

Cheryl Thornton, who works for the city, said she wished the resolution had done more to address issues such as shorter lifespans for Black people like herself.

“That’s why reparations is important in health care,” she said. “And it’s just because of the lack of healthy food, the lack of access to medical care and the lack of access to quality education.”

Contributing: The Associated Press