No Reparations For Now, But SF Supervisors to Vote on Formal Apology to Black Residents

The reparations conversation has been sidelined amid ongoing budget trouble, but on Tuesday the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was preparing to vote on a resolution to offer the Black community a formal apology for past harms. “An apology is just cotton candy rhetoric,” responded Rev. Amos C. Brown, who helped lead the San Francisco reparations advisory committee in recent years, per KPIX. “What we need is concrete actions.” The formal apology would go to SF’s Black residents — numbering about 46,000 — for its past racist laws and policies (and the language is similar to the apology SF issued in 2022 to Chinese immigrants and their descendants). But an apology, even an official one, doesn’t come close to previously floated ideas from the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, the 15-member council that advises Mayor London Breed and other municipal departments on the matter. The committee, if you recall, previously recommended $5 million lump-sum payments to African-American descendants of slaves. Despite the right-wing headlines that it grabbed, it all became moot when Breed’s budget cuts dissolved the nascent Office of Reparations at the end of last year. Breed has said she believes reparations should be handled at the federal level,...