By Lisa Awbrey, HANC Vice-President, and Christin Evans, HANC Board
At HANC’s March meeting we will host San Francisco African-American Reparations Advisory Committee (AARAC) members Gloria Berry and Eric McDonnell (Chair) to discuss the body’s recently released report.
The AARAC was created in 2020 under the City’s Human Rights Commission and is tasked with developing a plan to address “the institutionalized city sanctioned harm that has been inflicted upon African-American communities. “ San Francisco is among several cities and states across the country working to atone for the damage caused by slavery and institutionalized racism.
Some history around the issue of San Francisco and reparations and the formation of AARAC:
In 2019, the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) made a proposal to the Board of Supervisors: The City and County of San Francisco should pay the debt it owes to Black residents for generations of disinvestment and displacement. At the time, City leadership said there were “no plans” to introduce legislation to support the effort.
The SF NAACP and other Black community members continued their advocacy efforts until, in February 2020, Board of Supervisors President Shamann Walton introduced a resolution supporting the creation of a San Francisco Reparations Plan. The Plan would comprehensively address the inequities that exist in San Francisco’s African American communities as a result of chattel slavery’s legacy of systemic oppression.
This prescient resolution was adopted in August 2020, the same year as a litany of events that would change national reparations discussions, namely the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. These events brought nationwide attention to the ways in which city and state actors have historically played a role in driving institutional anti-Black racism at a systemic and policy level. In addition to shining a light on the ways that disproportionate policing impacts Black communities and how global health events had disproportionately fatal outcomes for Black people, 2020 illuminated other ways that government agencies have either passively or actively contributed to unjustifiable socioeconomic, health and educational disparities along racial lines. To this end, the AARAC was formed.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed the ordinance officially establishing the AARAC in December 2020. Over the course of a two-year term, the fifteen member Advisory Committee was tasked with developing a San Francisco Reparations Plan to address the institutional, City-sanctioned harm that has been inflicted upon local African American communities. The legislation specifically prioritizes improving education, housing, workforce development, economic opportunities, financial stability, small businesses, transit access and food security while reducing violence, health disparities and over-criminalization experienced in the city’s Black communities.
Early in the AARAC’s formation, the Committee decided to focus on four distinct areas: economic empowerment, education, health and policy. Subcommittees met on a monthly basis in public meetings with interested members of the public and guest speakers offering input and insights. A stated goal of the AARC is to “develop recommendations for repairing harm in our Black communities.”
According to the United Nations, reparations “refers to measures to redress violations of human rights by providing a range of material and symbolic benefits to victims or their families, as well as affected communities. Reparation must be adequate, effective, prompt, and should be proportional to the gravity of the violations, and the harm suffered. “In this context, reparations are being demanded by members of the Black/African-American communities, not to remedy enslavement, but to address the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery. 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 extra legal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement.
The draft reparations plan contains a detailed list of policy recommendations, ranging from a formal apology by the City for historical wrongs against Black residents, including the displacement of households during the “urban renewal” development era of the 1950s through the 1970s, to financial compensation for eligible residents.
Another action item is a one time, lump sum payment of $5 million to each eligible resident. The draft plan describes this recommendation as compensation for “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 suggestions include financial education and debt relief to long-term subsidies for certain households, along with mortgage assistance and reform of the application process for affordable housing—policies that have been enacted or are being considered in other cities.
You may read the draft of the 60-page reparations plan here: Reparations Report download
A hearing to review a draft of the reparations plan is also scheduled at the Board of Supervisors for March 14 at 3 p.m.
Please join us in person or online at HANC’s March 9 meeting starting at 7 pm to learn more.