Via Wikimedia Commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
By Praniti Gulyani and Bryan Miller
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — The San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently collectively passed 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.”
As per USA Today, this apology comes after “decades of discrimination” and should be looked upon as “a first step towards reparations, the steps that follow must be carefully considered for the apology to prove meaningful.”
However, Reparations Scholar Roy Brooks said that “an apology alone was not sufficient.”
Brooks, a professor at the University of San Diego, and editor of the 1999 book When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, adds, “Reparations are the redemptive act that make the rhetoric of an apology meaningful. You can’t just say you’re sorry and walk away.”
According to SF Supervisor Dean Preztone, who represents the historically Black Fillmore Neighborhood, some leaders who support the apology still want to build “unaffordable housing for mostly wealthy, white people” on public land. “People want an apology,” Preztone says. “But they also want a commitment to not repeat harms,”
USA Today wrote, “Policies that hindered African American families’ ability to accumulate generational wealth” are most likely the reasoning for the Black population, now making up only “5.4 percent (of San Francisco’s) overall population of 850,000” which they say is “significantly below the national percentage of 14.4.”
According to USA Today “African Americans comprise 38 percent of the homeless population in San Francisco” with the Census Bureau and Lending Tree showing “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.”
They add a report by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission states, “Black people have the highest mortality rate among nine of San Francisco’s top 10 causes of death.”
Supervisor Shamann Walton, the only Black member on the board, said they “have much more work to do, but this apology most certainly is an important step.”
USA Today reports Niambi Carter, “an associate professor of public policy.” backs this idea, and stated, “apologies are usually an important first step in the process of repair.”
However, the Rev. Amos Brown, who USA Today describes as “a member of the reparations advisory committee” and a former supervisor, said that the apology is “cotton candy rhetoric. If San Francisco is serious, local leadership, as well as the citizens of that city, need to have some honest, tough talks about the road ahead and not give in to the potential for divisiveness that this subject engenders.”
Carter said “they may not always be recognized as such” but, “Reparations as a form of justice are globally and even nationally common. Reparations is ultimately about easing conflict,” and that “to get there requires negotiation of all parties involved, being honest about the conflict and the harms it caused.”
According to Carter, although people tend to think of reparations in a monetary way “they can encompass a range of possibilities. Cities that focus on the former can be hindered from issuing similar apologies.” She added apologies are “a necessary precursor to ‘righting’ the harm.”
Carter suggests in the USA Today story that reparations “can take the form of public remembrances” and they can “even include mental health counseling, which was among the remedies offered as part of a $5 million reparations package awarded to victims of Chicago police abuse in 2019.”
Brooks stated in the USA Today story that “budget constraints challenge public entities to respond concretely to past wrongs,” and, “Instead, some municipalities are leaning on rehabilitative reparations that are less costly. Though such forms of reparations are less effective economically than cash payments,” he said, “budget challenges can make them more attractive options for government entities to pursue.”
According to Brooks, effective reparations “require more than good intentions; rhetoric has to be backed up with tangible actions focusing on those harmed.” He says that if they do not then “the apology doesn’t mean anything. … It sort of dilutes the whole notion of redress.”
Brooks states in USA Today the problem with reparations within California and San Francisco is that they are all over the place and “not targeted to victims of atrocity.”
According to USA Today “he noted that one of the measures called for in a California reparations task force report last year was an increase in the minimum wage. That applies to anybody. Many victims are not minimum-wage earners, so that makes no sense whatsoever.”
USA Today reported that Brooks said reparations are “not broadly applied but specially targeted to victims of an atrocity.”
USA Today writes that according to Brooks “Time – and attention to such distinctions – will show how genuine San Francisco’s efforts are…you determine the sincerity of the apology by the weight of the reparations.”
