No to San Francisco’s ridiculous jackpot reparations plan
Washington Examiner
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If you’re black and you were sent to prison for drug crimes, then San Francisco wants to make your day.
The city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee has just made public its draft proposal for reparations not just for slavery but for general malfeasance toward black people by the city’s government and other entities. It recommends a $5 million lump-sum payment for any black person who meets a set of criteria that are, to say the least, not well crafted.
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Here is an indication of the quality of this panel’s work: In order to claim the $5 million prize, one need not even have visited San Francisco. If you read the recommendations literally, there are only two requirements — you need only be black and 18 years old — and beyond that must meet two out of eight other criteria, several of which would not require claimants to have even a remote connection to the city, let alone have lived there.
If you are a black adult with a prison record for drug dealing — yes, the panel considers this a form of victimization, worthy of compensation — and you can prove that you had an ancestor who was a slave, then you can claim your prize. Perhaps the rest of America should thank San Francisco taxpayers for offering to pay racial reparations on everyone else’s behalf, once and for all.
Let’s assume that this is just an error and will be corrected. But consider this. California was never a slave state. The city of San Francisco never owned slaves. Neither can claim it is making amends for uncompensated work performed for the benefit of people more than 150 years ago in distant Southern slave states.
But this is sort of the point. The reparations movement keeps grievances as broad and as multifarious as possible. Reparations advocates want to roll all historical injustices against black people together and homogenize them to justify having somebody — it has to be a government because that’s where the money is— pay gargantuan lump sums to everybody, including those not truly affected. It is taken for granted that taxpayers must foot the bill, including the vast majority whose ancestors never owned slaves and perhaps died in the war to end slavery or who had no ancestors in America before the Civil War.
A separate but equally ridiculous aspect of the panel’s recommendation is that it would directly reward people convicted and incarcerated for crimes they committed. Whatever you think of the war on drugs, drug dealing was and for the most part still is a crime. Criminals are supposed to be incarcerated and fined so that they are punished and deterred from further crimes. They should not be rewarded with millions of dollars, which would have the opposite effect.
If someone wrongs you or violates your civil rights, there is already a process to seek redress. The common law and each state’s civil code provide remedies that people can pursue in court. One can sue for unjust harm — whether it is a discriminatory lender or the government of San Francisco. No court will hear your case if your grievance is that you were convicted of dealing drugs and spent time in prison. But that’s also the point. Courts rightly only consider genuine and proximate harms. They do not provide handouts that an unelected panel arbitrarily decides would be a good idea.
If the harm in question is too distant — say, Oliver Cromwell dispossessed your family and drove its members out of Ulster in the 17th century or a Roman nobleman enslaved your Gallic ancestors in the first century — it’s likely that you don’t have a strong enough claim to win in court.
Maybe you’ll just have to go through life without counting on somebody giving you something you didn’t earn.
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