San Francisco shouldn’t pay Black residents reparations for slavery

When it comes to the latest in liberal news, our eyes and ears so often turn west to the city of San Francisco. And that’s no different today. The city’s official Advisory Committee on Reparations — yeah, you heard me, the city has an official Advisory Committee on Reparations — well this committee has unveiled its recommendations to the Mayor and other city officials. They decided that the city, the city of San Francisco, owes $5 million to each Black resident for decades of discrimination. Now, San Francisco wasn’t a slave state or a slave city, but anyway, discrimination. In explaining their reasoning, the committee’s chair said they landed on that number as a result of a journey, rather than a math formula, in quotes. Yes, they just grabbed a number out of the sky. 

Not surprisingly, San Francisco doesn’t have that kind of money. They’re already broke from so many other left-wing policies. And even if they weren’t broke from being woke, they still have no way that they can afford this redistribution handout. 

But the problem is not just with the price tag. The problem, most of all, is with the principle of the matter. My ancestors were slaves. And my life as a young woman was a mess. Was my life a mess because my ancestors were slaves? I don’t think so. Did I need reparations to turn things around for me? Certainly not. 

I needed a wake up call, which to my great gratitude, I got from a few church going Black Christians who told me the way I was living was unacceptable to God. So I went to their church, took back responsibility for my life and turned my circumstances around. The problem with the idea of reparations is that it redirects attention away from an individual’s responsibility for their own unique lives. And it redirects attention in such a way to encourage individuals to believe that a collective problem from the past is the cause of all their individual problems in the present.

To be sure, compensation of what many referred to as restitution for damages, is a legitimate principle, but only in the very real here and now, not when it’s pushed to the abstract past. And most of the time, it’s in cases where one individual has caused damages against another — in other words, personal responsibility on both sides. After all, one of the main problems with racism is that it denies the uniqueness, the dignity and the personal responsibility of each individual.

And in that sense, reparation is not a counter to racism. They share more in common than one may realize. They both remain dedicated to the past. Slavery, although it never existed in San Francisco was, of course, a horrible, horrible, deplorable sin in our nation’s story. And the Jim Crow laws that followed, everything else that followed, there were sins as well, a lot of it government-induced, government-promoted sin. But in order to heal the present and build the future, we must not forget the principles of freedom that drive us forward, that actually drove us from slavery, the principles of freedom, that every individual, regardless of circumstances, and history, is unique and has free choice. Thus, we have personal responsibility as well. And although, let’s not lie, any of us would be psyched to take the free $5 million, there’s just no price worth our individuality and our personal freedom.