Greenberg: The Irony – Ineligible Blacks May Fund SF Reparations

San Francisco’s controversial reparations initiative, formalized and signed by Mayor Daniel Lurie on December 23, 2025, creates a dedicated Reparations Fund (essentially, a new city hall-administered bank account) – to dole out restitution to the city’s Black residents which were victims of slavery, redlining, urban renewal, the War on Drugs, and other qualifiers. Drawing directly from the African American Reparations Advisory Committee’s (AARAC) 2023 final report, which spans over 400 pages and outlines more than 100 provision, the city-approved plan endorses measures such as one-time lump-sum payments of $5 million per eligible person, low-income supplements to reach the area median income of $97,000 annually (potentially for 250 years), debt forgiveness, dedicated health care, school curriculum and housing assistance.

While proponents describe it as moving “from apology to action,” the program’s design creates a stark dilemma: it compels non-eligible residents, including a significant number of the city’s Black African Americans, to actually subsidize reparations benefits they themselves cannot access; they’d ironically pay towards direct lump-sum costs and potential future taxpayer appropriations as well.

The AARAC’s framework outlines: Applicants must be 18 or older, have self-identified as Black/African American on public documents for at least the last 10 years, and meet other criteria such as birth or migration to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 with 10+ years residency proof; descent from someone enslaved in U.S. slavery before 1865; Drug-war incarceration (1971–present), attendance at a segregated SFUSD schools (1983–2005) or lending discrimination (1937–2008).

Yet much of the city’s current Black population could be ineligible and therefore excluded.

San Francisco’s Black population has declined from 13.4% in 1970 to roughly 4% today (approximately 42,000 people). Much of the remaining community is increasingly diverse. Foreign-born Black residents (primarily from Africa- Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia- and the Caribbean) now constitute about 10% of the entire San Francisco metro area’s Black population, with newer arrivals concentrated in the city. Recent African immigrants, less than 10-year-resident U.S.-born Black residents, or those without documented ties ie. no ancestral enslavement lineage, no minimum 10+ years of self-identification record as Black) could ineligible to receive reparations.

A Black Ethiopian immigrant working in Bayview-Hunters Point, paying the same rent, property and sales taxes as everyone else, or a U.S.-born Black single mother who arrived in 2007, faces the same contemporary inequities – skyrocketing rents, wage gaps – yet receives nothing while others perhaps living in the same apartment building collect multimillion-dollar payouts. The plan thus fractures solidarity, creating a tiered Black underclass: those with the “right” paperwork versus those without.

Although the fund has begun with zero city appropriation amid a nearly $1 billion budget deficit, the ordinance signed by Mayor Lurie explicitly states that the Reparations Fund “may receive any legally available monies appropriated or donated”.

The lawsuit over the Reparations Fund plan, filed February 5, 2026 (on behalf of San Francsico taxpayers Richie Greenberg (yours truly) and Arthur Ritchie, joined by the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation- all as plaintiffs) spells this out plainly: “By directing an agency funded almost entirely by taxpayer dollars to administer funding solely dedicated to implement race-exclusive benefits, the City is using public money, public employees, and public authority to carry out an unconstitutional racial spoils system.”

If private donations to this new fund remain negligible, the pressure to appropriate public funds from the General Fund will only grow, turning every non-eligible San Franciscan (including excluded Black residents) into an involuntary reparations financier.

This reparations financial structure is not merely symbolic. It creates a zero-sum transfer: some Black San Franciscans may receive life-changing monetary payouts and extraordinary benefits and privileges, while others – equally Black – pay out and watch their tax dollars support a program that officially deems them ineligible. The result is not repair, but resentment, division, and an ironic, perverse inversion of justice. True redress for historical wrongs should not require pitting one group of disadvantaged residents against themselves, nor should it force today’s taxpayers, regardless of race, to bankroll benefits based solely on racial ancestry.

Elected officials come and go, good and bad. Major events grab headlines; scandals in city agencies pop up now and then. But reparations could be the most significantly damaging issue to befall San Francisco in generations.