Tangle - The reparations proposal in San Francisco.

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

Last week, a committee in San Francisco released a reparations proposal for the city that includes $5 million for each qualifying Black resident of the city. The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee (AARAC) was formed in 2020 and was asked to develop a plan to address institutional harms African Americans have had to face. Plus, a question about being scared to air my "real" opinion and an important story the Supreme Court leak.You can read today's podcast here, today’s “Under the Radar” story here, and today’s “Have a nice day” story here.Today’s clickables: Quick Hits (1:04), Today’s Story (2:29), Right’s Take (5:57), Left’s Take (10:55), Isaac’s Take (16:14), Your Questions Answered (21:38), Under the Radar (23:16), Numbers (24:06), Have A Nice Day (24:39)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited by Zosha Warpeha. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum. Some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about reparations. More specifically, a new reparations plan that was just proposed to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors by a committee that was formed to come up with a reparations plan. We're going to be talking about what the plan entails and some of the reactions to it. Before we jump in though, as always, we'll start off with some quick hits. First up, a former FBI official was arrested on

charges of working for a Russian oligarch and faces charges that include money laundering. Number two, four more members of the Oath Keepers were convicted of seditious conspiracy by a Washington jury. Number three, U.S. health officials are proposing a shift to once-a-year COVID boosters similar to the flu shot schedule. shift to once-a-year COVID boosters similar to the flu shot schedule. Number four, at least seven people were shot and killed in Half Moon Bay, California, just three days after a separate mass shooting in the state. Separately, two students died and one teacher was injured in a shooting

at a Des Moines, Iowa youth outreach center. Number five, Microsoft announced a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the company behind the chat GPT language model. A bold proposal now in San Francisco, the city will soon consider reparations for the black community, giving certain people a sum of money for centuries of harm. Today we're talking about details from a San Francisco committee about reparations for black residents, which would be millions of dollars per person. Pete, Larry, this is outrageous. It's unlawful.

It's unconstitutional. It's racist. But it's not surprising it came from California. Last week, a committee in San Francisco released a reparations proposal for the city that includes $5 million for each qualifying Black resident of the city. The San Francisco American Reparations Advisory Committee, or AARAC, was formed in 2020 and was asked to develop a plan to address institutional harms African Americans have had to face. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will now vote to accept, amend, or reject the committee's plan. According to CNN, to be eligible for reparations,

San Francisco residents must be 18 years or older, have been identifying as Black or African American on public documents for at least 10 years, and meet two of eight additional criteria, including having been born or migrating to the city between 1940 and 1996, as well as showing proof of at least 13 years of residency, having been incarcerated by the failed war on drugs or being the direct descendant of someone who was, being a descendant of someone who was enslaved through U.S. chattel slavery before 1865, having been displaced between 1954 and 1973, or being a descendant of someone who did, being part of a marginalized group who experienced lending discrimination in the city between 1937 and 1968, or in formerly redlined communities

within the city between 1968 and 2008, according to the committee's plan. Along with the one-time lump sum payment, the plan also recommends the city supplement the income of lower-income households to match the median income for at least 250 years in an attempt to address the racial wealth gap in San Francisco. Neither San Francisco nor California ever adopted institutional chattel slavery, though the state did embrace segregation. The drafters of the plan say it would cover the 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. Republican John Dennis, who chairs the San Francisco Republican Party, criticized the committee for not fleshing out how it determined the amounts of compensation. I think there's a discussion of good faith to be had about reparations, and this isn't the way to do it. I think it'll also, lastly, if the plan does pass, I think it'll be challenged in the courts aggressively, Dennis said. Today, we're going to take a look at some opinions from the right and the left about reparations and this plan specifically, and then my take. First up, we'll start with what the right is saying. Many on the right criticize the plan, arguing that it is an absurd idea that is also ethically questionable. Some call out the poor results of simply giving people money. Others take offense to the idea of rewarding people

who have committed crimes. National Review's editorial board called it a terrible idea. This would be by far the most ambitious attempt yet at reparations, and it lays bare the flaws in the whole concept. Those include deliberately conflating the unique historical injustice of slavery with other forms of legal discrimination, the editor said. Then there is simple ignorance. The United States was wholly supportive of and dependent upon the enslavement of African people and their descendants as the vehicle that established and propelled the country's economy, the plan said.

Wholly dependent? The vehicle? In one fell swoop, the Human Rights Commission staff writes the labors of nearly 90% of the American population, including generations of small farmers, inventors, and industrialists, entirely out of American economic history. The notion that the city of San Francisco as an entity owes reparations for slavery is preposterous, the board added. If one considers the taxpayers of San Francisco, who actually foot the bill, the case for saddling them with financial responsibility for American slavery, or even more recent injustices, becomes even more ridiculous. Over 34% of San Franciscans are foreign-born, having no historic ties to the American past. That number has been above a third for four decades, and it was also consistently between a third and half of the city's population

between 1860 and 1910. It's been 40 years since non-Hispanic whites made up a majority of San Francisco's population, which as of the 2020 census was 33.7% Asian American, including South Asian and 15.6% Hispanic. In the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro said racial reparations solve nothing. This is bad ethics and it is bad social science. It's bad ethics, and it is bad social science. It's bad ethics because the innocent should not be forced to pay people against whom they have not sinned, and because the connection between continued suffering and past discrimination must be measured and clarified rather than merely assumed, he wrote. It is bad social science because it ignores the role of individual decision-making in persistent intergenerational inequality, despite the massive intervention of state, local, and federal government. Simply put, the preferred solution of San Francisco's reparations committee, simply cutting checks,

has been a dramatic failure in the United States. The federal government has spent in excess of $25 trillion on redistribution programs in the United States. The result has been exceedingly poor. While the income gap between the poorest quintile of Americans and the wealthiest quintile of Americans post-transfer payments and taxes is just 4 to 1, the wealth gap between Black and white Americans has skyrocketed from approximately $50,000 pre-1960 to well over $130,000 in 2016. Why? Because it turns out that public money designed to alleviate inequality also alleviates the consequences of bad decision-making. Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that 70% of Black children are born to unwed mothers.

Nearly 8 out of 100 Black males drop out of school. Black college students tend to major in subjects that result in worse job prospects. Just 12% of Black students get a bachelor's degree in STEM compared with 33% of Asian students and 18% of white students, for example. And one-third of the American prison population is Black. The Washington Examiner editors criticized the reparations movement as a whole. The reparations movement keeps grievance as broad and 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 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, the editor said. 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. 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 Gaelic ancestors in the 1st century, it's likely that you don't have a strong enough claim to win in court. All right, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. Many on the left support some form of reparations, though their feelings about this specific plan are mixed. Some say we should think of reparations as multiracial equality and broaden the goal to more than just giving black people money. Others argue that even the plan in San Francisco really doesn't approach making it even for slavery's impacts. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Justin Phillips called it a bold plan to consider. A century after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation,

civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. and lamented how the Negro is still not free. 100 years later, the Negro lives on in a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity, he said in his 1963 I Have a Dream speech from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King could have been describing today's San Francisco, a 47-square-mile city that's home to more than 60 billionaires and at least 7,000 homeless people, around 40% of whom are Black, despite Black people representing only 5% of the population. What happens next will show whether San Francisco politicians are serious about

confronting the city's checkered past or simply pretending to be, Phillips wrote. While California was never officially a slave state, slaveholders were protected here, and the committee's research reveals that segregation, systemic oppression, and racial prejudice born from the institution of slavery had a profound impact on the city's evolution. In the 20th century alone, San Francisco was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold, barred Black people from settling in certain areas, kept them out of city jobs, and demolished the Fillmore, a Black neighborhood and commercial district, leaving it vacant for decades. In the Washington Post, Andrew Delbanco wrote about how reparations could work.

We must proceed with full awareness that the dire challenges of our time—climate change, disparities in healthcare and education amplified by the coronavirus pandemic, gun violence, state violence in the form of bad policing, misused and inequitable incarceration, to name just a few, all have disproportionate effects on persons left vulnerable by history, notably but by no means only black persons, Delbanco said. This version of reparations does not gloss over penalties exacted in the past by racial cruelty, but it looks to a future in which human dignity will count for more and more and race will count for less and less. Today, a great many white Americans feel as demeaned and discarded as black Americans and just as forgotten. In the grim

metrics of poverty rates, infant mortality, and maternal deaths and childbirth, black Americans and Native Americans continue to hold the lead. But in the distribution of suffering, as measured by other markers such as opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide, the racial gap is closing, he said. This multiracial reality can be addressed only with a multiracial response of the sort envisioned by Martin Luther King Jr. Beginning with a robust defense of the right to vote, such a response must include subsidized housing for low-income Americans, improved access to health care, investments in public transportation, expanded child tax credits, preschool and wraparound services for all children of the

sort that affluent families take for granted. It must include renewed investment in community colleges, historically Black colleges and universities, tribal and regional public colleges where low-income white students as well as Black, Hispanic, and Native American students are likely to enroll. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza

cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. In HuffPost, Sage Howard said we should all be paying attention to what is happening in San Francisco. Before we go any further, let's agree that this nation owes Black Americans reparations, period, Howard wrote. If you're unsure about this, immediately dive into

some contemporary literature to learn why chattel slavery is the root of America's most pressing disparities. Many Republicans, who of course hate the idea of San Francisco's proposal, argue that the plan would be too costly, unfair, and divisive. Republican Florida Representative Byron Donalds called the $5 million lump sum a distraction from solving problems like homelessness and the opioid epidemic. The plan, which would cost the city $50 billion of just 10,000 residents qualified, is indeed ambitious. But even addressing the financial repercussions of slavery on Black Americans is going to require ambition. And for the record, $5 million is not enough to quote call it even for slavery, especially in a city that's one of the most notorious in the country for its history of housing discrimination. Whether you agree with

the dollar amount it proposes or not, the committee's plan is innovative because it uses historical and socioeconomic evidence to identify what exactly it will take to help the average black San Franciscan to close the racial wealth gap, he said. The plan holds the city accountable while offering compensation to help level the playing field and allow Black residents to build generational wealth like their white counterparts do every day. It's been estimated that the plan would exceed San Francisco's municipal budget, but there is yet to be any public discourse around what could be done with support from state and federal budgets. The truth can be jarring and expensive sometimes, and we all have to be honest here about what this country has robbed us of.

All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. Let me start by stating plainly that America's racial disparities in wealth and incarceration are not random. They aren't simply a product of bad luck or, as Ben Shapiro put it, bad decision-making. African Americans making the case for reparations have a clear, compelling, and straightforward argument. We suffered multiple centuries of horror, oppression, and discrimination. We had our wealth and opportunity stolen from us in a systematic way, and those injustices suffered by our ancestors have cost us today. We should now be made whole. Any historical understanding of slavery and its impact on modern-day America renders the root of this argument incontrovertible.

This incontrovertible truth, though, doesn't make this plan any more productive, realistic, or rational. Edmund Burke said that society is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Those words resonate with me. Nevertheless, there is an ocean between partnership with my ancestors and responsibility for their actions. I wouldn't take responsibility for the sins of my own father, let alone the sins of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. As it happens, I actually am a descendant of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who is best known for advocating religious freedom, separation of church and state,

and fair dealings for Native Americans. In a world where reparations existed, Rhode Island, who is best known for advocating religious freedom, separation of church and state, and fair dealings for Native Americans. In a world where reparations existed, should my reparations toll be the same as a descendant of an unabashed slave owner? Equal? Greater than? I'm sure there are many ways I benefit from my Anglo-Saxon-English heritage on my dad's side, but are those benefits awash when you consider the millennia of persecution faced by my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors on my mom's side? Should the centuries of enslavement of my ancestors absolve me of the owing of reparations for slavery of another's ancestors here and now? Questions like these are obviously impossible to answer and feel silly to even write, which is why the project of retroactively redistributing wealth

or harms along racial and ethnic lines is so difficult and would engender so much more division. This plan is particularly fraught not just for the eye-popping sums, broadly worded guidance, and rather arbitrary lines of qualification, but also because of the diverse makeup and relative quote-unquote ancestral innocence of San Francisco's current taxpaying population. Reparations today cannot and should not look like five million dollar checks footed by taxpayers, promises to create a nearly six-figure floor for all employment, and redress for any black person who has been convicted of a drug crime. A better form of reparations, one not just more rational and just but more unifying,

is actually what we are watching unfold before us. A reckoning and acknowledgement of the sorted parts of our racial history when we didn't have even 50 years ago. Equal rights under the law, which we didn't have even 60 years ago. Efforts to improve education opportunities for minorities, better representation in workforces, college campuses, and Congress, police accountability, economic opportunity, expanded voting rights. The untold story of the 21st century, the unfolding story of the 21st century, is one of progress, where wages are rising faster for Black Americans than white Americans, racial disparities in state and federal prisons are shrinking. Police accountability is increasing. Acceptance of a multi-ethnic society is skyrocketing. And opportunity for black Americans is blossoming in every direction.

Every day, there are new organizations and government programs fighting to reduce the stubborn wealth gap, advance black entrepreneurship, or improve housing accessibility. These programs don't just benefit black Americans, but all minorities, along with many disadvantaged white Americans. This is how an expansive and holistic kind of reparation should work. Redress for the poor and disenfranchised who are disproportionately ancestors of slaveholders, but not exclusionary to those who aren't. Ultimately, it's hard for me to see how the idea of reparations where the government cuts checks to ancestors of slaves could ever really

work. There is no getting even for slavery. No check in the mail or redistribution of wealth organized by federal, state, or city government could make our nation whole. And that's not to say that therefore we should do nothing. In the partnership between the dead, living, and future, we as a collective society are already living with the repercussions of slavery and more importantly already trying to reconcile them. A grim consequence of success here is, as Andrew Delbanco so elegantly put it, the racial gap is closing on the distribution of suffering, and a race-based solution is not a productive way forward. This plan, and other reparations plans like it, are not only counterproductive because they try to assign

harm, blame, and responsibility in literal black and white terms amid centuries of gray, but because they seek to repair injuries that cannot be repaired. They aim to make victims whole whose perpetrators have been relegated to the ash bin of history. The task before us is bigger than writing eye-popping checks or creating half-baked qualifications for those checks. It's about resolving to care for the people struggling and suffering in our midst while dissolving the same racial lines in our country that helped brings us to your questions answered. This one is from Julie in Poughkeepsie, New York. Julie said, Isaac, do you ever modify or tweak your opinion a bit, especially on a very divisive topic, because you're afraid you will lose

subscribers? I could honestly understand if you do. Heck, you are trying to make a living, but wondered if it was something you struggle with continually. So Julie, I try really, really hard not to. Trust me, there are days like today where I worry. What will some folks on the left do when a white middle-class guy calls a reparations plan counterproductive? Will I be showing my quote deeply rooted white supremacy? How will some folks on the right react to me advocating organizations or government plans that promote diversity? Am I going to be a woke social justice warrior? Anytime these thoughts creep in though, I just remind myself of a few things. One, no matter what I write, some people somewhere are going to be offended and unsubscribed.

That is the nature of opining on anything that has to do with politics today. Two, concealing my real opinion insulates me from any honest criticisms, which would both keep my opinion from getting stronger and make this newsletter supremely boring. And finally, most of my readers are here to be exposed to ideas that challenge them. All this is to say, I know there are times that I soften language or go out of my way to make people I disagree with feel seen, but I do my best to articulate what I'm actually thinking, feeling, or seeing without any kind of self-censorship. All right, that is it for your questions answered, which brings us to today's Under the Radar story.

This one is about the Supreme Court, which released a long-awaited report on who leaked the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, which has highlighted the difficult reality that we just may never know. Eight months, 126 formal interviews, and a 23-page report later, the court has failed to discover who was behind the leak, the Associated Press reported. All nine justices were interviewed, and the report said nothing had implicated them. However, the report did say the leak was, quote, no mere misguided attempt at protest, seemingly implying whoever was behind the leak was a left-leaning operative who intended to prevent the ruling from being handed down as written. The Associated Press has the story and there's a link to it in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. The percentage of U.S. wealth held by white Americans is 84%. The percentage of U.S. wealth held by white Americans is 84%. The percentage of U.S. population that is white is 60%. The percentage of U.S. wealth held by black Americans is 4%. The percentage of the

U.S. population that is black is 13%. The average per capita wealth of white Americans is $338,093. The average per capita wealth of black Americans is $60,216. All right, and finally, last but not least, our have a nice day story today. Archaeologists in Norway have discovered what might be the world's oldest runestone, a rock inscribed with the letters from the Germanic alphabet, which preceded the Latin alphabet. The inscriptions are believed to be 2 Germanic alphabet, which preceded the Latin alphabet. The inscriptions are believed to be 2,000 years old and may be the earliest examples of words recorded in writing in Scandinavia. The runestone was found during the excavation of a grave site west of Oslo,

and other items in the cremation pit indicate the runes were inscribed between AD 1 and 250. Eight runes read Eideberg, which the archaeologists think could be the name of a woman, man, or family. Without doubt, we will obtain valuable knowledge about the early history of runic writing, Crystal Zilmer, a professor at the University of Oslo, told the Associated Press. There is a link to that story in today's episode description. their description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. As always, if you want to support our work, please go to retangle.com and become a member. You can also give this podcast a five-star rating or just spread the word to some of your friends. We'll be right back here same time tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace.

We'll be right back here same time tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited by Zosia Warpea. Our script is edited by Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and Bailey Saul. Shout out to our interns, Audrey Moorhead and Watkins Kelly, and our social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who created our podcast logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, check out our website at www.tangle.com. We'll be right back. Don't want to holla do the most? Holla don't. More festive, less frantic. Get deals for every occasion with DoorDash.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season?

Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.