A Florida man speaking during a Tampa City Council meeting on last week demanded reparations of $3 million per black citizen.
This is considerably less than what the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee (AARAC) recommended to city leaders there last year. They set the amount at $5 million for any descendant of someone enslaved before 1865 who was born in or migrated to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and have proof of residency for at least 13 years.
In a statement, now on Twitter, to the Tampa City Council, the man asking for the reparations said, “we have to put White people on notice that we want our reparations. Our foreparents and us didn’t work for free and [get] underpaid and all this nonsense and the White folks get away with it.”
The Committee in San Francisco concluded that “the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of Black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement.”
While it is doubtful that Florida’ governor Ron DeSantis would allow such a thing to happen, and A representative for the City of Tampa said there are no council members currently considering reparations, California’s Governor Gavin Newsome recently reversed course and said he may be open to the idea of reparations.
On a Federal level, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) recently unveiled a resolution urging the federal government to provide reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans and people of African descent. He was joined by Democratic Reps. Barbara Lee (Calif.), Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.).
Rep. Bush said the measure would support previously proposed legislation for reparations and back efforts at state and local levels.
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