San Fran reparation proposal even worse than you think

For San Francisco to give reparations to drug offenders would be strange and unjustified, because it barely prosecutes drug offenders in recent years, and certainly hasn’t engaged in recent, widespread discrimination against black people in that context. There were only three drug dealing convictions by the San Francisco district attorney’s office in 2021, and none of the offenders were singled out because of their race. The reparations committee doesn’t claim the City is only prosecuting black rather than white drug offenders, or that it is prosecuting more black than white offenders, and even if it did, the Supreme Court’s Armstrong decision says a higher black arrest rate doesn’t show discrimination.

For a racial preference to be legal, it has to be remedying government discrimination, not “societal discrimination,” or discrimination that is “ageless” or in the distant past, according to the Supreme Court’s Croson decision. The governmental discrimination being remedied has to be recent, not in the distant past, like 14 or 18 years ago, according to federal appeals courts in cases like Brunet v. City of Columbus (1993). Also, the governmental discrimination has to be widespread, not just involve isolated instances of discrimination, according to the federal appeals court in San Francisco in its Coral Construction decision.

In its report, the San Francisco African-American Reparations Advisory Committee cites a long history of serious discrimination against blacks by government officials in San Francisco and California from the mid-19th Century to the mid-20th Century, in many different areas of life. But that discrimination is just too old to justify a racial preference. On the other hand, the Committee doesn’t point to any drug conviction tainted by racism in recent years, or even any widespread discrimination by San Francisco’s government.