There are horrible ideas. You’ve seen them. Mullet haircuts. An electric vehicle. A Bad Bunny halftime show. There are also historically disastrous ideas. And then there are ideas so spectacularly misguided they leave you wondering how anyone uttered them with a straight face.
“Reparations” schemes fall squarely into that last category.
Whether framed as compensation for slavery, historical discrimination, or systemic inequities, most modern reparations proposals share the same fatal flaw: they attempt to settle historical grievances by transferring wealth from people who never committed the wrongs to people who never directly suffered them.
That’s not “justice.”
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So naturally, San Francisco decided to go all in.
The city moved forward with a reparations ordinance, embracing a policy that was always going to be legally and financially explosive. And now — shocker — it’s staring down the barrel of a lawsuit:
A lawsuit is challenging a San Francisco ordinance that establishes a reparations fund for Black residents.
The ordinance, signed in December by San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, a Democrat, is aimed at addressing systematic harms. Even so, the Pacific Legal Foundation said this is wrong.
“The purpose of the lawsuit is to make sure that the city and county of San Francisco is not spending taxpayer dollars on an unconstitutional, unlawful plan, which is the reparations plan,” Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Andrew Quinio told The Center Square this week. “By having the San Francisco Human Rights Commission administer the funds to implement this reparations plan, San Francisco is engaging in steps that will carry out a plan that violates the Constitution.”
And this is where the entire framework starts to collapse under its own contradictions.
How exactly do you quantify “systemic harms”? What formula do you use? What data point converts history into a dollar amount? The moment you try to assign a price tag to something so broad and abstract, you’re no longer talking about justice — you’re talking about arbitrary math dressed up as policy.
Then comes eligibility.
The ordinance reportedly refers to “black residents.” That sounds simple until you ask the next question: what does that mean in practice?
What happens if someone has one Black parent and one white parent? Is there a sliding scale? A percentage calculation? Or does the policy default to some modern version of a one-drop rule — the very concept civil rights leaders fought to dismantle?
Here’s more about the lawsuit:
Pacific Legal Foundation filed the pro bono lawsuit on behalf of San Francisco residents Richard “Richie” Greenberg and Arthur Ritchie, as well as the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation.
“I’ve been keenly paying attention to this issue of reparations for several years now, watching as city hall officials (and now the mayor) have consistently ignored law and constitutional rights of us taxpayers,” said Greenberg in a CFER news release. “I have reached out to the Board of Supervisors, the mayor, the city attorney, and the reparations committee itself to demand they cease wasting taxpayers’ money on this unconstitutional plan, and the time has come to bring them to court.”
The modern push for “reparations” ultimately boils down to a familiar formula: take money from one group and transfer it to another, based not on individual conduct, but on collective identity.
In practice, that means government deciding that one racial category is “Group A” — the payers — and another is “Group B” — the recipients. That’s not equal protection. That’s state-sponsored sorting by ancestry.
Proponents often cite slavery as the “original sin.” But even if you focus narrowly on slavery, the logistical and evidentiary hurdles are enormous. Tracing lineage back generations with certainty is extraordinarily difficult. Records are incomplete. Migration patterns complicate claims. And many Americans — of all races — arrived long after the Civil War.
Then the argument shifts to “systemic harms.” But that term itself is elastic and undefined. What qualifies? Over what timeframe? Under what measurable standard? If you can’t clearly define the harm, how do you calculate compensation?
And what about individuals whose personal family histories don’t fit neatly into the narrative? Consider a former president with a black father from Kenya and a white American mother, raised in substantial privilege. Would eligibility hinge solely on skin tone? On self-identification? On partial ancestry? If so, the policy isn’t remedying specific, provable harms — it’s assigning benefits based on racial classification alone.
That’s not healing. That’s racial essentialism dressed up as justice.
And San Francisco isn’t alone in experimenting with these policies. Evanston, among others, has pursued its own reparations-style initiatives, inviting similar legal, moral, and practical questions:
Established in 2019 and approved by the City Council in 2021, the program issues $25,000 direct cash payments to Black residents and descendants of Black residents who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969.
Evanston was the first city in the nation to pass a reparations plan, pledging $10 million over a decade to Black residents.
And for the record, neither California nor Illinois was ever a slave state.
The more you drill down into how reparations would actually work, the more obvious it becomes that the architects either haven’t thought through the consequences — or don’t want to say the quiet part out loud: It’s pandering and vote-buying with taxpayer money.
