... But the Golden Age of Revision is not over. San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee has issued a report recommending that each black resident of the city receive a lump sum payment of $5 million. This payment is intended as reparation for the “forced enslavement of people of African descent.” Notably, slavery was never legal in California — and whatever injustices people of African descent suffered in California’s past, slavery wasn’t one of them.

It is perhaps nice that San Francisco wants to make up for injustices committed by others elsewhere, but the Advisory Committee is more revisionist than that. The payment in this case is meant “to encompass not only the atrocities committed by this country during the era of chattel slavery, but also call out the role of government in creating and perpetuating poverty by codifying racist practices in housing policy, particularly during the postwar era of urban history in the 1950s through 1970s known as urban renewal.”

The “racist practices” in question are summarized in the report as “a legacy of civic divestment” from the 1940s onward in which “black wealth was undermined” and “near-exclusive black communities” were “facilitated and coddled.” The terminology is a bit confusing, but the “coddling” appears to mean forced segregation, which indeed was a bad thing.

I wouldn’t dissent from this summary, nor, having no expertise in this era of San Francisco history, would I endorse it. But I bow in admiration at the audacity of the revisionary spirit. San Francisco, like the rest of the country, certainly had a history in which racial discrimination played a significant part, but when the Advisory Committee gets to more recent times, it acts in the spirit of the 1619 Project by turning huge achievements in civil rights upside down. In 1996, California voters by a wide margin passed Proposition 209, banning racial preferences. It outlawed racial discrimination, but in the eyes of the Committee this outlawing of racial discrimination was itself racial discrimination: “The passage of Proposition 209 undermines black-owned businesses that seek to obtain public contracts with the State of California and local governments.”

The idea of paying current black residents of San Francisco $5 million each regardless of any personal injury or injustice they may have suffered fits perfectly well with the collectivist mindset that has seized so many Americans. One might think that San Franciscans with any shred of common sense or spirit of actual justice would laugh this proposal to scorn. But those sort of San Franciscans have spent the last few years withdrawing inland, or moving to Colorado, Montana or Texas. Those who are left may be too mesmerized by their reflections in mirrors as people of transcendental wokeness to grasp that they are being set up for revisionist plunder.