A former Black Lives Matter activist denounced an ambitious San Francisco reparations plan as "gaslighting" black people.
Xaviaer DuRousseau, who now works for the conservative organization PragerU, bashed the plan, saying that it was trying to make black Americans reliant on "handouts." DuRousseau said that the plan, which aims to give all eligible black residents a one-time cash sum of $5 million, eliminate all personal debt and tax burdens, and sell residents homes for just $1, is not feasible.
CALIFORNIA PUSHES FOR $360,000 PER PERSON IN REPARATIONS DESPITE MAJOR DEFICIT
“This is 111 ways to gaslight black Americans into thinking that we need to be dependent on a system of handouts in order to be successful,” DuRousseau told Fox News Host Laura Ingraham in a Wednesday appearance.
“It is so unrealistic to think that the average family in San Francisco is going to be able to pay $600,000 extra apiece,” DuRousseau said, referring to an estimate from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which found that each non-black resident would need to pay that amount to make the reparations a reality.
DuRousseau then pointed to the city's budget deficit as evidence that the plan is “never actually going to happen.” The plan would cost an estimated $50 billion for a city that had a 2022-2023 budget of just $14 billion.
The former activist then slammed the plan for distracting from other immediate issues, such as homelessness in San Francisco.
“It’s disgusting to me that we are more focused on slavery, which ended in 1865, than we’re focused on veterans who are on the streets of San Francisco, homeless and begging for spare change in 2023,” he said. “That’s where they need to start sending their money.”
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San Francisco's African American Reparations Advisory Committee, commissioned by the city in the wake of the George Floyd riots, first made the proposal in December.
The report says that the $5 million per person sum "would compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced, and will redress 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."