San Franciscans step gingerly around the detritus of homelessness (feces, discarded drug paraphernalia), past volatile mentally ill derelicts and shuttered stores that are casualties of crime, especially all-but-legalized shoplifting. Residents of their picturesque but dystopian city know, however, that government is worrying about one problem: slavery. Which the state of California never had.

A 15-person city task force has made 111 recommendations, including $5 million payments to certain eligible individuals. Because many disadvantages downstream from slavery, such as housing discrimination, are ascribed to it, degrees of victimhood must be negotiated. Particularly now that racial identities (“I identify as ...”) are even more fluid than genders, and multiply faster than pronouns.

Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans, who had many generations of terrible treatment in California, need not apply. But then, Soledad Ursúa, writing in City Journal, notes that Japanese American households lead the Los Angeles metro area in median net worth ($592,000), and Chinese American households (median $408,200) also lead White households (median $355,000).

What is owed to African Americans who identify as multiracial (nationwide, more than 3 million)? Should descendants of the hundreds of thousands of White Union soldiers killed (by battle or disease) or maimed in the Civil War be exempt from paying reparations? Solomonic decisions must be made.

Some San Francisco politicians are disappointed by their constituents (although not the 7 percent of the city’s residents who are registered Republicans). Many vociferous progressives are unenthusiastic about a reparations bill estimated (by Stanford’s Hoover Institution) to cost $200 billion, almost 30 times the city’s 2022-2023 general fund budget of $6.8 billion.

A relatively parsimonious California task force, whose final report is due this month, last year initially suggested $223,200 (the $200 was a whimsical touch) as recompense just for housing discrimination. A more recent figure is $360,000 for all the state’s Black residents who had enslaved ancestors. Although the total cost might be about three times the state’s budget, a task force member who mints novel verbs is disappointed that the news media has focused on dollars and is “not able to nuance better.”

Nationally, the reparations bidding has reached $14 trillion (more than half the nation’s GDP), that being the calculation by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) of the nation’s bill for “reparatory justice” regarding slavery “and its lasting harm.” Evanston, Ill. – a college town, naturally: Northwestern University – has its own reparations program. Other progressive cities might practice what they preach, although the fun is the preaching part.

The Goldwater Institute’s Matt Beienburg, writing in National Review, reports that thanks to the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, a school near you might soon teach “reparations math.” Seventy-four percent of eighth-graders are not proficient in math, but first things first. The Pulitzer Center, which Beienburg says is “a curriculum partner of the New York Times’ 1619 project,” says “two essential questions” are: “How does white rage fuel the racial wealth gap?” and “What are ways that the United States could begin to repair the harm of enslavement, Jim Crow, and other forms of wealth theft from Black Americans?” Among the “guiding questions” for teachers is this: “What patterns do we notice about violence and terrorism by White Americans against the Black middle class?”

Reparations are another example of a metastasizing phenomenon: solemn silliness. All calculations of costs are fanciful, depending as they do on capricious inclusions and exclusions of categories of people from access to the trough. The multibillion-dollar race industry (“diversity, equity, inclusion” consultants, governments’ spoils systems of racial set-asides, etc.) involves some awkwardness. A piquant New York Times headline announces on page one: “Reparations Put Democrats in a Quandary.” Do tell.

Progressives bandying the idea that the nation was born racist and remains so cannot tiptoe away from reparations without seeming insincere. Advocacy of reparations involves, however, the culminating denial of Black people’s agency: Crippled by history, they necessarily have the status of permanent wards of government. The progressive vocabulary of “equity” says disparate social outcomes are definitionally the results of racism that is “systemic,” therefore it is incurable until a new social system arrives. Meaning: never.

Some San Francisco officials hope that $5 million payments to eligible individuals will slow the exodus of the city’s Black residents. (The flight is part of the multihued flow from California: Between April 2020 and July 2022, the state’s population declined by more than 500,000.) The payments might, however, subsidize Black flight to, say, Texas, a former Confederate state where taxes, housing costs and homeless rates are lower, job creation is higher and slavery ended a while ago.