If you want to start a fight with your left-leaning friends, presuming they have not already disowned you, try bringing up the subject of reparations. It might make a good warm-up before the State of the Union Address this evening. Reparations are always good for lighting up a comment board on any news site, since very few, if any people are neutral on the subject.
But no matter what you think, San Francisco is taking the matter very seriously, unlike homelessness and the businesses leaving town. And a hearing on the matter was slated for Tuesday but has been postponed by a month. The reason? The San Francisco Standard reports that Supervisor Shamann Walton is stuck in Colombia after a week of partying hard.
Walton, the only black member of the Board of Supervisors, said that the junket was a birthday trip. Walton and several of his friends have birthdays close to one another, and a trip to Colombia seemed like a good way to celebrate. But for the moment, he appears to be stuck there. Walton told the Standard, “Our flight was delayed on Copa Airlines, and we couldn’t make the connecting flight. This is not a delay for reparations. The final report is due in June. Most certainly, I have no control over the airlines and flight delays.” That’s true. But if reparations are that important, Walton does have control over when he schedules his vacations.
For our VIPs: $5 Million in Reparations ‘Not Enough,’ San Francisco Board Member Says
Apparently, Walton posted and then deleted a picture of himself on Instagram at a birthday party at a Hooters in Medellín.
Okay, pause tape.
Hooters? Hooters? HOOTERS? The man flew all the way to Colombia to go to Hooters? The whole point of international travel is to try new things including the local cuisine, not to visit a restaurant you can probably find in a suburb of Des Moines. What was the problem? Was Appleby’s closed? Was the line too long at the Medellín TGI Fridays? Hopefully, when Walton gets his big payday, he’ll come up a little on the Michelin Ratings.
Or maybe there just weren’t enough scantily-clad women hanging around the pool at the hotel.
People were not amused. according to the Standard:
Rev. Amos Brown, who served as one of the 14 people on the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, was shocked to learn the reparations hearing was being delayed by Walton‘s vacation to another country.
“I’m stunned,” Brown said in a phone interview.
He added, “Well, still, there need to be reparations for the people’s sake. The Black population in this county is on life support.”
I have met very few racist white people in my life. And to be honest, many white people are simply tired of being hit with the “racist” label, and being told that they must wear sackcloth and ashes for atrocities they did not commit. And they are tired of being told that by the virtue of their skin color, they are evil. Many feel as if they are being deliberately provoked into a fight. And when someone who is supposed to be taking an active role in the reparations movement decides to cut a key meeting close so they could go to Colombia and do Jell-O shots from a waitress in a belly shirt, people look at that and they think, “Well if it looks like a grift, sounds like a grift, and walks like a grift, it must be a grift.”
No matter what the professors, pundits, network nabobs, and professional race hustlers say, most white people don’t harbor an animus toward black people. There are some that do, but not as many as the press and activists would have the country believe. But the constant drum beat of CRT only serves to rouse those people from the sediment and ooze to try to stoke the fire. There’s no way to prove that except for truly honest dialogue, which is all but impossible in 21st-century America. And frankly, the image of a San Francisco supervisor (who, according to The New York Post, was accused of uttering a racial slur against a black cadet at a City Hall checkpoint in 2022) ordering another round of mai-tai’s in Medellín doesn’t do much for the reparations movement’s credibility.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member