City of Oakland Mayor is branded racist for giving families of color $500 a month if they earn under $59,000 with no rules on how they spend it - but offering poor white families nothing
A program to give $500 monthly checks to low-income families of color in Oakland, California, has been criticized for explicitly excluding the 10,000 white residents living in poverty in the city.
The lottery system, funded by private philanthropists, will see the no-strings-attached checks go to households with an annual income of less than $59,000 if they have at least one child. The other half of the $500 checks will go to those earning under $30,000.
According to data from an Oakland Equity Indicators Report, cited by officials to justify favoring people of color, white households earn about three times that of African-American ones.
The same report states around 8 per cent of the city's white residents, approximately 10,000 people, live in poverty.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announces a privately funded program that will give low-income families of color $500 per month with no rules on how they can spend it.
The program has spurred criticism for explicitly excluding white residents from applying. In this 2019 file photo, a woman walks through a homeless encampment at Union Point Park in Oakland
Around 10,000 white people live in poverty in the city, which is defined by earning less than $12,880. This file picture shows Oakland resident Ed Hansen with walking sticks that he carved in the Union Point Park homeless encampment
Schaaf told the Associated Press the reason for limiting eligibility to black, indigenous and other people of color was that white households in Oakland make on average about three times as much as black households.
Mayor Schaaf said: 'We have designed this demonstration project to add to the body of evidence, and to begin this relentless campaign to adopt a guaranteed income federally.'
The announcement sparked an angry debate online, as hundreds of commentators on Reddit were critical of the move.
One commenter labeled it 'pure racism'.
'Is this even legal? Can a city government legally have a program that's only for certain races?'
Another explained the program failed to understand the changing demographics of the city.
'The high income earners in Oakland are mostly young transplants that did not grow up in Oakland. They should have done research on upward social mobility in Oakland and restricted based upon that. But I guess that's too much work.'
Another wrote: 'Poor is poor. Being poor and white sucks, you may not get locked up for trivial shit like our dark skinned brothers and sisters but it’s no secret that White Privilege always has and always will require a certain shade of green to your name.'
Families have been forced to live in their cars, as homelessness rates surged in the city (File photo from 2019)
A homeless man waits to panhandle drivers stopped at a traffic signal on Broadway. The rates of homelessness in the city rose nearly 50 per cent between 2017 and 2019, when this photo was taken
In this shot from March 2020, a homeless person camps on a street bench
Homeless encampments like this one (pictured in February 2021) underneath the freeway and BART tracks have sprung up around the city
The group behind the scheme, Oakland Resilient Families, said the idea for race-based payments began in 2020 when Mayor Schaaf pledged to bring a guaranteed income pilot to Oakland.
It states she was inspired in part by Stockton, California, which in 2019 started giving some residents earning under $46,000 per year a monthly check of $500.
Stockton's plan, launched under previous Mayor Michael Stubbs, has been widely praised as bringing greater economic prosperity to the city, and identified as a potential blueprint for a Federal universal basic of income.
Oakland Resilient Families, said it planned to steer half of the monthly checks towards black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) in East Oakland.
According to the Equity Indicators Report, 2016 median household income for white families were $110,000, for Asians $76,000, Latinos had a median household income of $65,000, and African-Americans just $37,500.
The DailyMail.com contacted the City of Oakland director of communications and Oakland's citywide communications director to ask how the eligibility rules had been decided.
Neither had responded by Wednesday afternoon.
Oakland's homeless population rose by nearly 50 per cent between 2017 and 2019.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, any individual earning less than $12,880 is in poverty.
A household of two earning $17,420 would also qualify, rising to $31,040 for a household of five.
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