Florida man puts 'white people on notice,' says every black person should get $3 million for reparations

At a Tampa City Council meeting Thursday, a man proclaimed that $3 million per person is the only thing black people care about in the city. “All this nonsense, homelessness and all this other garbage yall talk about, police violence, and all this stuff, don’t nobody care about that,” he said. 

“We care about our reparations,” he continued. “And we have to put white people on notice… that our fore parents and us. We didn’t work for free and underpaid and all this nonsense, and the white people get away with it. And they talk about the great city they are building.”

The video, posted to Twitter by political commentator Ian Miles Cheong, garnered 1.5 million views in about nine hours and received mostly negative reactions. One commenter, Calvin Robinson asked, “Racist man wants free money?” 

The man’s comments came the same day Missouri Representative Cori Bush introduced legislation calling for $14 trillion in reparations to black people. She said, "The United States has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans."

"Black people in our country cannot wait any longer for our government to begin addressing each and every one of the extraordinary bits of harm, all of the harm it has caused since the founding." She continued. “America must provide reparations if we desire a prosperous future for all."

Steps toward addressing the so-called issue of reparations have already been made in the United States. In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) put together a reparations task force seeking to compensate black Californians affected by discriminatory housing discrimination practices between 1933 and 1977. Earlier this month, Newsom denied that same task force’s recommendation to give black Californians between $360,000 and $1.2 million and said reparations should not necessarily be a cash payout.