…the demands of abolition exceed a simple respite from antiblack racism. Abolition is the unreasonable, irreverent wilderness that exceeds and undermines any infrastructural attempt to “develop” its lands, even in the service of revolution. Abolition is not a pathway—it is the end of paths and the end of worlds, a roadblock barring passage to the destination-cum-mirage of late liberal democracy.
Dependence on cotton stretched far beyond North American shores. A world greedy for a slice of the whipping-machine’s super-profits had financed the occupation of the continent, and the forced migration of enslaved African Americans to the southwestern cotton fields helped to make the modern world economy possible. The steadily increasing productivity of hands on the cotton frontier kept cheap raw materials flowing to the world’s newest and most important industry, the cotton textile factories of Britain, Western Europe, and the North… Slavery’s expansion was the driving force in US history between the framing of the Constitution and the beginning of the Civil War.
As W.E.B. Dubois first argued in 1935, and white historians have finally fully conceded, by deserting their enslavers by the hundreds of thousands, by slowing and stopping work by the millions, and by joining Union forces to directly fight against Confederate armies, enslaved men and women forced the upcountry southern whites and the Union armies fighting to defeat the Confederacy militarily into helping them wage a war to destroy slavery. And in their world-historical success, they nipped an emerging slave-powered white-supremacist industrial war machine in the bud.
These patterns of economic exploitation were evidence that it was not just racial hatred that maintained the segregation of African Americans in their urban enclaves. A political economy had emerged and was structured around the captive African American market…. [described by social theorist Noliwe Rooks as “segrenomics”]…
These
days, I’m an old white guy, nearing 63 years old. But outward
appearances, not surprisingly, don’t tell the whole story. As a
child I grew up in or adjacent to Black Urban America. Born in
Brooklyn, I grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park from age 2-10, and then
North Oakland from 1967-74, during the peak of the Black Panthers
whose headquarters was less than a mile from my home. When I arrived
in San Francisco at the beginning of 1978 I found a place on Cole
just off Haight Street (Haight Street was at the time about 50%
boarded up and abandoned). Page Street, a half block away, was nearly
100% African American from Golden Gate Park all the way to Market
Street. The “lower Haight” was still the Fillmore, and was
overwhelmingly a black neighborhood. But in a few short years, the
black population was disappearing around me, and by the time I left
the Haight for the Mission in 1987, gentrification had fully
transformed the upper Haight, and was well on the way to transforming
the southern Fillmore into the “lower Haight” and later “NOPA”
and other real estate tags.
Seeing the recent film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” was incredibly moving. It’s a gorgeously filmed movie full of exquisite shots, and right from the start you realize that the filmmakers are fully engaged in the moment. A soapbox “preacher” is standing at a chain link fence in swirling smoke denouncing the toxic waste buried in the Hunters Point shipyard properties slated for development (and already wreaking havoc with the health of the remaining black population of the area). As the story unfolds, a distinctly black San Francisco sensibility quickly emerges, playfully bouncing between a greek chorus of rappers and the more artsy intellectualism of the main characters. I sighed repeatedly, feeling the aching absence of these lovely people in my everyday life. How can it be that Black San Francisco, once nearly 100,000 people, has shrunk so far that a film like this could be made and the title’s irony is overwhelmed by the reality it describes? A grassroots group in Bayview briefly appeared a couple of years ago under the moniker of the “Last 3%,” though it didn’t survive long. The upcoming census will tell the obvious tale of ethnic cleansing that has disproportionately evicted black and brown San Franciscans over the past two generations.
Black Panthers and supporters across from San Francisco’s City Hall, c. 1968.
None of this can be a surprise. The deep structural racism of U.S. society, while briefly obscured by Obama’s election, has resurfaced as Trumpism, and it looks like it’ll take a violent struggle to finally rid ourselves of it. Abolition began with the mass general strike of enslaved people during the Civil War, made some important legal gains in the constitutional amendments (13, 14, and 15) that passed during Reconstruction, but suffered decades of regression and defeat between the 1870s and the 1950s. The Jim Crow era, the full implantation of white supremacy not just in the South but throughout the U.S., even in San Francisco, kept African Americans in economic and social bondage enforced by police and vagrancy laws, debt and finance, and disenfranchisement. When the Civil Rights movement erupted and the legal apparatus of official discrimination began to crumble, other means were used to maintain the historic inequalities that are one of the bedrocks of the American way of life (these barbaric inequalities themselves are built on the genocide and mass theft of lands from indigenous peoples that comprise the other indispensable foundation of the United States).
Black folks in San Francisco began to coalesce around the language of “Frisco natives” and “Gentrification is Colonization” as displacement tightened its grip around The City. Of course, Frisco indigeneity is palimpsestic, only legible when hastily scribbled over three centuries of Muwekma Ohlone genocide… just because Black indigeneity flummoxes what we know about Indianness and blackness, it does not collapse the distinction between them. The politics of belonging in The City are a set of volleys between and across the inherited categories of settler, savage, and slave, Frisco native and out-of-towner, here and there, then and now. (p. 112) … I write in collusion with [my student] Tarika’s ethnographic refusal [to participate in my interviews]—following her no without trying to transform it into a yes. Her manifestation as a Black Matrix straight outta Sunnydale brings us back to the utility of indigenous political theory in The City, where Frisca indigeneity is a new foil for the old dispossessed twins, the Ohlone and the Negro. (p. 120) (Shange, Progressive Dystopia)
Some recent fiction got me started on a new jag of study. The novel American War by Omar El Akkad is a brilliant speculative work about the Second American Civil War breaking out in 2074. The story mostly takes place in the long years after the war has stalemated, and the characters live in refugee camps along the front lines at the northern border of the “Free Southern States” of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia (Florida is by 2075 entirely under water except for a few islands; South Carolina is entirely quarantined and off limits due to the detonation of a deadly biological weapon during the war). The United States has shrunk, literally due to massive sea level rise, and politically due to the establishment of a “Mexican Protectorate” covering most of the original territory of Mexico seized during the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. Eastern Texas is one of the hottest battle zones of the grinding, ongoing war. This novel has an incredible plot line and I won’t spoil it here. Suffice to say that it is well worth a read. Friends who I have recommended this to have told me they find it too depressing or slow in the early part and I concede that it will take an effort to get fully into it… but you won’t regret it! Our current polarization and neo-tribal divide, themselves reminiscent of the Civil War period, are revealed in their full misery 50 years hence.
Call white voters bigots or don’t. But in good times and in bad, in peacetime and in war, in sunshine or in shadow, white America votes for those candidates it believes are most likely to keep people of color “in their place”—either outside the country altogether, or in the most servile and subordinate condition possible within it.
—Kevin Baker, “Losing My Religion,” Easy Chair column, Harper’s Magazine, March 2020
I am finally sitting down to write a new blog post at the end of February 2020. My new bookHidden San Francisco just came out, and I just hosted yesterday the inaugural Twilight “City Front” Bay Cruise too. I hang out with my almost 3-year-old granddaughter twice a week, and Shaping San Francisco continues to chug along, underfunded but sustained by our commitment; the reward is that it is interesting and engaging most of the time.
I often feel a palpable nausea when I wake up to another day of life in the U.S. And I don’t have much to complain about personally. My personal situation is very comfortable thanks to my land trust apartment and its relatively eviction-proof low rent, and my low cost of living thanks to not owning an automobile, and paying the minimum for a high-deductible health insurance. I can proudly say that I’ve made it from 23 to 63 years old without having to have a regular 40-hour+ job (in fact, I’ve not had any “real jobs” all that time beyond self-employed small business gigs and the occasional college class to teach). I’ve enjoyed a remarkably free life, intellectually and socially, and I continue to enjoy the fruits of that freedom every day. A lack of financial hardship of course has been a blessing throughout, not because I ever got rich or had a lot of money, but because I was able to save some of my limited income (and the small payout I got from the only time I owned property) by keeping my overhead as low as possible. Lucky me. But the world around me, in San Francisco, in California, in the United States, and certainly across the planet, is going to hell. And there is nothing on the horizon that gives me much hope that we can halt this disaster and turn towards a liberatory abundance rooted in our common wealth.
The bizarre ritual of American politics is fully underway, and it’s difficult to discuss politics or political issues without it devolving into a comparative popularity contest of the various candidates. My own long-time antipathy for electoral politics and especially presidential politics, makes this spectacular ritual all the more repellent. But like everyone, I too succumb to the daily reporting on the horse race, much the same as I follow a baseball pennant race, or the NBA regular season. But in the case of presidential politics it’s hard not to try to interpret the polls and primary votes as having some larger political meaning, if only because so much of the U.S. population that chooses to pay attention to politics invests nearly all its energies into this narrow and symbolic “choice.” The half that tunes out is mostly tuned out of any sense of politics or historical agency. In any case, there is a shortage of broad grassroots organizing going on outside of the “electoral imperative.”
Like most people with a critical mind and a heart, I have been a bit traumatized by Trumpism, especially its blatant white supremacist ideology. On one hand, I saw the turn to xenophobic nationalism and racist trolling as more of the same that we endured in the 1980s under the equally dim-witted TV president Reagan. But this is decades later, and the revanchist efforts to restore American primacy launched by the ruling class in the mid-1970s through the embrace of the marketizing, privatizing neoliberal attack on the social and the public has largely run its course. We’re left with a profoundly atomized and fearful population. The bonds of solidarity and mutual aid, probably strongest among the poorest and most oppressed communities, have largely been destroyed among working- and middle-class people. Most seem to accept the prevailing sense that There Is No Alternative, and that you’re on your own. Instead of Freedom = Slavery we get Kleptocracy = Meritocracy, and for some bizarre reason an awful lot of people actually believe it (it may be one of Trump’s most useful qualities, his willingness to openly and brazenly flaunt the norms that keeps the corruption buried, most recently in his flurry of pardons for white-collar criminals who were convicted of all the things he’s been doing all along). The bigger public secret remains War = Peace, which masks the insane expansion of the U.S. military budget, and the pointless murders, slaughters, and lost wars that should have long ago discredited the Pentagon and its apologists.
We are on course to fill the world’s oceans with more plastic (in terms of sheer weight) than life. In the face of this ecocidal absurdity, private investors in major oil companies are expanding plastic production by over 40% in the near future. The United States claims to be the best of all possible societies, even when things are deteriorating all around us in such dramatic fashion—from the collapse of daily news sources to the brutal unhousing of ever more of our neighbors, the rapacious destruction of the limited environmental protections we managed to develop since the 1970s, the abandonment of public lands and public resources to venal profiteers, etc. etc.
A surprisingly large number of people continue to believe in their underlying well-being, especially if they own a house. Somehow the decades-long inflation of property values is expected to continue forever, and the long-term disconnection between income and the cost of shelter is to be ignored. For the 40% of the population that cannot handle a $500 emergency due to lack of savings or resources, property values offer no hope, and for most of the bottom half of the population, endlessly rising housing prices and rents only exacerbate an already untenable situation.
Thought about in this way, maybe Bernie Sanders has a chance. But even if he were to win, and somehow bulldoze the inevitable obstruction in Congress (where millionaire Nancy Pelosi and her plutocrat allies will be among the most intransigent), the idea that jobs and economic growth are in themselves a good thing will go unchallenged. A Green New Deal may finally begin to direct our daily productive lives towards some of the real transformations that are already decades too late. But it also threatens to complicate even further urgent attempts to break with the growth paradigm that drives capitalist accumulation and ensures that we will eventually go headfirst into the abyss.
So I’m happy to see Sanders doing better than anyone else in the current campaign. Some friends on the left are certain his candidacy is doomed to repeat the McGovern 1972 catastrophe, and they may be right. It’s hard to imagine enough young voters turning out to swamp the gerontocracy and its millions of elderly white supremacist voters. Though they do conveniently keep dying, there are deep currents running through whole swaths of the country that are too easily tapped by demagoguery and open appeals to whiteness, America First, and other ideological ghosts that have chased us all through the 240 years of U.S. history.
If this election turns on anything, I think it is a generational opportunity to repudiate for once (and let’s hope, for all) the persistent white racism that has had its last gasp of self-congratulatory power while firmly planting its head into its collective ass during the Trump era. Surely there must be a substantial majority who are sick of the backward-looking, reactionary, incredibly dumb people who are running the show, Trump only being the figurehead for a brazen strata of comfortable criminals. Their criminality takes all the usual forms—stealing public resources and money, exploiting millions of people while brutalizing others, destroying common wealth in pursuit of their own profits, and irretrievably destroying a potentially abundant future that should belong to everyone on earth. So sure, vote the bums out. But voting is not enough, not nearly enough.
Bente Wohnsen Carlsson November 5, 1936 – October 28, 2019
Me and my mom on Mother’s Day, May 2019.
My mother, Bente, died October 28, 2019. I am very sad and will miss her forever. Losing a parent is the most normal of human experiences, and among the most daunting. She was nearly 83, and I thought for a number of years that she or my father could drop unexpectedly at any time and I needed to be prepared. Two weeks before she died she took a bad fall, and as so often happens when the very elderly take a fall, things unraveled. I wrote this a few weeks ago, but wasn’t ready to make it public til today, a month after her death.
During her two weeks in the hospital, we learned a lot about Kaiser’s assembly line medical care, the erroneous assumptions it produces that lead to degraded care at skilled nursing facilities (through no fault of the individuals who work in those understaffed, under-resourced facilities) and how hard it is to properly advocate for our parents when things start breaking down. The saddest loss is the relationship between my mother and my granddaughter, which had just begun to solidify. But relationships between great-grandmothers and great-granddaughters are rare, and almost by definition, cannot last. They played together for two and a half years—pretty good really, but my granddaughter’s memories of my mom will be fully shaped by the many videos and photos we have of them. She’s a child of the digital world, the over-documented childhoods that will allow little to disappear in the fog of memory. She will “know” her childhood in a way that few of us born in the 20th century do (unless our parents made home movies of our earliest days).
Mom and Halloul when she was just a few months old in 2017.
At my dad’s birthday lunch in January 2019.
My mom came to the United States after marrying my father on December 22, 1956, when she was already 6 months pregnant with me. At a memorial we held on Day of the Dead, my father surprised us with his account of their serendipitous meeting at the end of a train line in northern Germany where he’d overslept and missed his connection. After traveling together to Copenhagen, he left as planned to visit his relatives in Sweden, but came back after a few days and went straight to my mother’s parents’ home at the edge of Dyrehaven in Klampenborg, a suburb north of Copenhagen. After he was well received and fed dinner, my mother, who was working as a nurse trainee, called in and told her parents to have my dad meet her at Hellerup station at midnight. He was there, and after walking around a bit in the warm Scandinavian midsummer middle of the night, in a passionate interlude my mother and father conceived me in a public park. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 11, 1957.
My mother and father on their wedding day, Dec. 22, 1956
My mom, dad, grandmother, aunt, and grandfather, Dec. 22, 1956, in Denmark.
I have no memories of my first couple of years in Brooklyn. I have a dim memory of flying to Denmark in 1960 or 1961 on Scandinavian Airlines to visit my mother’s mother (MorMor in Danish). The plane had white linen tablecloths and full silverware, including a special “pusher” for kids in lieu of a knife, a utensil that remained in our kitchen drawer for another decade. At my grandmother’s I had to sleep in a crib for which I was already too tall, my head and feet uncomfortably smashing the top and bottom. My earliest memory in Chicago, after we moved there in 1959, was when my father carried me up a rickety wooden stairway to see fireworks shooting off over the opening of a nearby Co-op grocery store. Later, redevelopment bulldozers leveled many square blocks across the street from our place in Hyde Park, and I vividly remember an old-fashioned circus setting up its BigTop tent in the vacant lot, with elephants and caged tigers, clowns and acrobats and the whole bit. I was taken to see the show and my mother bought me a small stuffed bear that was attached to a dowel. It slipped from my grasp and fell through the bleacher seats into the darkness below. It felt like the end of the world as I bawled in abject despair, until a nice person brought it out and gave it back to me.
