It’s April 12 and we’re still under shelter-in-place orders which were extended to May 3. They may likely be extended to June, who knows? We don’t really get a chance to participate in these decisions, they just mysteriously come from “the authorities.” Do we trust them? Who are they exactly? How would we have a more democratic process in this situation? With so much apparently falling apart, where is our agency in this moment? Old habits of passivity, trust in authority, and our general isolation from any kind of engagement in the larger dynamics that shape our lives tend to dominate our experience. We really need to find another way.
I’m out every day, bicycling or walking through the streets, climbing Bernal Heights, enjoying the serendipitous social encounters with old friends here and there. I’m also in a few email conversations that have lengthened to dozens of missives, with a variety of links to smart analyses appearing all over.
In San Francisco, as of today, we still have less than 1,000 cases and just a dozen or so deaths, out of a population of about 800,000. San Franciscans have been very cooperative and adaptable, and have largely engaged in a self-managed process of physical distancing and reorganizing everyday life. It’s downright anarchic! Yes, the government called for shelter-in-place in mid-March. But lots of people were already doing that before then, and as soon as the call went out, it seems that a huge majority of the city readily complied. It’s part of why I like living here. I think we can do this. We can take common sense actions together, without coercion or heavy-handed enforcement. I’ve shared so many moments already of people cooperating, thanking each other, standing aside on a path, making way in an almost crowded grocery aisle, waiting a few feet behind at a corner so as not crowd each other. It’s remarkable! It’s anarchy for real, albeit on a very small scale.
We are all flooded with countless articles and essays to read these days about the Covid-19. I start to write this somewhat reluctantly, because what really can I say that is so different than the millions of words already coursing through the internet? But I’m a blogger, albeit a pretty infrequent one, and I do have an unorthodox way of seeing the world around me. So here I am.
The view from Bernal Heights on one of the many incredibly clear sunsets we’ve had lately.
I’m also grieving the devastation that is underway. Much as I’ve hoped for the end of the world as we know it, mass sickness and death is horrifying. My mother died five months ago, too, so this brings those feelings to the surface every day as well. And then I have the odd experience of being a person who has repeatedly publicly said we should all just stop! Stop doing all this stupid work, most of which is destroying the planet and making us miserable. Once we stop, I proposed, we should figure out what work IS worth doing, and then get on with it… like reorganizing our plumbing systems so we stop using fresh drinking water for waste removal. Like deconstructing buildings in known flood zones and managing our retreat from the shorelines where the ocean and bay will soon rise to unknown levels. Like depaving huge swaths of the urban environment in favor of radical expansion of local food production… Like returning 50% of the lands of the earth to nature’s control, giving other species a chance to rejuvenate and reestablish themselves as part of the web of life, etc. etc.
Soon after my March 11 birthday (and the release of my new book Hidden San Francisco) passed, the severity of the pandemic started to become clearer to me. I admit I was a bit frustrated before then, thinking it puzzling that so many people were getting so freaked out by what was still a fairly low number (then) of infections and deaths. After all, we treat as normal the slaughter of nearly 40,000 people annually on the roads of the U.S. by car collisions, a toll that I have been describing forever as a bizarre social decision to trade “convenience” for mass murder. We’re also living through a decades-long rising crescendo of cancer deaths that we largely attribute to individual bad luck and/or lifestyle choices, rather than the systematic poisoning of our environment by identifiable corporate and individual criminals. And the United States is the largest purveyor of arms and militarized terror the world over, killing directly or indirectly tens of thousands every year in the name of (our) peace and prosperity. The list goes on from there… But as I said, just a few weeks back the numbers on the virus were uncertain, and I was carrying on a usual.
Our last daily newspaper, March 17, 2020.
As
San Francisco declared a shelter-in-place order, and businesses shut
down all around us (though grocery stores have remained open and well
stocked after the first frenzy of panic shopping), and the scope of
the global shutdown started to become clear, I suddenly realized that
this is it! I’d been expecting and anticipating that our fragile
daily lives would suddenly break and collapse eventually. What would
cause it? A financial collapse like 2008? An earthquake? A
Chernobyl-style nuclear accident? No, it is the pandemic. When in
modern times have we seen the entire planet shut itself down over a
period of a few weeks? Everyone who thinks we are going back to
normal after a month or two hasn’t thought it through.
How many people were already at the edge before this started? Something like 40-50% of U.S. households reported that they couldn’t sustain an unexpected $500 medical or other expense. How many people were already working in precarious, part-time and low-paid jobs, mostly in the much-vaunted service sector? The March 28 SF Chronicle reports that somewhere around 30,000 restaurants have closed in California, a large percentage of which will never reopen. That must be at least 100,000 people who are now permanently unemployed. And that’s just one sector. All convention businesses are closed down. Tourism is shut down. Hotels are empty. Entertainment is closed down, no sports, no concerts, no museums. A happy side effect of all this is that AirBnB is collapsing, but all the people that have built their precarious financial lives on the steady income they could get by renting rooms to tourists are shit out of luck. And this is all just in San Francisco. Extrapolated across the country and all the world, and what we are living through is truly unprecedented.
Waiting in line in six-foot increments, outside Rainbow Grocery.
The line wrapped all the way around to 14th Street at one point.
This is the Trader Joe’s line in Castro Valley on March 27… they’ve adopted the same system.
Lots of boarded up places in the neighborhood.
West of Pecos and Puerto Alegre both boarded up quickly.
…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.
