this past sunday i visited San Francisco, supposed gay Mecca of the US. well, it was somebody's Mecca but it sure as hell wasn't mine! yuppies, yuppies everywhere. geesh. as me and Angel walked the streets of the Mission district it took everything we had not to release all the pent up anger that was raging inside of us on the nearest bicycle-riding, hemp-wearing, eco-friendly, barefoot, i'm-a-walking-revolution gentrifier. and you know what else? i realized that i HATE it when comfortable gay white folks go around talking about how great it is to be "free" in a place where the oppression of poor folks and POC is plain as day. i think the thing that enrages me the most is the air of innocence that yuppies and hippified yuppies have about them. James Baldwin once wrote
and this is precisely the problem i had with San Francisco. though we walk by one another in "integrated" neighborhoods, we couldn't be farther from each other. my rage is proportional to the innocence. coming in, the gentrifiers push us out. always coming, never arriving. they haven't made it yet.
the city is swarthed in a myth of freedom; its very name is a myth. once, after being pelted with food from a car of Black men here in Raleigh i told a friend that i didn't know if i could take it anymore. he suggested i go somewhere more homo-friendly. perhaps San Francisco. the name was uttered like a prophecy, the image invoked a talisman warding off despair. but i had heard it before. people spoke of New York City as a magic place as well.
of course NYC has its own myth. New York is a metropole, a capitalist citadel. it boasts to be cosmopolitan, the noisy clash of cultures and identities running together, all reaching for wealth or survival. San Fracisco invokes the ideals of co-existence and harmony, NYC is a city of cacophony.
and to these cities come the young urban professionals, the innocents. mostly white but heavily spiced with black and brown phenotypes. they come, singing the myths of their cities. culture, creativity, art, diversity are their mantras. beneath the sound of The Song is the grinding of change that is not beautiful: removal, poverty. diversity turns out to be racism, plain, if not simple.
i went to some book stores hoping to find something rare, something that i would only find in the Gay City. to no avail. it seems Barnes & Noble in Kalamazoo, MI has just as much radicalism about homosexuality as the famed city of San Fran. i wanted to shop for used clothes, but i couldn't stomach it, as the thrift shops opened their doors beneath the windows of luxury condos.
as the sun went down the police came out and put brown intoxicated bodies in patrol cars. me and Angel retreated to Oakland, where the little old Korean ladies take the bus and where we could breathe some.
there's something disturbing about a place that shrieks peace and liberty to the sky but invokes such resentment so deeply in us. i remember something once said in Africa about colonialism that pronounced its benevolence: it is a "policy of smiling and bloodshed".
but this isn't to say that Cali was all bad. not at all. i loved most of what i saw. i especially appreciated being in a racial demographic that i was previously totally unaquainted with. when i went to the middle school where Angel mentors, i realized that for the first time i was in a school that was majority Latin@. (i guess that could have happened in NYC, but it happened for me in E. Oakland). the school yard, surrounded by low angled roofs reminded me of a school i had visited in Ghana.
and then there were the hills. and the trees whose layers stood in stark relief in the light of the street lamps. like immense paper cut-outs. there is, then, a place of marvel behind the narrative myths. i think i'd like to return someday. just not to San Fracisco.
"it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
"Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, “No! This is not true! How bitter you are!”—but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions, under which you were born, for I was there. Your countrymen were not there, and haven’t made it yet." (from "My Dungeon Shook")
and this is precisely the problem i had with San Francisco. though we walk by one another in "integrated" neighborhoods, we couldn't be farther from each other. my rage is proportional to the innocence. coming in, the gentrifiers push us out. always coming, never arriving. they haven't made it yet.
the city is swarthed in a myth of freedom; its very name is a myth. once, after being pelted with food from a car of Black men here in Raleigh i told a friend that i didn't know if i could take it anymore. he suggested i go somewhere more homo-friendly. perhaps San Francisco. the name was uttered like a prophecy, the image invoked a talisman warding off despair. but i had heard it before. people spoke of New York City as a magic place as well.
of course NYC has its own myth. New York is a metropole, a capitalist citadel. it boasts to be cosmopolitan, the noisy clash of cultures and identities running together, all reaching for wealth or survival. San Fracisco invokes the ideals of co-existence and harmony, NYC is a city of cacophony.
and to these cities come the young urban professionals, the innocents. mostly white but heavily spiced with black and brown phenotypes. they come, singing the myths of their cities. culture, creativity, art, diversity are their mantras. beneath the sound of The Song is the grinding of change that is not beautiful: removal, poverty. diversity turns out to be racism, plain, if not simple.
i went to some book stores hoping to find something rare, something that i would only find in the Gay City. to no avail. it seems Barnes & Noble in Kalamazoo, MI has just as much radicalism about homosexuality as the famed city of San Fran. i wanted to shop for used clothes, but i couldn't stomach it, as the thrift shops opened their doors beneath the windows of luxury condos.
as the sun went down the police came out and put brown intoxicated bodies in patrol cars. me and Angel retreated to Oakland, where the little old Korean ladies take the bus and where we could breathe some.
there's something disturbing about a place that shrieks peace and liberty to the sky but invokes such resentment so deeply in us. i remember something once said in Africa about colonialism that pronounced its benevolence: it is a "policy of smiling and bloodshed".
but this isn't to say that Cali was all bad. not at all. i loved most of what i saw. i especially appreciated being in a racial demographic that i was previously totally unaquainted with. when i went to the middle school where Angel mentors, i realized that for the first time i was in a school that was majority Latin@. (i guess that could have happened in NYC, but it happened for me in E. Oakland). the school yard, surrounded by low angled roofs reminded me of a school i had visited in Ghana.
and then there were the hills. and the trees whose layers stood in stark relief in the light of the street lamps. like immense paper cut-outs. there is, then, a place of marvel behind the narrative myths. i think i'd like to return someday. just not to San Fracisco.
2 comments:
Thank you.
That's mostly all I have to say - I feel lame saying it but...I think you know...thanks for speaking your rage.
sidenote - i love love the demythologizing of these cities. I'm constantly trying to do this with NYC in response to the glazed over looks I get and cries of "omg how IS IT, how is NEW YORK CITY!? ISN'T IT MAGICAL?!" ...my friend who spent many years on the east coast but now is back in east LA often try to talk about the myths of the different cities and the different flavors of racism/sexism/heterosexism and how they express themselves in different locales...
...essay? book?
-elizabeth
hmmm. i've gotten lots of sympathetic responses to this post. perhaps more work should be done on city myths? my friend Bryan Mercer was working on that this past summer...
yes, the flavors of reality are interesting. but not all of them are bad, verdad?
thnx lizbeth
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