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[...] To think about blackness as a kind of categorical imperative, a duty first to ourselves and therefore to all, to expand the reach of freedom from domination, to understand blackness as a way of being in the world that necessitates a political project, that orients our expression inevitably toward a confrontation with injustice. It is also to understand that Black Humanism, with black music at its core, is the foundation that has cracked open a hollow American democracy by force and continuous resistance, and that remembering and carrying on the burden of that struggle continues to be the only hope for making this country a place worth living in, a nation with something to offer other than the cold hand of business ruling over a glass-tower gentry, a pauperized and fearful suburban petty bourgeoisie, and underneath both the abyss of the carceral archipelago.
In this literature, “antiblackness” is a technical, not a subjective or impressionistic, term. It does not refer to prejudice or dislike, as might easily be supposed. Rather, it is used to capture the idea that an underlying racial antagonism can come to structure the social fabric of a given society. Race, in this description, operates like a function that overdetermines outcomes and relations between people regardless of any particular actor’s personal disposition or attitudes. It says that there are disparate and antagonistic sets of what Durkheim would call “social facts,” matters of objective analysis about the relative position of power, and more importantly even, of value, that inhere in populations that are racially marked and bounded. The racial fault line is therefore not a regrettable byproduct of behaviors that can be reformed or improved over time; it is not like a tumor that can be excised from the body politic. On the contrary, it is a necessary and even vital ingredient of the social order, a division that pulls two socially defined groups apart but simultaneously binds the larger edifice of society together like mortar in between bricks, holding them in place. Let us call this the “structural antagonism thesis.”
The embarrassing truth is I had become somewhat of a townie. I was frequently in a bad mood, disgruntled with the new expensive coffee places and the four-dollar donuts. I was scowling at fancy cars. Flipping off buildings shaped like glass pricks. Angry at air plants and hand-milled soap. Raging at salumi platters and hand- knotted rugs. I mistook a toddler in Gucci sunglasses for a robot and almost punched it. I even rolled my eyes at Burning Man and burlesque and Good Vibrations and marijuana, those mainstays of the freewheelin’ Barbary Coast, for the sheer reason that I couldn’t handle hearing them used as examples of how freaky and fun the Bay Area was by the new brand of interloping young people. I was pissed off at the rampant technology-fueled late-stage capitalism that had invaded my home turf.
San Francisco was supposed to be for everyone and the more it became clear it was not, I rebelled. Me, a person who felt like she was always down for just about anything, forever on the lookout for vibrancy in my community, rebelled by closing my eyes. (Well, first I exhausted myself complaining how tech had ruined everything, and then I grew exhausted of other people complaining how tech had ruined everything, and then I closed my eyes.) I simply couldn’t look anymore. I was unable to see beauty.
Everywhere I turned seemed to have undergone a change of which I did not approve in the least. My friend, a San Francisco native, actually brought me to eat an icy chef salad at the restaurant at the golf course in Lake Merced just so we could experience something in the city that was old that felt new to us. The hypocrisy. I was a gentrifier through and through, but then I got mad at the gentrifiers who came after me, which I knew was ridiculous. So I got mad at myself for being ridiculous.
Almost all the people I know in San Francisco who are still making art are either people who were able to buy property decades ago or are, at this moment, knocking on wood hoping they don’t lose their rent-controlled housing. There is so much money amidst so much poverty and despair that your heart burns. Being comfortable when there is chaos and upheaval around you is never comfortable for long. It started to make me feel hopeless. It started to make me wonder who I would even be someplace else. And if that sounds too esoteric, I’m sure I also blew off San Francisco when I felt like it was about to blow me off entirely. The teenage feeling that sticks with you. So there I was, jilted and uncomfortable, and also shrinking, because defining yourself against something you resent will always make you small.
Everyone has a gig in ’90s SF. We work jobs but we really slave for an art form that we are still learning how to master. Musicians, painters, dancers, hairstylists, writers, actors, massage therapists, inventors. Everyone is outside and inside at the same time. Everyone works at, and spends a good deal of their day in, restaurants, bars, or cafés talking, working on art, waiting on tables. Friday and Saturday are for rookies and the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. But every other day is locals only, and we have a secret: We are in the middle of doing something important. Even if no one notices. It’s important because we say so. It is important because we are free. We are judgment free. We are free of George Bush’s America and its macho posturing. We are self-appointed freaks. We are surviving and thriving in this environment that we have created through our unique expression—and it will last forever. So we think.
Inside the club, there is a loud crowd full of day drinkers and early concert goers. We’re here to see Film School, the top of the heap in SF shoegaze cool, and Track Star, an SF indie/post-punk, angsty three piece that trades off vocals and sweats heavily into their instruments. I see Peter in the corner, a bass player I once played with in a band called Max Demian about a year ago. The whole scene is quite incestuous. I love that it is so easy to go out and see good bands and randomly find friends hanging out. The cover at Bottom of the Hill is never more than five or seven dollars and if you play in a band, you rarely pay a cover anywhere. Everyone in this scene is excited and happy to be in a place where the artists set the agenda (which is no agenda at all). There may be some other, darker forces at work on the other side of town, but we wouldn’t know it.
I see the Bottom of the Hill concert calendar on the wall. This week has not only Film School, but also the Dwarves and Oranger. Thursday is the PeeChees. On Friday there is a brand-new band from Brooklyn called TV on the Radio. Over the weekend is Cat Power, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, the Dandy Warhols, and next week Grandaddy. We are in this bar in the middle of a Renaissance and we are totally unaware of it. No one assumes any of us will ever be famous and no one cares. No one inside the bar or outside expects the rest of the world to get it. We are all just here, in the middle of it. The overabundance of talent and innovation of this city in 1996 is lost on the world, yet we imagine this time, this revolution of sound and attitude, will go on forever.
sweet
San Francisco in 1996 was a city organized for artists. The city of the creative class, the nonconformists. A city for full-hearted romantics. And the sad truth is there isn’t much room left for the artist in San Francisco today. It’s just too expensive. The San Francisco I love has become colorless and shallow due to an elusive race to becoming the richest, the freshest, the most disruptive in a self-satisfying vacuum of cash and innovation. Yet, besides the never-satisfied tech crowd and the obnoxiously rich, many artists who were lifers in SF in 1996 are still lifers in SF today. Lifers may be all that are left to define this city. Because some of us never left it.
The months ticked by. I hired more people, built more features, and grew the business. My peers were all white men: other YC founders building consumer-tech startups within a few blocks of ours. I took advice from some of them. I made friends with some of them. I dated some of them.
My social life, or what little there was of it, was constructed mostly of other startup founders and early employees focusing on building their startups. We rarely discussed anything other than issues we were having with our product. A group of us would often gather in Daly City for dim sum on Sundays, where most of our socializing took place outside, waiting for a Chinese hostess to call our number— that is, until someone in our group figured out that she could hire a TaskRabbit to go early and stand in line for us. We’d arrive with a few minutes to spare, walking past crowds of white men with their Asian girlfriends congregated in front of the restaurant and straight to our table, where everyone but me looked at menus.
somehow i forgot about this essay. just saving this to note it
The Volunteer Coordinator at My Internship
Through my stepbrother’s wife’s brother’s now- ex-girlfriend, I scored an internship at a tutoring center, where my primary responsibilities were taking out the trash and improving youth literacy.
In any new place—to make that place worth going to—there should be someone you aspire to kiss. One night, I followed the paid employees to the bar Amnesia (other nights they went to the Make Out Room or the Beauty Bar, names that doubled as offerings). I stuck to the edges, unnoticed, until out of nowhere the volunteer coordinator with the good sense of humor came over and talked to me when no one else did, which meant I’d love him always.
We didn’t kiss that night. Or any other. It’s now ten years later, and I’m still extremely not over it.
At the second publishing house I worked with commas. Nine hours of the day, every business day, I added and removed commas. I was alive one out of every four seconds. I could not believe that this was what people did all day, that “having a career” is people signing emails Cheers. I needed someone to kiss. But no one there wanted to kiss me, which isn’t why I got fired, but I did get fired without having kissed anyone at all