I think best while moving, walking the manicured streets of my neighborhood—the Inner Richmond—as the fog settles, taking in the pastel-colored Queen Anne houses and neatly groomed gardens of protea flowers.
Last week, I ended up at an art studio near my house. I didn’t want to, but I found myself thinking about the time I went to a friend’s opening there this past summer, and the doorman, who’d been easily welcoming in non-Black people immediately before and after me, hesitated to let me in until he saw my friend acknowledge me as “OK.”
Suddenly, I was consumed with these moments and so many others I’ve had to swallow and forget to keep going as a Black woman living in San Francisco — a city I always dreamed of moving to, only to be met with a disdainful reality once I did.
I kept walking until I arrived at a plush-green golf course in Lincoln Park. I’d successfully secured a new job in corporate America and wanted to celebrate, but my mind was wandering, and I began cringing when remembering how I’d been given the cold shoulder by all my white superiors at one of my last jobs after questioning a white colleague when he said — in front of our entirely white department — that he hoped a cop would “Freddie Gray” a passing Black driver.
Then I recalled all the times I’ve had to repeatedly ask incredulous non-Black drivers to move their illegally parked cars away from my driveway (because “yes, I do live here”), the people who double-lock their cars after seeing me and those who recoil as they pass me, in my workout clothes, on the street, startled and temporarily distracted from their phones.
Suddenly, I was consumed with these moments and so many others I’ve had to swallow and forget to keep going as a Black woman living in San Francisco — a city I always dreamed of moving to, only to be met with a disdainful reality once I did.
San Francisco is reportedly now 5.5 percent black, down from 13 percent in the 1970s. I’ve been in SF for only two years, so I can’t and won’t write about all the structural issues that caused such widespread displacement. I also can’t speak to the experiences of Asians, Mexicans and other non-white people who live in this city. What I can do is write about my personal heartbreak.
“Making it” to me always meant making it in San Francisco. As a native New Yorker, I had long been fascinated by the beautiful city by the bay, the bastion of progressivism and counterculture. As a creative, I knew it as the town that helped both a gay disco queen like Sylvester and a Goth misfit like Anne Rice find their artistic voices. More than being a less-crowded New York City with better Mexican food, weather and scenery, this place — to me — seemed powered by fairy dust.
And I’ve found success here. Over the past two years, I’ve pursued my poetry while navigating Silicon Valley as a tech writer to pay the bills, as living in SF costs slightly more than it did when Rice and Sylvester found sanctuary here. I’ve managed to find a place for myself in two disparate and competitive worlds, but instead of being able to enjoy my hard-earned win of an address and a brand in this city, I’m continually met with skepticism and soul-devouring investigation. And while it can certainly feel like I’m all alone here, I’m not.
I think of all the ways I try to make people unafraid of me and comfortable in my presence so that I can be comfortable in my body, in this city.
Every once in a while, I see other Black people up close and personal around town. I sometimes see us pouring IPAs at AT&T Park, driving Ubers, delivering Amazon boxes or serving as greeters in one of this city’s many playground-fitted office buildings — buildings that may or may not have a sign hanging about a commitment to diversity. Those of us who don’t disappear (mainly by crossing the Bay Bridge) after dark linger as black rhinos, the feared and mythical.
I think of all the ways I try to make people unafraid of me and comfortable in my presence so that I can be comfortable in my body, in this city. I think about how although I live less than two miles from both a Trader Joe’s and a Whole Foods, I drive to the Sprouts in Daly City so that I can roam the aisles in sweats and not be followed or glared at (most of the time).
San Francisco likes to think of itself as elite in its progressiveness. It likes to point to the rest of the country with a shrug, saying they’re all the problem, not us. But I often say that the deeply segregated America Trump champions may be flourishing here, in one of his most despised cities.
And this may be my real issue: that I can’t sit comfortably at the top of the caste system I’d worked so hard to conquer and just enjoy it. I hit all the goalposts. I have all the right schools and corporations on my résumé. I live in the right house, in a decent neighborhood. I’ve been thin enough; my hair has been long enough; and I’ve lived in the Instagram light of contour as my successful (white) boyfriends pay for my (terrible) IPAs at the ballpark as I make sure to overtip the Black and brown servers, wondering how it’s gotten to the point where I, too, need absolution. I’ve “made it” but sometimes wonder, what’s the point?
San Francisco likes to think of itself as elite in its progressiveness. It likes to point to the rest of the country with a shrug, saying they’re all the problem, not us. But I often say that the deeply segregated America Trump champions may be flourishing here, in one of his most despised cities. SF is quite possibly “great again.”And I wonder if the recent election of London Breed, a Black woman, as mayor, will only serve to further the optical illusion that San Francisco is an inclusive city instead of a haven of white privilege, with walls much more difficult to breach than any physical manifestation of will and power.
San Francisco’s identity problems run deep, deeper than the recent influx of tech millennials.
Of course, I don’t believe that all white San Franciscans are problematic so much as the systems of white privilege and neoliberalism. Systems that require a caste of people submerged below to keep the next level afloat and feeling accomplished. Systems that unfortunately seem more virulent here, in what has become a plutocrat mecca for the inevitable pilgrimage of the privileged.
But San Francisco’s identity problems run deep, deeper than the recent influx of tech millennials. Despite the idealistic image that drew me and so many hopefuls here, this has long been the town that turns a blind eye to inequality in brand-name, rose-colored glasses. In the 1963 documentary Take This Hammer, James Baldwin, while being driven around a then-shifting San Francisco, observes, “At least in the South [racism] is overt, but here, especially in San Francisco, where everyone is so liberal and so civilized and so literate, they throw it under the rug.”
My walks often lead to Ocean Beach. The Pacific feels affirming, and the coastline is my sanctuary. I love all its riffraff and graffiti, the impromptu bonfires and broken Beck’s bottles, and the old-school boombox parties. This part of the city still feels like the city I’d moved here to become a part of: punks walking bunnies on leashes, naked surfers, Goths in fishnets in 50-degree weather, vampire christenings, biker-gang summits, bodybuilders buffing on the sand and senior citizens dressed in pink, striped leggings.
I feel a particular affinity with the construction workers parked at the shore during their lunch break, opening their windows to inhale the ocean while trading the aroma of animal-style-stained-In-N-Out wrappers. They eat and daydream, then sometimes nap. I’m happy parking myself alongside these men in a seafoam, cerulean haze. We’re all dreamers. But once the sun sets, it’s back to the cold fog of the encroaching San Francisco I know.
Hey! The Bold Italic recently launched a podcast, This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley. Check out the full season or listen to the episode below featuring Jessica Alter (Founder, Tech for Campaigns). More coming soon, so stay tuned!
