We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (9 page)

But we are far from that ideal. If cultural activism and justice movements can succeed in decentering whiteness and improving access and representation—and all the evidence suggests that the odds on that are still very long—we will still need to address the ways in which we see each other. Perhaps one day we may no longer need an #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. But we will still have to deal with the kinds of inequities that made #NotYourMule. What, then, will a culture of transformation look like?

VANILLA CITIES AND THEIR CHOCOLATE SUBURBS

ON RESEGREGATION

I.

It was the mid-2000s and all the kids around the way were wearing impossibly huge glasses, sporting sun-bright colors, spitting thickets of new lingo that required slang dictionaries always under revision. The music had sped back up, the raps were complicated and goofy, the synth lines bouncy, the bass lines wobbly, and the vibe always energy-drink high. Turf dance battles were liable to break out anywhere—on a lawn in front of an East Oakland youth center or at the Powell Street cable-car turntable in San Francisco. The Hyphy movement brought pride of place back—in a major way, you could say—and once again it felt good to be from the “Yay Area,” caught up in the extra-prolific silliness of it all, the whole world watching and scratching their heads, then going dumb too.

The Bay Area had long been a vortex of creativity, a place where turbulent minds could find each other and develop the kind of weird ideas that could surprise the world. The future was in the fringe, and the visible part of that fringe included circuit-board-crammed Silicon Valley garages, painted Mission District alleyways, and East Oakland streets where muscle-car sideshows might take over any time of the day. For a few ecstatic summers, it seemed natural that a lot of the left-field rap spiking the national Top 5–only airwaves—E-40’s “Tell Me When to Go” or Keak da Sneak’s “Super Hyphy”—had been beta tested on the streets of Oakland (“The Town” in local parlance) and San Francisco (“The City”).

In actuality much of the music was being made deep in the cut, far away from the metro center, along a nowhere stretch of interstate highway heading out of the Bay between the suburbs of Vallejo and Fairfield. Both places were fading military outposts not known for much, certainly nothing like the Black Panthers, the Summer of Love, the White Night riots, the antiapartheid movement, or Occupy Oakland. They had not developed public scenes of their own—folks just weren’t rolling like that near Six Flags Discovery Kingdom or the Jelly Belly factory.

But Hyphy permanently broadened the hip-hop map of the Bay. E-40 was rapping about how he was running “my region.” Keak da Sneak shouted out Central Valley ethnoburbs like Stockton and Modesto, Sacramento hoods like Oak Park and Del Paso Heights, even foothill mall towns like Citrus Heights, two hours away from San Francisco’s Fillmore District. The Yay Area now officially covered nine area codes and two metropolitan areas.

At about the same time, artists in San Francisco’s Mission District were fighting what felt like a last stand. For decades, the neighborhood had been home to rough-and-tumble dive bars, late-night pupuserías and taquerías, edgy clubs, theaters, and bookstores, and a deeply influential pan-Latinx bohemia. By the end of the 1990s, though, it was losing all its spiky edges to a creeping—then surging—flood of new gold-rush tech workers.

In 2004, Richard Florida’s influential book
The Rise of the Creative Class
captured the zeitgeist for the George W. Bush housing-bubble boom. Cities were the future, he argued, especially cities that welcomed the diverse, artsy, highly educated workers who formed the “creative class” driving the knowledge industries. The as-yet-unwritten story would be about just how much diversity and art these cities would sacrifice in order to get to their bright creative futures.

Over the next decade, the Mission became the place where all the contradictions contained by Florida’s thesis exploded. As the memory of the dot-com bubble faded, the Sand Hill Road venture capital tap flowed again and Web 2.0 hit its inflection point. At public bus stops, unpermitted luxury charter buses picked up workers bound for Google, Apple, and Facebook campuses thirty miles away in Silicon Valley’s wealthy exurbs, disrupting daily transit schedules and outraging residents. On the soccer fields, techies flashing city orders purchased for a $27 fee tried to expel brown youths whose pickup games had been running for years. In under five years, at least one elementary school shifted from 70 percent Latino to 70 percent white. Residents were evicted to make way for the workers pouring into creative-economy jobs at Twitter, Spotify, Airbnb, and Dropbox, ready to pay steeply increased rents or make mortgage down payments in cash.

When in 2013 the famed artists René Yañez and Yolanda Lopez—Yañez had helped found Galería de la Raza as well as its famed Día de los Muertos parade and Lopez had created some of the most compelling art of the Chicano movement—were evicted from their apartment, artists gathered to raise funds to help them and to mourn what the city had become. In a widely circulated letter to Yañez, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña raged:

It’s like you once told me, “This city loves to preserve its murals and to evict its muralists.” After all, it’s not only the “criminals,” the homeless and the gangbangers who are being removed from the streets to make them acceptable for the new dot.com cadre. Along with them go the poets, the performance artists, the experimental musicians, the transvestites, the sex workers, the Latino families, the low-riders, the urban primitives, the punks and postfeminist radicals, and the very activists who used to protect us from the greedy landlords and politicians, only to be replaced by people who either look like art students and supermodels (but definitely aren’t) or like they were just dropped by a UFO straight out of an LA or a Houston suburb, complete with their state-of-the-art gym gear, designer dogs, and customized baby strollers. It never ends. And soon, they will wake up to an ocean of sameness. What will San Francisco have to offer them then? Absolutamente nada!

But don’t you worry Padrino. All the “creative cities” that have managed to successfully destroy and/or evict their working class have ultimately been condemned to doom.
¹

Cities are cauldrons of change, it’s part of their very allure. The tech economy has turned “disruption” into a value, an unqualified good. Cities have also been havens for economic and cultural diversity, which at their best become the engines of dynamism. But these times beg the question of whether disruption and diversity are really compatible. They also force us to look beyond the boundaries of the city, into how entire regions are being reshaped into new geographies of inequality.

From 1997 to 2013, there were nearly 12,000 “no fault” evictions in San Francisco.
²
The median price of an apartment rental climbed to $3,023 per month, the highest in the country.
³
By basic housing standards, even a median San Francisco family could not live in a one-bedroom apartment in the Mission without being considered at severe risk for displacement.

In “The City,” the Black population was decimated. In 1970, African Americans made up 62 percent of the population in the Fillmore, Western Addition, and Bayview/Hunter’s Point neighborhoods, which comprised much of the Black community. Forty years later, they made up just 24 percent. The racial income gap in San Francisco County strained belief: the median white household brought home $104,364 per year, the median Black household $29,503.
⁴

In 1963, on a visit through these neighborhoods, James Baldwin was surprised by the amount of anger he encountered among Black youths. Urban redevelopment plans had been drawn up for the Fillmore and the Western Addition, which would have resulted in the tearing down of hundreds of Victorian homes. He was moved to say, “Urban renewal is Negro removal.”
⁵
Baldwin was prophetic. Amidst the new tech boom, the Western Addition was rebranded “NoPa,” a hipsterized take on “north of the Panhandle,” by giddy real-estate interests shrugging off the weight of history and the disappearance of the Black middle class.

Displacement has a domino effect. Those pushed from San Francisco had to move somewhere. Between 2000 and 2013, Oakland’s median household income climbed by 36 percent to $54,394. In 2015 alone, Oakland became the hottest market in the country. Rental prices in Oakland surged 20 percent to become fifth highest in the nation, just behind Washington, D.C.
⁶
The
New York Times
commissioned travel reporters to hype The Town’s “quirky, independent appeal” and “thrilling cultural heterogeneity,” even as longtime working-class residents who had made its rep packed up and hit the I-80—north to Richmond and Vallejo and Fairfield, south to San Leandro and Hayward, east to Stockton and Antioch and Tracy.
⁷

Central to the Bay Area’s sense of itself—indeed, central to the pitch made by tech chiefs, politicians, and real-estate developers to lure talent here—were narratives about its “live and let live” countercultural tolerance, its proud claim to being the birthplace of American multiculturalism, its refined appreciation for all the things that make up the good life: art, education, natural beauty, and good food. But in late 2015, confrontations in Oakland between white transplants and longtime residents reached a critical point. They took the form of noise complaints: new neighbors literally did not want to hear from the old.

In September, the Oakland Police Department broke up a gathering of African drummers that had been meeting weekly at Lake Merritt for decades. In subsequent weeks, police were called upon to stop musicians from playing in a historic African cultural center and worshippers from singing in two West Oakland Black churches. Drummers, dancers, and church singers quickly joined the ranks of anti-displacement activists in loud musical protests at city hall. The Oakland Creative Neighborhoods Coalition brought together demands for affordable housing and sustainable development with demands for cultural equity. Its motto was #KeepOaklandCreative. It mobilized activists to join Sunday services at the churches that had received noise complaints. “When we’re talking about Black lives,” one community leader said, “it’s good to remember that Black noise matters, too.”
⁸

In the half century between Baldwin’s visit and René Yañez’s eviction, perhaps San Francisco’s multiculturalist moment had been only a brief, enlightened interval between an era of segregation and one of resegregation, another lost utopia in a place known for cursed Kool-Aid visions. And yet the same pattern has held all across the country, from Seattle to Chicago to St. Louis to Miami to New York City. If segregation once kept communities of color locked into certain neighborhoods, a condition relieved by the all-too-ephemeral victories of civil rights revolution, then the post–civil rights era has been marked by an unmistakable lurch back to resegregation.

Our elementary and secondary schools, the front lines of demographic change, serve as a telling index. Public schools reached peak desegregation in 1989, the year of Spike and Chuck’s fabled summer. But because of growing inequality, residential “preferences,” and anti-desegregation campaigns, school segregation rates have since been surging back toward
Brown v. Board of Education
levels.

Those rates have especially accelerated since the turn of the millennium. From the 2000–01 to the 2013–14 school years, the number of public K-12 schools classified as high poverty and/or predominantly Black or Latino more than doubled. These schools, which account for almost one in six of all schools, offer fewer math, science, and college prep courses, and have higher rates of students being held back, suspended, or expelled. Only 8 percent of white students attend high-poverty schools, while 18 percent of Asians and 48 percent of Black and Latino students do.
⁹

Eighty percent of Latino and 74 percent of Black K–12 students attend majority-nonwhite schools. But whites remain the most segregated racial group of all. The average white student attends a public school that is 75 percent white. That fact mirrors another: the average white lives in a neighborhood that is 77 percent white—a rate of racial isolation that is at least twice that of all other racial groups.
¹⁰
White flight is moving in two directions—to the “real America” exurban edge where big-box retail and brand-new “traditional” homes swallow fields of gold, and back toward the romance of the city, where wealth and youth conquer place and memory.

Scholars and pundits have labeled such changes “The Big Sort” or “The Great Inversion,” careful, neutral terms that barely hint at the despair, conflict, and chaos that free-market forces and political acquiescence have wreaked on many Americans. Bill Bishop has argued that Americans are sorting themselves into new geographic alignments that will define political polarization in the coming decades. Alan Ehrenhalt describes how U.S. cities and suburbs are becoming more like Europe’s, where wealth is in the metropolis and poverty surrounds it. But the reason sorting or inversion hasn’t become a popular frame is because “gentrification” has become the major story of our time. This is the word that has captured urban rage over massive displacement—the affective fallout of root shock and cultural clash, as well as the class stakes of eviction and redevelopment.

And yet, gentrification offers a peculiarly small frame for trying to understand these paradigmatic shifts. When rents reach the tipping point, when old industrial buildings flip or are razed for flimsy new ones made of glass and chipboard, when poor residents have to leave, the gentrification narrative hits its limit. It has the odd, counterintuitive effect of privileging the narratives of those able to hang on in the changing city. But what of those who are displaced? Gentrification has no room for the question “Where did the displaced go?” Instead, the displaced join the disappeared.