Diary of a Confused White Woman

Disclaimer:  This is a diary. It's not a manifesto.

Wednesday, May 7: I interview Rebecca Solnit about her forthcoming book, MEN EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME for KPFA Women’s Magazine.  Before we start, she asks how much time I want.  I say an hour.  She looks surprised, and mentions that she really hasn’t written that much about gender.  I tell her not to worry, I don’t plan to spend the whole time on gender issues.  The interview goes well.

Friday, May 23, 4:45 pm:  I start off the holiday weekend at a demonstration to shut down Guantanamo.  I hardly know anyone there.  I stand quietly near the cage I helped build long ago, holding my sign so the people coming out of the BART station can see it.  It’s a poster I made four years ago, that says Shut Down Guantanamo, Bagram and Pelican Bay – Torture Is a War Crime.  A young South Asian man (I later learn he’s Pakistani) comes up and asks me what Pelican Bay is.  I explain that it’s a supermax prison in Northern California, where men are held in solitary confinement for years on end, that it’s where the hunger strike that swept the California prisons last summer originated.  He tells me about being detained after 9/11, because a neighbor he went to junior high school with called the police to report that he was dating a white woman.  His parents first learned he had a girlfriend from the FBI.

4:55 pm:  A Vietnamese man comes out of BART and asks me what’s going on.  I explain it to him briefly.  He argues that it’s war, these things happen in war.  “Which came first, the attack or the locking up?” he asks.  The young Pakistani man quickly takes over the task of educating this guy, using lots of examples he’s accumulated from his work with a civil rights organization.  I’m happy to let him do the talking for a long time.  The Vietnamese guy says, “Well, I came from a Communist country and this is still the freest place on earth.”  I can’t stop myself from mumbling, “Not really.”  Both men scold me for interrupting him and disrespecting his narrative.  I feel terrible.  I’ve acted arrogantly out of privilege.  I stand silently, listen to them argue for about ten minutes.  The I move away from them and spend the rest of the hour standing with my sign, talking to no one.  When I leave at 5:45, they are still talking.

Friday night:  As I’m coming home from dinner with a friend, it occurs to me that those men used privilege as well, to silence and shame me.  I wonder whether they would have spoken to a white guy that way, and whether he would have taken it so hard.  I think about my South Asian woman friend who has trouble arguing with older women, even when she knows she’s right, because her culture taught her respect for elders.  Clearly, this young South Asian man had no such difficulty.

Saturday, May 24:  We’re working on UltraViolet, the quarterly newspaper I help produce.  I decide I want to write about how power and privilege analysis, for so long confined to activist circles is starting to be discussed in the mainstream due to Twitter hashtags like #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen and #NotYourAsianSidekick and the media frenzy over Tal Fortgang’s “Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege.”  I can’t get a handle on the subject.  I spend three hours and write two paragraphs.  I get home late and don’t see the news about the killing spree at UCSB.

Sunday, May 25:  On the way to UltraViolet production, I skim the New York Times story about how Eliot Rodger’s hatred of women who rejected him drove him to kill.  I’m too stunned and creeped out to think much about it.  I manage to finish my article.  I mean to put in the story about what happened at the demonstration on Friday, but in the end I don’t.  It ends up being mainly about whether Ta-Nahisi Coates’ cover article about reparations will help people understand what white privilege means.  I worry that I’m not saying anything everyone doesn’t know, but my co-editors like it.  Layout takes longer than we hoped; we finish about 9:45 pm.

Monday, May 26, 1:00 a.m.:  I finish everything I need to do and send the paper to the printer.  I look at my Twitter feed.  The first tweets that catch my attention are on the hashtag #YesAllWhiteWomen.  (I recently started following Suey Park, Mikki Kendall and Lauren Chief Elk.  I might have to unfollow them soon ’cause man are those girls prolific.  I don’t want to because they’re interesting, but I’m constantly scrolling back and back and back to try to find the beginning of the conversation.)  I read between the lines that something called #YesAllWomen is a phenomenon.  I don’t realize how big of one.  I check it out and it doesn’t seem that white to me.  It seems like a lot of women from many demographics (mostly young, but it’s Twitter after all) sharing stories and pain - an online consciousness raising group.  I don’t see any need to post anything.  No one’s online anyway at that hour, and I have almost no followers.

Monday afternoon:  I take a long walk and think about what I would like to write about this episode.  One phrase that immediately comes to mind is the title of one of Rebecca Solnit’s essays, “The Longest War.”  I think about how much U.S. policy since before there was a U.S. has been about denying women’s sexual autonomy.  I think about how Andrea Smith says that one reason Native American tribes had to be subjugated was to eliminate examples of societies with gender equality.  I wonder if Rebecca Solnit has read Andrea Smith.  I think maybe I should ask her.

Monday night:  I get home and look at Facebook.  Everyone’s talking about #YesAllWomen.  Interesting the way my worlds are starting to collide.  People I didn’t think knew each other apparently do at least on Twitter.  I look at the tweets, favorite a few.  Feel sad.  Finally post “We don't need a hash tag. We need a real anarchafeminist revolution. #YesAllWomen”  2 people favorite it.  The average tweet in the convo seems to be retweeted 200+ times and favorite 300+.  I’m not surprised; the hashtivists aren’t going to like my tweet and the twitterphobes aren’t going to see it.

I check out Facebook, where at least I have a more respectable number of “friends.”  Someone has posted an article about “The Woman At the Heart of San Francisco’s Anti-TechGentrification Protests.”  The woman is someone I recognize from demonstrations but don’t really know.  She’s young, white, college educated and has been in San Francisco for about a decade.  She’s awesome, but it seems to me there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people at the heart of the anti-gentrification protests.  It occurs to me that she probably had no idea that was going to be the headline and was only trying to get more publicity for the issue.  The article is pretty sympathetic given that it’s on businessinsider.com.  I feel bad for being snarky.  I chalk it up to the fact that it’s been a long war, I’ve been at this losing activism thing a long time.

I get email from a friend who’s writing her memoir.  She mentions that she’s finding it hard to compress her 85 years into a manageable page count.  She worked with Alice Paul on the National Women’s Party, the campaigns to free Joan Little and Yvonne Wanrow and moved to Wilmington, North Carolina as part of a multiracial women’s group supporting the Wilmington 10.  I think that I haven’t been at this so long at all.

Tuesday morning, May 27:  Rebecca Solnit is on Democracy Now.  She’s good.  Amy Goodman keeps asking her specifics about Eliot Rodger and she keeps saying, “We need to stop focusing on this one guy and talk about the systemic violence that women face every day.  This guy killed six people, but three women are killed by intimate partners every day in this country.”  The segment includes a clip from the video posted by Eliot Rodger.  I've avoided watching or listening to it.  It makes me cry.  It's not the good kind of crying.

Tuesday afternoon:  I check out #YesAllWhiteWomen.  There are a lot of tweets from white women cautioning each other not to be defensive, to listen.  There are a number of tweets on #YesAllWomen saying “Remember to retweet women of color, not just white women.”  I wonder if they can always tell the race of people on Twitter.

I see a tweet from Ken Jennings, Jeopardy Super-Champion.

I think, “We may really be getting somewhere.”  I click on Ken’s feed and see this:

(Julia Collins just won her 17^th game, with a total of $372,000.  I'm completely in love with her.)  I wonder why Twitter ruined Ken Jennings' life and think maybe I'm lucky to have almost no followers. I consider that the woman who started #YesAllWomen had to shut down her account because of all the hate mail.  I think spending your life in anonymous activist collectives may well be underrated.

Tuesday, 6:10 pm:  I get off work and walk to an event about Oscar Lopez Rivera, a Puerto Rican independentista who has been imprisoned by the U.S. government for 33 years this week.  Walking up Market Street, I think about what I want to write about all this.  I keep thinking of more and more things I want to pull in, but no unifying theme.  I pass the massive @Twitter edifice, which used to be Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart, and the soon to be closed Flax art supply store.

I get where I'm going and decide to post this as a diary.

It Isn't Nice to Block the Buses

Last Friday, the litigation group at the law firm I work for held its annual bash at a restaurant in the Marina.  It’s a very fun event where the associates present skits and videos making fun of the partners, made funnier by a fair amount of alcohol consumption.  Since the restaurant was several miles from the office, they chartered a bus for staff – attorneys had to get there on their own.

This was my first time on one of the huge white buses everyone calls “Google buses,” although in fact, lots of companies use them to transport their employees to and from work.  The wi-fi equipped buses (no one said anything to us about wi-fi, incidentally) have become one of the most visible symbols of the rapid gentrification that is destroying the cultural and economic diversity of San Francisco.  I told one of my coworkers that getting on it reminded me eerily of riding settler buses in Palestine, which I tried not to do, but occasionally it was the only affordable way to get from Tel Aviv or Petakh Tikvah to the village where I lived in the West Bank.

This morning, a bunch of people I know were involved in blocking a Google bus at 24^th and Valencia, in the heart of the Mission District.  The Mission has been one of the areas hardest hit by recent gentrification.  Once predominantly Latino/a, the Mission has experienced waves of gentrification beginning with artists and queers in the seventies, drawn by the cheap rents and eclectic culture, and vastly accelerated during the first tech boom in the nineties.  According to the Cesar Chavez Institute at San Francisco State, “On Valencia Street, 50 percent of the businesses that existed in 1990, mostly local operations that catered to the low-income Latino community were gone by 1998. Rental evictions tripled, and owner move-in evictions quadrupled in just two years.”  Today, the Mission teems with white hipsters.  Every time I go to Valencia Street, I see a couple new upscale restaurants, many replacing bookstores and bodegas that have been there for decades.  Every long-term business I know of on that strip has been threatened by skyrocketing rents.

The blockade of the Google bus highlighted a few issues.  One, the displacement being fueled by the influx of techies with lots of money to throw around, driving up rents and housing prices by offering cash up front over the asking price, motivating developers to use whatever dirty tricks they can to get rid of long-term tenants or owners.  And two, and more directly, the fact that the companies which attract skilled workers partly based on their proximity to chic and lively San Francisco choose to invest in private transportation for their employees, rather than contributing to better public services for everyone.  At the same time, their buses hog city bus stops and tear up the roads.  Trust me, during the two strikes by Bay Area Rapid Transit, I considered jumping on one of the buses I saw picking up workers downtown – only problem was, I didn’t know where they were going.

The highly organized protesters surrounded the bus carrying signs proclaiming, “Warning:  Illegal Use of Public Infrastructure,” “Two Tier System” and “San Francisco, not for sale”.  It attracted a ton of coverage not only from local media but also from national and even international outfits including a pretty good piece from Reuters, and coverage in Slate, Salon, Huffington Post and even China Daily.  Yahoo and Bing had it up top, but I didn’t see it on Google.

Someone got off the bus and yelled at the protesters that “This is a city for the right people who can afford it. You can’t afford it? You can leave. I’m sorry, get a better job.” The video of that confrontation went viral and probably helped to generate some of the media frenzy, before someone at the Bay Guardian realized that the “Google employee” in the video was actually well-known labor organizer Max Alper.   

This led to another frenzy of coverage, some negative, calling the theater piece a “hoax” and some surprisingly positive, like the Wall Street Journal’s observation that, “However false, Alper’s stagecraft touched a nerve in San Francisco, where some longtime residents say wealth from technology companies is pushing up housing costs and altering neighborhoods.”

On Facebook, the discussions were heated, thoughtful and mixed.  Many people felt that the controversy over the staged video distracted from the issue of gentrification, while others felt it enhanced it.  Some people said the performance was too understated and should have been readily identifiable as theater.  Several activists I respect a lot thought it unnecessarily alienated the Google workers, who are not the source of the problem and might have been sympathetic, by painting them all as hostile and clueless.  Others said they immediately knew it was fake because no Google employee would be that polite.

In later media coverage, Max said that he had just been there to support the action and decided to stage the confrontation on his own.  One of the organizers, Deepa Varma, a lawyer with the group Eviction Free San Francisco, condemned it in the press, saying, “‘We didn’t know that was going to happen and it’s too bad because the point was really to connect the housing crisis to the tech industry.”  

If it’s true that the organizers didn’t know about something that became a focal point for the media, that’s unfortunate, and it’s a learning experience.  My guess is that at least some of the organizers did know – there were a number of groups involved in the action, and it may be that the communication between the groups left something to be desired.  I’ve definitely been part of actions where some of us did things that others weren’t that comfortable with, and it’s generally been a matter of unclear agreements.

As an outsider, I feel like the invisible theater unquestionably strengthened the action.  It exponentially increased the attention to the action, both in social media and mainstream press.  I have been on the receiving end of that kind of upstagemanship and I can empathize with frustration that people may be feeling who did the grunt work to make the action happen – made the signs, fliers, wrote press releases, all that good stuff.  But without them, Max’s theater never would have happened.  In terms of more substantive critiques, no one said that all Google employees feel the way his fictitious one did.  But I can absolutely attest that every single thing he said has been said to me, in all seriousness, and not only by tech workers or people new to San Francisco.  Calling the workers names or yelling at them that they were single-handedly responsible for gentrification would not be useful, but as far as I know, no one did that.

Did any of the Google workers respond to Max’s outburst?  Argue with him, tell him to shut up, get back on the bus and wait?  Did any of them tweet, “Good for the protesters bringing attention to need for public transportation?”  Not that I heard about.  The media mainly quoted someone named Adelle, whose handle is @FashionistaLab, tweeting, “it’s not nice to hijack ppl on their way to work!”  Which makes me want to sing Malvina Reynolds (“It isn’t nice to block the doorway …”)

If any of the workers were sympathetic to the protest, great.  This video is not going to stop them.  Maybe next time they hear someone say those things in earnest, they will call it out.  Maybe they’ll get involved with the Housing Rights Committee or pressure Google to spend money on public transportation for San Francisco instead of free wi-fi in the parks, which is only going to benefit the people with laptops or tablets to use it.

To all the activists, whatever their roles, I say, “Bravo!” (and count me in next time).