An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy, 2017
BUILD LLC is here. The San Francisco Department of Public Health is here. Amy Brownell is here with her PowerPoints and her institutional voice. And the people, the actual people who live here, who breathe this air, who’ve watched their neighbors get sick, they’re here too, and they’re done being polite about it.
Bayview Hunters Point isn’t some abstraction. It’s not a “disadvantaged community” checkbox on some grant application. It’s where people raised families on land the Navy used for decades as a toxic playground where they tested God-knows-what during the Cold War and then walked away whistling. Left it for Tetra Tech to “clean up”, which they did by allegedly faking soil samples like some kind of environmental crimes farce that would be funny if it weren’t so fucking evil.
India Basin. Parcel A. These bureaucratic designations that sanitize what we’re really talking about: land that might kill you. Development projects that promise renewal but deliver the same old pattern, displace the poor, pave over the poison, pretend everything’s fine.
And here’s Amy Brownell from Public Health talking about “restoration” and “land use” while the room fills with people who’ve buried friends, who’ve watched cancer rates that make you want to scream at the sky. The slideshow continues. Professional. Measured. The language of agencies that have learned to talk about problems without ever actually solving them.
You want to know what environmental justice looks like? It looks like this room. It looks like people who’ve been systematically betrayed by every institution that was supposed to protect them, showing up anyway to demand accountability. It’s the opposite of giving up. It’s the refusal to let them memory-hole you, to let them pretend that “vulnerable citizens” is just some phrase in a Ta-Nehisi Coates quote and not actual human beings with names and stories and a right to not be poisoned by their own neighborhood.
The Shipyard looms over all of it, that massive contaminated ghost of American militarism and corporate greed. Lennar wants to build luxury housing there. Luxury fucking housing. On toxic land. Because… Because in San Francisco 2018, even poison can be gentrified if you put enough stainless steel appliances and fiddle fig trees in the rendering.
This meeting is resistance in its purest form: showing up, speaking up, refusing the convenient narrative. BUILD LLC presents their mixed-use development plans like we’re all supposed to believe this time will be different, like the community hasn’t heard these promises before. But the people in this room know the difference between development and development for whom. They know the difference between cleanup and cover-up.
And the whole sick joke is that this shouldn’t require a Task Force with “Environmental Justice Response” in the title. It should just be called “not poisoning people.” But we don’t live in that America. We live in the America where you need a goddamn task force just to get someone to acknowledge that maybe, maybe, you deserve to live on land that won’t give you and your kids cancer.
This Wednesday night in August, in a community facility in the southeast corner of a city that prides itself on being progressive: which is bullshit by the way. This is where all the pretty urban planning talk faces the hard truth of environmental racism, of decades of institutional indifference dressed up as bureaucratic process.
The resistance isn’t heroic or cinematic. It’s exhausting and necessary and it looks like folding chairs and PowerPoint presentations and people who are so tired of fighting but who show up anyway because what else are you going to do? Let these assholes win?
No. You show up. You demand answers. You refuse to be invisible. Even when every system is designed to make you give up, make you fail, you don’t. That’s the story of Bayview Hunters Point. That’s what was happening on Wednesday night. Not a meeting, a reckoning that’s still ongoing, still unresolved, still demanding we ask ourselves what we owe people we’ve spent generations betraying.