We met in prison. San Quentin, to be exact. Which sounds like the beginning of either a really good story or a really bad one, depending on your tolerance for irony. Turns out it was the former.
When we were first dating she’s took me all around Hunters Point. The southeastern corner of San Francisco that everyone else in the city pretends doesn’t exist unless they need somewhere to dump their industrial waste or park their toxic cleanup projects. I’ve got my camera, because I guess that’s what you bring when the woman you’re falling for wants to show you her life’s work.
And the light there. Unbelievable. The light in that part of the city is something else. It’s industrial and ethereal at the same time. It bounces off the Bay, cuts through the ruins of the shipyard, illuminates the contradictions in every frame. Beauty and poison sharing the same golden hour.
We’re walking, and we’re talking, and we’re doing what post docs do when they’re falling in love: we’re sharing our triumphs and our traumas. The writing that works and the writing that don’t. The advisors who get it and the ones who never will. I’m shooting. She’s explaining the impossible project of trying to make sense of environmental racism, of green gentrification, of what happens when a neighborhood finally gets cleaned up just in time to price out everyone who survived the contamination.
And somewhere in there, I capture this image. The one that would eventually become the cover of Toxic City. Her book. Her years of research and resistance and documentation of how Bayview-Hunters Point has fought for cleanup to mean something more than displacement, for environmental justice to be inseparable from reparations.
That cover image isn’t just a photograph. It’s a record of where we started. Not a bad origin story, all things considered.
From the publisher:
Toxic City presents a novel critique of postindustrial green gentrification through a study of Bayview-Hunters Point, a historically Black neighborhood in San Francisco. As cities across the United States clean up and transform contaminated waterfronts and abandoned factories into inviting spaces of urban nature and green living, working-class residents—who previously lived with the effects of state abandonment, corporate divestment, and industrial pollution—are threatened with displacement at the very moment these neighborhoods are cleaned, greened, and revitalized. Lindsey Dillon details how residents of Bayview-Hunters Point have fought for years for toxic cleanup and urban redevelopment to be a reparative process and how their efforts are linked to long-standing struggles for Black community control and self-determination. She argues that environmental racism is part of a long history of harm linked to slavery and its afterlives and concludes that environmental justice can be conceived within a larger project of reparations.