We met in prison. San Quentin. Which sounds like the opening line of either a really good story or a really bad one, depending on your tolerance for irony and how much faith you’ve still got left in coincidence as a delivery mechanism for the divine. So far it’s been the former, knock wood, spit three times, throw salt over the shoulder.
When we first got together she took me all around Hunters Point. The southeastern corner of San Francisco that everybody else in the city pretends doesn’t exist unless they need somewhere to dump their car batteries, refrigerators, and industrial garbage or park their toxic cleanup projects and pat themselves on the back for being so progressive about it. I’ve got my camera, because that’s what you bring when the woman you’re falling for wants to show you her life’s work, you bring the tool of your own obsession and you try to keep up.
And the light out there. Unbelievable. In this part of the city the light is something else entirely. It’s industrial and ethereal at the same time. It bounces off the Bay, cuts through the dead shipyard, illuminates the contradictions in every frame whether you wanted it to or not. Beauty and poison sharing the golden hour like old friends who know they shouldn’t be seen together but can’t help themselves.
We’re walking and we’re talking and we’re doing what two postdocs do when they’re falling in love, which is to say we’re trading the triumphs and the traumas of grad school like baseball cards, the writing that works and the writing that doesn’t, the advisors who get it and the ones who never will and never could if you spelled it out for them in crayon on the back of their own CVs. And in the few transitions, in the moments I couldn’t come up with anything smart or witty, I’d press the shutter. Just press it. Totally in awe of this woman 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 every single person who survived the contamination in the first place. The cruelest joke ever told, delivered with a straight face in the language of zoning codes and remediation budgets and the kind of bureaucratic English that’s designed to make sure nobody important ever has to feel anything about it.
And somewhere in there, somewhere in the middle of all that walking and talking and falling, I got 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 been fighting like hell for cleanup to mean something more than displacement, for environmental justice to be inseparable from reparations, for the word “remediation” to mean what it’s supposed to mean instead of what it’s been twisted into meaning.
That cover image isn’t just a photograph. It’s a record of where we started. A document. A receipt. Proof that we were there in that light on that day before either one of us knew what we were doing or where any of it was going. Not a bad origin story, all things considered. Not bad at all.
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.