A Family Destroyed by Un-Just Eviction
“BANG BANG BANG… Sheriffs here,open the door, you have to vacate the premises” On Wednesday, April 8th, at 9am after weeks of last minute legal maneuvers, unanswered calls to the mayor and multiple pleas for a pro-bono lawyer to save the single mama Sabrina Carter and her three suns from one of the most unjust evictions I have ever witnessed were exhausted, the San Francisco sheriffs, standing shoulder to shoulder with the souled-out housing managers were outside her door in the Plaza East apartments to change the locks and throw her and her suns into the street.
They were outside Sabrina’s no longer public- now privatized housing door in the Fill-no-Mo, like they were outside me and my mama’s door and so many other peoples doors who were devil-oped, rent-raised, gentriFUKed, negro-removed and destroyed by this capitalist system that encourages, supports and demands moves inspired by greed.
In these deadly, sci-fi-like moments, when entire families’ lives are destroyed by colonizers papers and politricksters lies, with names like unlawful detainers, notices to evict, and right to possession, time itself moves so strangely slow and so terrifyingly fast all at the same time. Suddenly before any of us could catch our breath Sabrina and her youngest sun were standing there in the early morning sun, holding back the tears as they watched large plywood boards nail shut what used to be their home.
Sabrina’s families tragedy of injustice has everything to do with the dismantling, destroying and privatizing of the public housing system in the US which is rooted in the misleading HUD acronym known as RAD (Rental Assistance Demonstration) and the ways that racism and policing and the criminalization of young black and brown men are used to implement that privatization.
Sabrina’s crisis began when her oldest, then 17 yr old sun, like so many like him began to be staulked and profiled by a local po’lice officer who obsessively over-polices the one block of majority African descendent residents (when I was sitting with the family on their front stoop, circled Sabrina’s one tiny block over 45 times within one hour). Multiple profiling of her sun eventually led to false changes against the young man which then led to the building management forcing the mother to file stay away orders against her own young adult sun and eventually stipulated agreements she could never keep and ultimately eviction to make way for richer, witer, gentrified tenants which make this building more desireable in the privatization pool.
“Plaza East is not part of RAD,” one of the managers who presided smugly over Sabrina’s eviction said at a tenants meeting POOR Magazine family was invited to a week prior. After his assertion that their apartments were not part of the filthy RAD pool where everyone from non-profit organizations to for-profit corporations like Goldman and Sachs were making bank , he went on to contradict himself in one paragraph,”Well, actually the SFPHA housing subsidies are now going to come from RAD and we are going to start moving people out who are not fully inhabiting their apartments”, he concluded, thoroughly confusing everyone in the meeting. He went on to cite the three projects that are slated for demolition, like the demolition of thousands of peoples housing was nothing more than having a cup of coffee and a donut.
Standing on the street holding this mama and her sun, dreams, memories, altars, momentos, toys and herstories were permanently lost in a series of hefty bags and clutched blankets. These moments can’t be described and yet I have tried for years, the tears they cause could fill an ocean and no matter how conscious, how revolutionary, and how much I know them far too intimately, I am still destroyed by them.
We stood there, POOR Magazine co-madres and reporters Queennandi, Jewnbug and me, along with Sabrina’s neighbors and extended family, holding onto 13 year old young warrior sun, and her, a lost and overwhelmed mama.
My mind raced with the moves of the last few weeks. The desperate legal saves comrade Leo Stegman and I did for the family at POOR Magazine’s Revolutionary Legal Advocacy Project. The media justice campaign and the countless stories written with POOR/PNN, the San Francisco Bayview and Manilatown Heritage Foundation. The thousands of caring people who made phone calls to the sold-out mayor Ed Lee to try to get him to intervene in this illegal and unjust eviction but who never did because of course it was Lee that invited the private devil-opers MacCormack & Barron who bought this public housing and their lying lawyers, Bornstein and Bornstein into this town, and who not coincidentally are the same lawyers who have been evicting Ellis acted elders and families from their long-time homes by the thousands, while teaching landlords how to be better kkkapitalists and “not care” .
We are still looking for a lawyer to challenge this case. The un-justness of this story has no words.
If you are a lawyer who can help file a state challenge of Sabrina’s case please contact us. POOR Magazine will also be holding an organizing/info meeting in the Bayview branch of the SF Public Library in May entitled RAD=ERADICATION. Please stay tuned
Poem for privatized, displaced mamaz..
“Been fighting for 30 years and i keep losing, why keep fighting when im never gonna win..?: said by one young privatized, gentriFUKEd mama in so much pain to me on the phone as I screamed out to touch her and Love her No Matter What…
“..Noooooooooooooooooo…,” I shouted to her and.to all the mamaz, the elders, the gentriFUKed and the Stepped on.
To the mamaz who hold their head up- even when their aint no more strength in their necks- whose eyes look foreward filled wit tears, who hands hold so much- whose souls were never built to be killed over and over again.
These stolen lands weren’t created by the gentriFUKators and all the haters- who make these laws and live on all this paper.
Dear Mama Sabrina, Mama Dee, Mama Mimi & to all the mamaz who never did nothing but care for their children in racist Amerikkka- im raising Superbabymama from the ashes of 1999 Dot com Evictions- Im calling upon Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer and Quetzalcoatl – im calling upon Mama Earth and Mama Creator.
The brutality of eviction and gentriFUKation is so deep and wrong and filled wit so much wite-supremacist monetary lies and deep hatred- THIS is our Freedom Ride family and all of us mamaz and ancestor mamaz are needed.
Hold out your hearts in the wind- Call to your ancestor mamaz to hold these children and these women.
This lie of civilization and corporate crafted institutional state-hood. Hold out your hearts Mamas – cuz you kno wut im saying. Hold out your hearts young mamaz, older mamaz, grandmothers and babies,
Cause the river of pain is to great to be sedated and the women and children are about to Completely go CRAZY.
The sounds will b loud and the vibe will b amzing –
cause We all KNOW Superbabymama Doesn’t play
