Divided…. NOT Conquered!

by Jasmine Syedullah/PoorNewsNetwork Poverty Studies Intern

I had first heard about Bayview Hunter’s Point from friends who advised me not to go there. A tremble would come over them as they reported to me that "it’s just too dangerous". Being from the Bronx I was necessarily skeptical of what I perceived as media inspired paranoia. Just because neighborhood’s poor and black doesn’t mean it’s dangerous. So I asked one of the youth I work with in the Tenderloin, "So what’s it like out in BayView?". Vanessa shook her head and said, "it’s crazy out there". She went on to tell me a about a time she had gone there with her cousin for some reason and been aggressively confronted by some girls who, when they realized Vanessa and her cousin were not from BayView were ready to throw down.

"We are not united… What is the saying? Divide and conquer? They have divided us and we are being conquered ", said Cati Hawkins Okorie in a recent conversation I had with her about her experiences living in the BayView area for the last 55 years. "This community was once united and it felt good… and I was very proud whenever I went wherever in this country, I’d always say, ‘I’m from the village of Hunters Point!’ ".

I met Ms. Okorie at a Community Meeting called by Charlie Walker, to give the residents of BayView Hunter’s Point (BVHP) the opportunity to collectively discuss the plans the city had for the "cleaning up" of Hunter’s Point, "We have a serious racial problem in this community… in this country… it’s a national goddamn emergency". I arrived at the SouthEast Community Facility, 1800 Oakdale Avenue, Monday June 16th just after 6pm.to hear Charlie Walker’s voice, filled with the fire and brimstone of a Baptist minister, quaking over the heads of 200 or so black men women and children, and burrowing its way into my "inner conflict". I was certainly not the only one in need of this tough love pep talk. This was the first meeting of the BayView Hunters Point (BVHP) community that had been called in a long time.

Ms. Okorie continued, "They don’t happen very often, they don’t. There used to be established groups that used to meet regularly, and people would come to those meetings and voice their opinions… getting people involved is really hard nowadays, cause now they’re just thinking about surviving and their children surviving. We didn’t have those issues back in the 60s…". Ms. Okorie is the program coordinator for the Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT). CIRT operates out of the Department of Public Health on Evans Street. CIRT provides services to families of homicide victims throughout BVHP and Double Rock. This is only the most resent of Cati’s long line of jobs working for social justice in the area.

I asked Cati what factors most divided the community she’d said used to exist in BayView, "Crack did something to the community that none of the other things that I named, substances, could do. It took away the nurturing that a woman used to give her kids. You could find the drunkest woman but she would take care of her baby. After crack came in that went out the window, no more nurturing. Then there were a lot of children born with this in their system. This was like the early to mid eighties… Everyone was wondering what’s going to happen to these crack babies?… Now we know, these kids are killing each other left and right… They have a feeling of not caring, something that seems to come along with crack.

Crack seems to desensitize you to the situation whatever it is doesn’t matter…. Crack was the ultimate weapon because it really divided the community. Before the drugs came, the black people in San Francisco had their differences as far as communities go… but basically, on the south side of the city, from Potrero Hill to like Sunnydale was considered one community."

She told me later how when her mother moved the family to Navy road in Hunter’s Point in 1954 from Double Rock, hers was the only one of two black families in the building. Walking down 3rd street today you’d be hard pressed to see anyone lighter than a brown paper bag chatting it up in front of the barber shop or waiting for the 44 MUNI bus on the corner. The land on which the housing projects now stand used to be covered with navel housing for families during World War II.

Cati told me that when the war was over, "the government got the housing authority going and the housing authority rented it to black folks who needed places and the more they moved in the more the other races moved out".

After 50 plus years the face of the neighborhood is scheduled to change again. The last major stronghold for African- Americans in San Francisco is headed towards extermination. In order to resist this housing crisis, Charlie Walker called a community meeting so that folks could be informed of the facts and motivated towards resisting the impending changes to the community. Within a matter of moments of listening to the speakers there in the Southeast Community Facility, it was clear to me that there are many more forces threatening the quality of life in BVHP than potential eviction notices. As one woman at the meeting exclaimed, "we needed to have this meeting a long time ago!".

Back in the northeast, my experience as a black woman with uncommon education opportunities isolated me from any community with which I could fully identify. The effect was silencing. I was afraid to claim solidarity with other black folks for fear of alienating myself from the mostly upper class mostly white folks who were my friends. And most black folks I met growing up rejected me because I "talked proper" and couldn’t dance.

This silence filled me like a balloon expanding with time. Last June I was about ready to explode. I could see the same balloon had exploded several times over throughout BayView Hunters Point, manifesting itself in violence, apathy, addiction and ultimately community fragmentation. The internal effects of institutionalized oppression have as great a mal-effect upon the well-being of the individual it effects as the institutions themselves. I would even argue that the effects of internal oppression are even more psychologically devastating, more permanently scaring.

Willie Ratcliff, publisher of the BayView National Black Newspaper, spoke at the community meeting about our need to "take control over our lives". "We have to make a demand!" He focused on the lack of control we have over our housing contracts, the loans we receive and the jobs we don’t have. He said we have to realize first that "we are not at odds with each other".

One of the many women who spoke during the meeting outlined how 17,939 families are on the waiting list for public housing and over 30,000 are waiting for section 8 assistance. Meanwhile a large number of houses along West Point on the hill are being boarded up and left abandoned. The irony of these statistics lies in the high level of toxicity that permeates the ground and pollutes the air all around housing projects in BayView Hunter’s Point and nearby Double Rock. Four out of ten of the children born in this community suffer some kind of birth defect. And it also has the highest number of cervical and breast cancer cases in the Bay Area. Living spaces built on top of landfill, next to the PG & E power plant and isolated by thick metal bars are the much needed housing tens of thousands of poor families are desperate to inhabit. I asked Ms. Okorie what she thought we needed to combat the intervention of these oppressive institutions on our lives.

"We need the power of the creator. We need the power of God… Bible says my people die from a lack of knowledge. They don’t have the knowledge of what is going on and what is happening to them and the what fors. If these kids had the knowledge, they would understand. They wouldn’t do a lot of what they’re doing…"

At the end of the community meeting, just after the closing benediction, a young man from the crowd who I later learned is an up and coming leader among the youth of the community raged against what he felt was the ageism silencing him from speaking in the meeting. His outburst was that balloon stretched to the limit and exploding with emotion. As he stormed out of the room still shouting his opposition the elders shook their heads in disappointment. They claimed the silencing was not intentional but a matter of limited time. However, it has been my experience that this division between the elders and the youth of the community is one of the most urgent least addressed challenges in our coming together. Without the guidance, affirmation and love of the village parents, our "village" of tomorrow will more likely resemble William Goldman’s Lord of the Flies rather than bell hook’s "Beloved Community".

"You cannot give up. That’s what the powers that be want us to do, give up. They want us to dislike these kids with the saggy pants. They want us to hate them. They want us to talk about them… But I refuse to do that. I was young myself… and remember - there are still some older people that we love today, they’ve passed on, but they stuck by us… and did not give up on the young".

I walked away from the community meeting with a feeling of resolve. Though divided, I felt the community is here. Looking for answers and encouraging one another to keep fighting. I had found the community I had come to the bay area to find. But the more I spoke with Ms. Okorie, the more I realized how easily impressed I am by a room full of tough talking black folks, and how far we have yet to go.