While conducting a community needs assessment for San Francisco Head Start in 2005, I reviewed data that took my breath away. I could have sworn the number of African American children in foster care was a misprint, the percentages were simply too high to believe. When analyzing secondary data, it is important to go “beyond” the numbers to understand the dynamics and causes of a phenomenon. To perform my due diligence as a consultant, my responsibility extended beyond creating a document with charts and tables, I had to make sense of the trends revealing themselves in the data to propose recommendations for services. Upon further examination that included many phone calls and meetings with data analysts from the City and County of San Francisco, social services, residents of the impacted communities, and others who knew the history of these neighborhoods with “shifting demographics” I was able to piece together the puzzle – or find the story.
The story in San Francisco was one of immigration over time, propelled by a variety of factors attached to the larger American theme that has built this melting pot nation. For the African American community in San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond it was the shipyards that became the magnet for what Isabel Wilkerson terms I her new book, The Warmth of Other Suns, “America’s great migration”. The shipyards were located in the Hunters Point neighborhood off Third Street, and many African American workers bought homes there and raised their families. There were other enclaves of African Americans – Western Addition with its lovely Victorians, and Bay View in close proximity to Hunter’s Point. Gentrification saw the end to a string African American presenle in the Western Addition; those homes were bought up and sent folks packing to Ingelside and beyond the city limits. Bay View became more of a mixed neighborhood with Samoan immigrants in the 1950s, and later the wave of Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees populated the community along with a simmering of tensions and resentments about allocations of resources and the purchase of homes by multiple family members of Southeast Asians. Neighborhood residents changed, were gentrified, the more wealthy stayed much the same; however, Hunters Point with its beautiful views of the downtown skyline and warm micro climate weather fell in further decline. Even the new light rail line along Third Street did not do much to change landscape of Hunters Point. Perhaps it was just a matter of time until the neighborhood experienced the predicted renaissance, though in 2005 I faced troubling data and a community in crisis.
One of my neighbors in my Easy Bay neighborhood was raised in Hunters Point, and until early 2000, her mother still lived in the family home. She described a vibrant working class neighborhood with close relations and community pride. She is my age - born in 1957, therefore she witnessed desegregation, the political movements of the sixties, wore an Afro in high school where she was a cheer leader, and sadly the decline that took place in the late 1970s with a shift in the manufacturing base taking good paying jobs overseas, crack cocaine epidemic, and people who had the means during those turbulent times sold and left for greener pastures – Ingleside District and the suburbs of the Bay Area. A dispersion, another leg of the journey for the African American Diaspora that began for most in West Africa, or what Paul Gilroy termed the “Black Atlantic” to the slave holding American South and for those who made the epic journey of the great migration north, Midwest, and west.
While working on the community assessment I had lengthy conversations with the head analyst for the Department of Social Services who introduced the concept of “leavers and stayers” to me. He helped me get my arms around the number of African American youth in foster care, and it really boiled down to migration. The once vibrant family centered working class neighborhood described by my friend (and many, many others) had dispersed beginning in the late 1970s. Families were separated by means, and those who had the ability left Hunters Point, and those without were the same families ravaged by joblessness, neighborhood decline and loss of professionals and businesses, and perhaps most devastating in the 1980s – crack cocaine. During a brief stint in Child Protective Services in Alameda County in 1988, I saw first hand the residual of crack on African American families. In fact, I did not need to look even that far, friends of ours who held good jobs in the SF transit system with homes and kids in private school lost it all and tragically some never made it back. The children who by then were called “crack babies” were often raised by grandmothers or in foster care. A knife had come and sliced communities apart. Driving through West or East Oakland, Hunters Point, or similar neighborhoods, it was not uncommon to see hollowed out addicts who resided in abandoned “crack houses” gathering on corners or roaming the streets.
If I was looking for an answer to the question of why so many African American kids in foster care, I could trace it on a map. GIS mapping was the rage then and I could view hot spots and accompanying data. The leavers, who might, and as they have in other times provided the support and resources to sustain though a crack epidemic, were gone. The stayers of those African American families who arrived in Hunters Point, full of hope and ready to work in the expanding shipyards during the war, were left to their own devices in a declining neighborhood despite the promise of better times (gentrification?) with the light rail line and new housing developments they could not afford. There was no mystery in the obvious city wide economic changes, loss of manufacturing jobs replaced by designer showcases and condos that had happened throughout the nation. The failure of urban renewal and the razing of communities and historical structures were evident in the built environment. But it is the stories that lend meaning and render us heartbroken. Included in my final documents were excerpts from those stories and brief histories of the communities from their inception. Context is everything when analyzing data and developing services for the children and families that reside in the communities the data represents. We are obligated to present a full picture.
In Mart I have observed a similar phenomenon. A good example is my husband’s journey to California, typical of many other Mart residents, and in particular African American males of his generation. He graduated high school and immediately joined the Navy where he was stationed in San Diego before shipping out to Japan. When he was discharged three years later, he spent a brief time in San Diego before heading to San Francisco where his older brother lived. He took the test for the Post Office where he worked before going to the transit system, MUNI. He worked for MUNI for 30 years, as a cable car grip man, then a manger after graduating San Francisco State University on the GI Bill. He left Mart and essentially never looked back; however, he spun tales of Mart for years and although racism was palpable, he descriptions of a vibrant black community were powerful and moving. He remained in contact with his family, visiting for funerals and always available to send money when needed. When the family reunions began in 2002, Mart was a shell of its former self, a decaying town that held far different fates for the leavers and the stayers.
Wahlbeck (2002)discusses the concept of Diaspora as a transnational social organization that relates to both country of origin and the society of settlement, and proposes this concept as an analytical tool for study of refugees in their country of exile. Wahlbeck warns that when using the Diaspora concept, “one must avoid generating a disregard of phenomena such as racism, discrimination, and exclusion, which are connected to the social structures in the country of settlement” (p.233). Using Wahlbeck’s definition of “ideal type” as a “form of social organization though for analytical purposes only” (p.230), and although Wahlbeack is referring to international dispersion of refugees, and cites an empirical study of Kurdish refuges, it begs the question when applying this analytical tool to the African American Diaspora and (Re)Diaspora - Are we refugees in our own country? When faced with social problems of epic proportions perhaps there is such a thing as social refugees dispersed or bound to remain depending on your means? How can our layered analysis uncover the soul of the Diaspora? As the grandchild of Jewish immigrants who made the trek across the Atlantic through Ellis Island to escape pogroms in search of a better life, I can best describe that experience through the eyes of my grandmother, sixteen years old, frightened, leaving her family and all she knew. Her journey to America and her life once here was one of constant hardship. Yet here I am, the result of one Diaspora creating new dispersions from the East Coast to the West, my children a fusion of the Black Atlantic, Great Migration, Eastern European Jewish Migration of the early 1900s, and the mobile society post 1960s. The “duel orientation” (p.234) that Wahlbeck (2002) refers to towards the society of origin and settlement may be even more than that as migration is multifaceted and includes (re)settlement and attachment in several waves. To grasp the full extent of data and trends that baffle and confound, a closer look into the stories, hearts and souls of the Diasporic experience reveal a significant piece of the puzzle.
Wahlbeck, O. (2002). The concept of diaspora as an analytical tool in the study of refugee communities. Journal of Ethnic and Refugee Studies, 28(2), 221-238.
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