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San Francisco’s Hypocritical Multiculturalism[/align]
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A week in New York City has left me even more convinced of San Francisco’s glaring hypocrisy toward its Latino and African-American residents. Although San Francisco prides itself on being a multicultural city, a place whose busses carry people of diverse nationalities and ethnicities, when it comes to employment in the city’s hip restaurants, blacks or Latinos are either missing or in the kitchen. These groups are also absent from the well-paying jobs in San Francisco’s popular small businesses selling clothing, housewares, and other goods. By contrast, New York City is often identified with racial tensions, but its multiculturalism extends to its waiters in upscale restaurants and sales staff in hip stores. No wonder some African-Americans in job training programs are pursuing the fools gold of Bayview Redevelopment; its far easier for local politicians to sell that promise than to ruffle feathers by demanding racial justice in hiring for the city’s small businesses.
When I lived in Noe Valley in the 1980’s, a common topic of discussion was the paucity of African-American or Latino workers in the small retail businesses lining 24th Street. This pattern was also evident along Chestnut, Union and other commercial districts whose fortunes boomed during that period.
Because San Francisco progressives during those years (and since) were accused of being “anti-business,� activists and elected officials were careful to distinguish between the evil Chamber of Commerce and the wonderful small businesses serving their neighborhood. This bifurcation was given political respectability by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, whose reliance on small businesses for advertising dollars has led it to largely ignore how restaurants and small retailers have vigorously opposed most progressive taxation reforms in the city, including the creation of a local minimum wage.
But there may be no area where small business has played a more regressive role in San Francisco than in terms of African-American and Latino hiring. It remains rare to see an African-American or Latino waiter in the city’s hotspot restaurants, and the percentage of jobs these groups hold in small, white-owned retail businesses is vastly below their demographic percentage in San Francisco (though the exodus of African-Americans from the city has reduced this discrepancy over time).
When you consider how small business has been the city’s economic engine over the past two decades, the inability of blacks and Latinos to get good paying jobs in this field helps explain the persistent low-income levels of both groups. It also explains why the city’s economic boom not only did not meaningfully benefit these groups, but helped force African-Americans out of San Francisco.
Having grown accustomed to San Francisco’s employment pattern, I was taken aback last week by the large percentage of black (not necessarily African-American) and Latino front-line staff at upscale restaurants and small retail outlets in Manhattan. Are New York City business owners less fearful that customers will be offended by the presence of such workers than their San Francisco counterparts? Or is the difference caused by New York City’s higher percentage of upper-middle class blacks and Latinos, so there is greater need for a workforce that looks like the customer base?
Both issues may be factors, and there are surely other reasons for the discrepancy in the two city’s hiring practices. But the best explanation is likely this: New York City has been forced to openly acknowledge its racial problems, while the prevailing view in multicultural San Francisco is that we do not have problems around race.
Since San Francisco does not have racial problems, those who “inject� racial issues into policy debates---such as those surrounding the exodus of families with children, conditions in public housing, Bayview Redevelopment, police misconduct, and the city’s prioritization of biotechnology over industries more likely to hire blacks and Latinos---are accused of playing the “race card.� This accusation demonizes those trying to highlight racial injustice, ensuring the problem remains underground and off-limits.
Unfortunately, there are those who wrongly attribute racial motivations to policy decisions. But San Francisco’s dominant media and too many of our local political leaders go out of there way to deny any racial basis to realities---such as the lack of black and Latino waiters in hip, upscale restaurants—for which entirely non-racial explanations fall short.
Because San Francisco officials have largely looked the other way regarding the racial composition of its small business workforce, over the past two decades African-Americans in particular have associated employment hopes with large, government-backed projects such as those promoted by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.
The irony, of course, is that there were far more African-Americans working in small businesses in the Fillmore in the 1950’s and 1960’s than there have been since the community was bulldozed by the Redevelopment Agency.
Back in 1981, when Tenderloin activists won their historic victory against three luxury hotel chains, Stan Smith of the San Francisco Building Trades Council sought to justify his alliance with the global corporations against the community by promoting a “Tenderloin First� hiring plan. What resulted from this plan, which was supposed to ensure that residents got “good jobs� from projects built in their neighborhood?
No Tenderloin resident got a job where they interacted with the public. Rather, even our smartest, bilingual Southeast Asian immigrants were hired as dishwashers or put in the laundry room.
A “Tenderloin First� plan was not needed to obtain these jobs, which were fine for those unable to speak English. But it was not what the bilingual immigrants who could have been the future leaders of the neighborhood expected after jumping through the many procedural hoops involved with the plan. These talented workers got disgusted with the lack of promotional opportunities and left their jobs and the Tenderloin.
The notion that Bayview Redevelopment is needed to provide current Bayview residents with jobs ignores the city’s failure to ensure fair treatment for African-Americans seeking jobs throughout San Francisco.
Some of us have seen this game too many times to be taken in again.
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13-03-06, 09:59 PM
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