Seven dollar cups of coffee; the highest displacement rate of Black Americans second to post-Katrina New Orleans; chrome Aston Martins going 60 miles per hour in the now “up and coming” neighborhoods; flocks of metal cranes piercing the landscape; casual yet covert transphobic racism; and the uncompassionate cackles of the young, profit-driven, and privileged toward the older man on the corner admirably collecting aluminum cans to recycle. This is the San Francisco we are currently witnessing—again. As a culture bearer of our past and the author of the future, my thriving existence as an artist is in and of itself resistance—resistance to racial capitalism, imperialism, cis-hetero white supremacy. From the racist 1870 street ordinance that banned my great-great- grand-aunties from carrying their belongings on bamboo poles to the Anti-Asian Exclusion act to the more
recent corporate takeover of America’s first Japantown. The Ramaytush Ohlone and Black ancestors. I owe them my voice, my struggle, my resistance, to upend the oppressive forces that be. They fought so that we all could be free. Not just me. Whether by blasting RBL Posse slaps through our subwoofers during the September sunshine or sharing our stories to the vibrant young authors, the youth, we are more than just witnesses. Like the brilliant artists that sculpted this beautifully intricate culture before us, the Ohlone Ramaytush stewards, the immigrants, the bold, the hopeful, the risk-takers, the misfits, the eclectic thinkers, the luminous lot of America’s upstream swimmers—we are the continuing, active architects of this dynamic city. I choose to embody the radically collaborative community I was born from.
“This is the San Francisco we are currently witnessing— again.”
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