Though I grew up mostly in San Francisco, and lived in and around The City for over fifty years, I haven’t been there in over three years and should probably temper my comments on the apparently successful recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin accordingly.[1]
But I can hold my tongue no longer. I really do think this recall reflects change in San Francisco and the surrounding area that is partly responsible for my decision to leave Northern California. Money, especially high technology money, had taken over San Francisco in particular and ever more of the Bay Area. Boudin blames his ouster in part on tech money.[2]
There is the fact of the money itself. Intrinsically, it is a means to power, as those who have money are more able to decline possible exchanges than those who do not, as those who have money have leverage to extract “better” (for them) deals than those who do not, as the benefits and handicaps from these uneven exchanges accrue, and as social inequality accordingly widens.[3] In San Francisco, there’s almost no affordable housing available; gentrification has even reached the notorious Hunters Point area. You are either rich or you are homeless, and so it should be no surprise that homelessness has increased, one of the complaints cited in Boudin’s recall.[4]
A link is also well established, even if people prefer to ignore it, between economic desperation and the sorts of crime[5] that are also cited by proponents of Boudin’s recall.[6] None of this is radical among criminologists or sociologists; it is well known, and usually understood in terms of a discrepancy between socially acceptable goals and the available means to achieve those goals.[7]
But it isn’t just the money. It is an attitude, really a way of thinking, that accompanies the money, a way of thinking that emphasizes binaries of truth and falsity, good and evil, at the expense of nuance. Despite those criminological and sociological links, people in San Francisco turn their eyes away from the poor and the homeless, and with wealthy encouragement in part as a diversion from rich people’s own crimes,[8] they see criminals instead. They want criminals locked up even as incarceration will only worsen the social ills that produce the crime.[9]
The refusal to confront class draws on privilege, something the high technology workers who increasingly populate San Francisco possess in spades, but even most so-called progressives clearly prefer to focus on anything else.
Critical theorists have long seen binary thinking, in which right is conflated with wealth, health, male, white, good, and, I’m sure a few other things I’m forgetting; and in which wrong is conflated with poverty, poor health, non-white, evil, and, I’m sure a few other things I’m forgetting, as supportive of patriarchy and the status quo.[10] But if you’re in high technology, binary thinking is intrinsic and essential to how you do your job: Things are either something or they aren’t, and computers, and necessarily the people who work with computers, make decisions accordingly. It has to be a comfortable way of thinking.
San Francisco voters may delude themselves into thinking they’re progressive, even as they have repeatedly re-elected the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein over a period of time that began long before the Silicon Valley tumor grew to include The City, and have now ousted Boudin. But when they’re talking to me about “victims,” but never mind victims of capitalism, and punishment, but never mind the families and communities of the incarcerated, I know they’re something else entirely: hypocrites.
- [1]Laura J. Nelson, James Queally, and Anabel Sosa, “San Francisco voters recall progressive D.A. Boudin. Crime and homelessness at issue,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-07/2022-san-francisco-district-attorney-chesa-boudin-recall-election-results↩
- [2]Laura J. Nelson, James Queally, and Anabel Sosa, “San Francisco voters recall progressive D.A. Boudin. Crime and homelessness at issue,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-07/2022-san-francisco-district-attorney-chesa-boudin-recall-election-results↩
- [3]Max Weber, “Class, Status, Party,” in Social Theory, ed. Charles Lemert, 6th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2017), 94-101.↩
- [4]Laura J. Nelson, James Queally, and Anabel Sosa, “San Francisco voters recall progressive D.A. Boudin. Crime and homelessness at issue,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-07/2022-san-francisco-district-attorney-chesa-boudin-recall-election-results↩
- [5]Steven E. Barkan, Criminology: A Sociological Understanding, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2006); Jeffrey Reiman, The Rich Get Richer and The Poor Get Prison, 7th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2004).↩
- [6]Laura J. Nelson, James Queally, and Anabel Sosa, “San Francisco voters recall progressive D.A. Boudin. Crime and homelessness at issue,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-07/2022-san-francisco-district-attorney-chesa-boudin-recall-election-results↩
- [7]Robert K. Merton, “Social Structure and Anomie,” in Social Theory, ed. Charles Lemert, 6th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2017), 181-190.↩
- [8]Herbert Gans, The War Against the Poor (New York: Basic, 1995); Jeffrey Reiman, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2004).↩
- [9]Ernest Drucker, A Plague of Prisons (New York: New Press, 2011).↩
- [10]David Benfell, “We ‘need to know how it works,’” Not Housebroken, March 19, 2012, https://disunitedstates.org/2012/03/19/we-need-to-know-how-it-works/↩