Aoki’s

n order to free gender outlaws, these rigid structures must be dismantled, because it is in these structures that the patriarchal power imbalance lies, not in the inherent existence of gender. This is by no means a simple goal. There is always more work to be done in forming an understanding of gender, power, and the interactions between the two that allows for fluidity.

Perhaps this work is too complex to scrawl on a pithy protest sign, but it is essential nonetheless.

Aoki’s text is not straightforward in its vision of freedom. While she is clear in her yearning for a world where people who have historically been outlaws can simply live their lives free of oppression and resentment, she does not consider the ways her conceptions power and weakness may inadvertently reinforce the gender binary.

Unlike Aoki, Faucette rejects the idea that our concepts of gender can be rethought within our existing systems: “Rather than working within state structures that oppress us and our allies, non-binary activists recognize that state structures are built on a discriminatory foundation” (83). Similarly to Beard’s reinvention of power, Faucette believes that these structures must be dug up from their roots. Where West and Zimmerman would work to redefine the requirements of interactional categories over time, Faucette writes that non-binary activists “believe that the answer to state control mechanisms that divide and label us is not ‘here’s how we would like to be divided and labled instead,’ but rather, ‘what gives you the power and authority to do this?’” (83-84) Aoki’s strategy of redefining gender within the structures in which it currently exists is a fruitless pursuit in Faucette’s view, arguing that the entire structure should be interrogated. 

Avory Faucett is a non-binary activist whose essay “Fucking the Binary for Social Change: Our Radically Queer Agenda” explores what the label “non-binary activist” means as well as activism’s strengths, shortcomings, and goals. Faucett writes of non-binary people that “rather than being recognized for who they are, these non-conformers are judged according to a rigid gender framework that ignores other aspects of self” (78). While Aoki does not necessarily adhere to gender essentialism, her statements surrounding the gender binary fail to recognize non-binary folks when put into practice—if masculinity is powerful and femininity tied to weakness, where do people who identify as neither male nor female fall?

While Aoki does not necessarily adhere to gender essentialism, her statements surrounding the gender binary fail to recognize non-binary folks when put into practice—if masculinity is powerful and femininity tied to weakness, where do people who identify as neither male nor female fall?

Aoki does not entirely exclude non-binary people from her rhetoric, at one point asking, “How can we best help other genderqueer, trans, and gender variant people live better?” (147). However, the relationship she suggests between gender and power does not allow for a satisfactory answer to this question, because as long as those in power continue to be cisgendered men, anyone who does not identify as such cannot maintain full autonomy.

This interrogation might also help us to circumvent a binary view of gender, and create a more inclusive definition of gender.

Although Aoki believes in “thinking beyond oppressed and oppressor” (150), she never squares this with her concept of gender as an inherent power structure. Although she recognizes a significant imbalance of power within institutional structures, she suggests it might be possible to use that imbalance to generate other types of power.

Where Beard would disentangle gender and power by entirely subverting and “undo[ing]” gender entirely, West and Zimmerman, and Aoki, would suggest that we, over time, change how we perceive it. West and Zimmerman suggest that these changes are inherently linked to “historical and social circumstances,” and that complicating our understanding of gender will require us to interrogate the ways in which we may unwittingly perpetuate rigid gender norms (119). 

Acknowledging that gender constructs have active, fluid definitions offers space for addressing issues of sexism, and would fall in line with Aoki’s desire to reform structures from within. West and Zimmerman write that “if the gender attributes deployed as a basis of maintaining men’s hegemony are social products, they are subject to social change (however challenging such change may be),” essentially concluding that if patriarchal power is a social product to begin with, then it can still be changed by society (114). They even explicitly say that “gender is not undone so much as redone” (118).

doing gender

Beard’s radicalism, while empowering in its ideals, could be alienating to even those who consider themselves activists, perhaps those who, like Aoki, see their activism in rice porridge and a house with a garden.

However, where Aoki invites her reader to consider the goal of “living well” and how it requires us to look “beyond oppressed and oppressor” (105), Beard is concerned with remaking power entirely, writing that the treatment of power “as a possession” must be rejected, and that we should instead “[think] about power as an attribute or even a verb (‘to power’)” (106). Aoki rejects this, arguing that the “romanticized goal of erasing structures” is a black hole for the energy of activists (146). Beard’s solutions unabashedly take the radical approach, hoping to reinvent power in its entirety, making no attempt to rethink the current definition as inclusionary of feminine presenting people. That attempt, in her eyes, is futile. “We have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man,” she writes (68). While Beard’s essays do not explicitly address the experiences of trans people, in this case, we can assume that her imagined system of power is based on the image of a cisgender, heteronormative man.

This characterization of power as a male-coded structure is not directly contradictory to the ties Aoki makes between gender and power, yet the two thinkers diverge on the correct way to transform this patriarchal structure. Beard’s conclusion, that power is an inherently masculine concept and therefore must be entirely reinvented in order to be accessible to non-masculine people, is in tension with Aoki’s belief that gender can, and should, be reformed from within.

power

femininity, masculinity,

laws

outlaw

However, by insinuating that women are part of “the weak,” she perhaps inadvertently categorizes gender as something that is inherently tied to power in a way that is not conducive to eliminating gender-based violence and discrimination.

Gender discrimination has long held women back from amassing power, but is there a way that our current understanding of power can reconcile itself with gender?

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Both he and the person next to me in Pittsburgh had been marching for the same cause, yet they approached the same issue of systemic inequality from seemingly opposite sides. Is one of these views more productive than the other, or perhaps even more true? 

And hope was not what I felt when I wrote Riot Baby. It is not what I feel now. I felt hope neither in witnessing the consequences Amy Cooper suffered for what she did nor in seeing charges of third-degree murder and manslaughter brought against the officer who killed George Floyd. What happened after the snuff film of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder inspires no hope. Neither do the pledges of legislators to reconsider the use of no-knock warrants by police following the shooting death of Breonna Taylor. In the face of an Aggressive Menace dripping with contempt for your humanity and wishing, when it cannot exploit you, to punish you, to terrorize and torment you, what use is hope? My vision of fireworks returns.

People have pointed to the coronavirus pandemic as having shown us a glimpse of an alternate reality, where residents of East Hollywood can see a smogless sky, where industries that demanded people live in overpriced cities for work are now forced to reveal that work-from-home was always a viable option, a reality where capital’s vice-grip on American society has loosened just a little bit. But the pernicious, persistent thought on the heels of that is the intractability of so many societal inequities. How do we know that, if this ends, we don’t revert to a shade of our Old Normal? How do we know that we won’t return to the embrace of familiar hellions? The pandemic has laid bare the horrors we regularly enact—through institutional neglect and outright cruelty—on our incarcerated. It has laid bare the racialization of socio-economic inequality in titanic and tragic fashion. And it has laid bare just how much we undervalue those we have discovered are invaluable. Our nurses, our grocery store clerks, our postal workers, our bus drivers. All of these are suddenly “essential.” (We dare not say “expendable.”) If my profession demands that I am constantly imagining alternate realities—possible futures and parallel presents—then how do I explain this pessimism? The New Deal that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression was unevenly distributed, as every future that has arrived inevitably is. (I tip my hat to William Gibson.) Decades after the expansion of queer rights following the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, rates of homicide and neglect among queer communities of color reveals a stark divide. And looming over all of this is corporate co-optation. Who hasn’t yet seen a tv advertisement or YouTube ad from a corporation replete with soothing music and a message that We Care? It feels irresponsible to be publicly pessimistic at a time like this. To look at the rates of COVID-19-related deaths among whites and among Black and Latino populations in the US and see continuity, even as news organizations and leaders increasingly sound the alarm. To look at how easily we cast aside concern for the elderly and chalk it up to the cost of doing business and see continuity. To look at the ways in which China’s debt colonialism is further crushing the promise of a self-sustaining African infrastructure and see continuity. To look at the current societal rupture, the collapse of the house whose already weakened foundation was further diminished by post-Great Recession austerity policies, and expect continuity. To look at cops firing unprovoked into homes and ramming their vehicles into crowds and blinding journalists, to see American police revealed for the unreformed and irreformable cartel they’ve long been, and expect continuity. Starting points in dystopian fiction are generally post-Collapse. The zombies have been let loose, a significant chunk of the global population has already succumbed to lethal pathogens, the waters have already risen. Why does this seem so much like the easy part? The assumed part. If there is optimism in these stories, it lies in individual courage, individual rescue, individual salvation. What are the contours of its systemic equivalent?

they’re not looking for answers, they’re looking for hope. And you’re to give it to them. When they ask for ideas on how to be of service, you give them that too. You give and give and are afforded only a few opportunities every three or four months to tell people to stop asking and do their own homework before you’re called upon to give and give and give again. To point people in the direction of organizations they can donate to, to advise them on how best they can respect the efforts of local activists and not Columbus their way into a movement, to inform them of the varied vehicles through which the existential threat of white supremacy makes itself manifest in your life day after day after day.

You are not permitted to watch a police precinct erupt into flames under a canopy of fireworks and whisper to yourself, “good.”

All throughout, people in the publishing industry have reached out—editors, agents, bloggers, reviewers, fellow writers—recognizing the enormity of the tax suffered by Black Americans, the water having boiled over the lip of the pot yet again, sizzling as it hits the stove. And they’ve offered condolences and solace. They’ve sent me their surprise at having discovered how much fear of white Americans governs my waking hours and, on the heels of that, they’ve sent me their sorrow.

have skin in this game

On my back porch, I held my phone in my lap and I watched that precinct burn and I saw those fireworks light up the night sky and I thought, “good.” And something of this is in my book, I remember thinking at the time. A book where a black boy can hurt and get older and be smart and be sad and want to escape occupation and fail and have a family, and where having written it felt less like writing and more like paying witness. And this boy had a sister and she was be capable of unimaginable things. She wanted to save him from this. And she was able to fly. On Minnehaha Avenue South, bounded by Interstates 35 W and 94 on the west and north respectively and by the Mississippi River to the east, beneath a flowerhead of fireworks was a police precinct ablaze. I knew that image. It was in my book.

A book where a black boy can hurt and get older and be smart and be sad and want to escape occupation and fail and have a family, and where having written it felt less like writing and more like paying witness. And this boy had a sister and she was be capable of unimaginable things. She wanted to save him from this. And she was able to fly.

I just don’t know what to do anymore”.

A book where a black boy can joke and be young and be smart and be angry and aimless and have a family, and writing it will feel less like writing and more like paying witness. And he’ll have a sister—in fact, she has already been written—and she’ll be capable of unimaginable things. She’ll want to save him from this. And she’ll be able to fly.

A teeming mass, contained beneath a tent. A single organism thrumming with life

I wonder how many of those people, in their rush to signal their own personal outrage and, by extension, their virtue, saw a specific and individualized human being and how many saw an act.

hate

The murder is the severing of the head. Social media is the pike on which it is planted.

So the duty of the Black Writer then becomes “diversify depictions of Blackness.”

“A window into the condition of contemporary Black America” reads the breathless blurb or pull-quote on the cover. And in that book are likely breathtaking sentences, arresting paragraphs, gorgeous scene-endings depicting the worst day of a Black character’s life. The sentences will sing in a story about slavery. The hunger for this sort of story exists outside the Black writer.

To write of his death this way approaches sacrilege. There was nothing beautiful or aesthetically intelligent about the destruction of his body. There isn’t a sentence in the world that can make it anything other than the abominable and heinous act it was. But the words are what to which I flee when confronted by the confusing and the hurtful and the lessening. We were both writers, this man and I. Words were how we organized the universe. So, after Harvard-Yale weekend, this was how we talked about Laquan McDonald and Facebook and how it fucked you all the way up. Subject and verb and simile and metaphor.

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At some point, they lose their shock and induce only numbness, in part because the result is almost always the same: that cavernous yawning that faces the colored American public where justice or restitution or vengeance should be found. Sometimes, however, the horror leaps back out and becomes a visceral, churning thing.

a deadening, a dying

The day was a reminder that joy can take corporeal form, that luminescence can be a felt thing, an inlying experience where the entire body is rendered clement. A blanket has wrapped itself around one’s insides. Smiles glow. Hugs calm the chaos of warm things. Where normally one speaks, one instead sings. Dancing becomes a larger thing than oneself, so that we moved as a swarm, as a glorious, teeming mass caught beneath that tent, a single organism thrumming with life and love. Of self. Of each other. Of the fact of our Blackness

At some point on the night of November 24, 2015, the Foodtown grocery at 148th and St. Nicholas caught fire.

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Facebook had been prompting users to share “memories” of specific days in years past, anniversaries of a sort where you can re-post particular status updates or pictures or linked pages. November 25, 2014, I’d written the following Facebook status: “I just…I don’t know how not to be angry anymore.” 19 Likes. 1 Comment. 1 Share.

The Cathedral of Computation

In its Enlightenment incarnation, the rise of reason represented not only the ascendency of science but also the rise of skepticism, of incredulity at simplistic, totalizing answers, especially answers that made appeals to unseen movers. But today even as many scientists and technologists scorn traditional religious practice, they unwittingly invoke a new theology in so doing.

It gives us an excuse not to intervene in the social shifts wrought by big corporations like Google or Facebook or their kindred, to see their outcomes as beyond our influence. Second, it makes us forget that particular computational systems are abstractions, caricatures of the world, one perspective among many.

It gives us an excuse not to intervene in the social shifts wrought by big corporations like Google or Facebook or their kindred, to see their outcomes as beyond our influence. Second, it makes us forget that particular computational systems are abstractions, caricatures of the world, one perspective among many.

And when left unseen, we are able to invent a transcendental ideal for the algorithm. The canonical algorithm is not just a model sequence but a concise and efficient one. In its ideological, mythic incarnation, the ideal algorithm is thought to be some flawless little trifle of lithe computer code, processing data into tapestry like a robotic silkworm.

But that’s just a part of the story, a theologized version of the diverse, varied array of people, processes, materials, and machines that really carry out the work we shorthand as “technology.”

Even if this is true to an extent, examples like Netflix’s altgenres show that data is created, not simply aggregated, and often by means of laborious, manual processes rather than anonymous vacuum-devices.

In its ideological, mythic incarnation, the ideal algorithm is thought to be some flawless little trifle of lithe computer code, processing data into tapestry like a robotic silkworm.

Indeed, an exceptionalism that favors the present is one of the ways that science has become theology.

Even though injection-molding machines and other automated devices help produce all the crap we buy, the metaphor of the factory-as-automated machine obscures the fact that manufacturing isn’t as machinic nor as automated as we think it is.

The real firmament is neurological, and computers are fitzing with our minds, a fact provable by brain science.

And like any well-delivered sermon, it seems convincing at first. Until we think a little harder about the historical references Manovich invokes, such as electricity and the engine, and how selectively those specimens characterize a prior era. Yes, they were important, but is it fair to call them paramount and exceptional?

metaphors

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Science and technology have become so pervasive and distorted, they have turned into a new type of theology.

While the Greek style of interpretation is respectful to the original art form, for Sontag, modern forms of analysis are like the greedy Spanish conquistadors that Poma wrote about. They deplete the original form in the way that miners cut down trees in the Amazon to try to find some gold underneath, but fail to realize the value of the forest they destroyed.

decoder

Just as English is the private language that helps Li connect to herself, the right way of interpreting artwork is by accessing a “private language” that helps readers connect to the author. When we as readers find ourselves baffled trying to interpret a piece of writing, it is not because there is no way to interpret it, it’s just we haven’t yet found the “private language,” the decoder.

Li writes in English to have private conversations with herself that are separate from her past, but she is still tied to Chinese culture. Poma is opposing the culture that has imposed itself on him and Li is running away from the culture of her youth. Four hundred years lie between these two writers. Yet, Li and Poma face the same problem of having their motives misinterpreted.

“contact zones,”

Well, stop guessing why the mark is there. Imagine being in the narrator’s position, observing the mark, touching it with your hand, feeling its texture, discovering the snail. After all, to speak is to blunder. But to listen, is to bind.

Li attests to Sontag’s idea in her essay, saying that her decision to write only in English is easily overinterpreted.

When Li came to America, she created a cultural contact zone between Chinese and American culture in which she was a minority trying to fit into a majority culture. When Li writes in her second language, she is writing autoethnographic text. Li uses her adopted language to self-reflect. The foreignness of English makes her feel safe, but it also puts her in the position of a cultural minority in both Chinese-speaking and English-speaking cultures. This places her work “in the contact zone.”

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I began to question if the traditional way of literary interpretation that I learned in China still applies to a world in which different cultures meet, clash, merge, and blend incessantly.

How We Should Respond to Photographs of Suffering

Repeatedly, Azoulay asks her readers to project themselves into the scenes of photographs, to notice the power dynamics at play, to identify the participants, and to view the outcomes not as inevitable but as one possibility among many. Looking at photographs this way, Azoulay thinks, can loosen events from their seeming inevitability and reveal that history didn’t have to proceed the way it did. Things could have been different. Viewing a photograph becomes a kind of reanimation: the still photograph begins to move, and though this motion cannot erase inequality, it can trouble oppression that might otherwise seem intractable. Azoulay understands that actions in the past are irreversible, yet she insists that photography introduces a kind of malleability, the potential for change. “The photograph is out there, an object in the world,” she writes, “and anyone, always (at least in principle), can pull at one of its threads and trace it in such a way as to reopen the image and renegotiate what it shows, possibly even completely overturning what was seen in it before.”

There, she wrestles with the effects of rape’s near-invisibility outside of pornography and asks whether it is possible to fight effectively against sexual violence if it “isn’t accessible to the gaze.” Azoulay’s emphasis throughout the book is on the spectator, who bears responsibility “toward what is visible.” To be resisted, it seems, violence must be seen, and photography makes such vision possible.

For many years, I said I didn’t know what to do when I encountered an image of another person in pain or dying or already dead. After reading Azoulay, I could no longer claim that I didn’t know what to do. She had explained the work in detail. The question for me now is whether I am up to the task.

Viewing a picture becomes a way of offering healing or reparation to those already dead. Her book scared me—I felt overwhelmed by her proposal that every time I look at an image of a person in pain I am bound to that person, obligated to try to end that person’s suffering. I thought of a friend whose son was diagnosed with a fatal disease. When he was dying, people would say to her, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through.” She would respond, “Yes, you can imagine it. You just don’t want to.”

a series of daguerreotypes of people enslaved in Columbia, South Carolina, on the plantation belonging to Benjamin Franklin Taylor, a graduate of Mount Zion Institute and Princeton, who served one term in the South Carolina legislature. The biologist Louis Agassiz ordered these images made; he wanted to use photography to substantiate his claim that not all human beings belonged to the same species, to prove that blacks were inferior to whites, to justify the enslavement of some bodies by other bodies. With the help of his colleague Dr. Robert Gibbes, a paleontologist, who was friends with local slavers, Agassiz travelled to the Taylor plantation, set up a studio, and hired J. T. Zealy to take the daguerreotypes. Out of the enslaved people Taylor presented to him, Agassiz chose the individuals he wanted photographed: five men of African birth and two African-American women, daughters of two of the men. Labels for each photograph record the subjects’ names, the African tribe with which they were affiliated, and the name of their owner. The images were found in the attic of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1976, more than a hundred years after they were taken.To make humans appear to be marketable, sellable, disposable property—to create the illusion of bodies without kin—slavers separated parents from children, wives from husbands, sisters from brothers. Owners’ records largely used matriarchal attribution to trace the lineage of children born into slavery, noting a child’s mother and not her father, because the biological fathers were often the owners themselves, who raped enslaved women. Agassiz’s daguerreotypes inadvertently re-inscribed the very father-daughter relationship that slavery tried to erase, though that was likely not his intention. Azoulay argues that Agassiz chose to photograph fathers and not mothers so the picture-taking might become a “performative event” in which white men could act out their superiority on the bodies of black men. Imagine that room with the camera set up on its tripod, Azoulay proposes. Imagine enslaved men subjected to the gazes of the camera and of the white men gathered there. Imagine fathers forced to watch their daughters as they, too, were subjected to those gazes, daughters who were ordered to strip, to peel down their dresses, to expose their breasts, a reenactment of the auction block, where naked women were groped by sellers and potential buyers, their bellies and breasts grabbed so slavers could determine how many children the women could bear and nurse, how many more enslaved people they could produce. Yet even as they stood within this violence, Azoulay writes, the subjects of Agassiz’s images could see there was a small opening: the photographs could capture not their inferiority but their equality, their humanity. “Photography subverted Agassiz’s presumption,” Azoulay writes. Rather than documenting the sub-humanity of the enslaved, the images document the inhumanity of the owners.

We are accountable to one another, responsible for what the camera lets us see.This responsibility, for Azoulay, is not abstract. Photographers and people who have let themselves be photographed assume that someday people will see their images and do something in response to what they see, she argues. They imagined you, their future viewer, hovering above them at the moment the picture was taken, and you must live up to their expectations. Azoulay began working on the book in the fall of 2000, at the beginning of the Palestinian uprising known as the second intifada; in the introduction, she writes that “observing the unbearable sights presented in photographs from the Occupied Territories” formed the main motivation for her writing. In some ways, the heartbeat animating “The Civil Contract” is the obligation that Azoulay feels to restore citizenship to “dispossessed citizens” and her hope that photography might play a crucial role in this work.

Images can transform the world, she argues, and the only reason they haven’t yet is because we don’t know how to look at them. The problem isn’t images; it’s us.

Suddenly, every question that seemed important to me felt beside the point. Azoulay, a curator, filmmaker, and professor at Brown, is not interested in viewers’ emotional responses to images of suffering. It’s not empathy she’s after; she wants action.

Do these images harm their subjects? Is it an ethical violation to make a photograph of suffering beautiful? Do I have a right to look at other people’s pain?

Reading the book, I was reminded of “Photography’s Other Histories,” a collection of essays edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson. In the introduction, Pinney rethinks the long-held belief in the indexicality of photographs: the idea that photographs have a natural, even physical, relationship with their referents, and are thus somehow truer or more accurate than other forms of representation.

the invention of the camera was not merely a technological leap, the introduction of a new machine. Rather, it was the “invention of a new encounter.” Cameras allow ordinary people to take pictures of other ordinary people, and they also allow ordinary people to take pictures of dictators and fascists and states committing violence. “Photography reorganized what was accessible to the gaze,” she writes. It gave people the chance to share their visual field with one another, to see more than they could see alone, to be in otherwise unreachable times and places. Azoulay calls photographs “transit visas” and insists that the camera grants a kind of citizenship that transcends borders.

voyeurs

privacy

empathy

Back in Chicago, Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, received his body and decided to have an open-casket funeral. “Let the people see what I’ve seen,” she told the funeral-home owner. On the day of the funeral, thousands of mourners lined up in the streets near the Roberts Temple Church of God, waiting for hours to reach the casket. Inside, people shrieked, wailed, and fainted. They were unprepared for what they saw: Till’s right eye was missing and his face was disfigured beyond recognition. Photographs were taken, and the black press disseminated the image of Till’s mutilated corpse far outside of Chicago, making Till’s death a national story. In the years that followed, many civil-rights activists would say that Till’s murder had been what spurred them to join the movement.

Over the past two years, as videos of black men being killed by police became national news with terrible frequency, I took a similar position. "Why should we look at these videos?" I wondered. The facts of these killings should have been enough to spark outrage and action. Were we becoming inured to seeing black suffering and death? But Diamond Reynolds’s act of heroism, and the conversation it prompted, made me reconsider my stance.In the days after Castile’s death, I was listening to NPR’s “Code Switch” podcast and heard a reporter’s interview with a man named Joe Jones, an African-American resident of Dallas. Jones said that, after Castile’s death, his conversations with white acquaintances had been different from those he had had after past incidents of police violence. Jones believed that those who had previously been willing to accept violence as “just a natural part of policing” had begun to “feel and empathize in a way that" Jones had "never seen before.” Perhaps it was that Reynolds and her four-year-old child had been present in the car with Castile, Jones said, or that Castile had a permit to carry the gun he had told the officer was in the car with them. “Folks who I’d never seen sympathize with a young black man who’d been shot by a cop were able to say, for the first time, ‘I can see myself in that position,’ ” Jones said.

Mamie Till Bradley and Diamond Reynolds both shared their sorrow with the world. They asked onlookers to view the bodies of two black men and see a son, a brother, a boyfriend, a loved one. Looking is hard. It shakes us and haunts us, and it comes with responsibilities and risks. But, by allowing us all to look, Bradley and Reynolds offered us real opportunities for empathy. Bradley’s moral courage galvanized a generation of civil-rights activists. We have yet to see how far Reynolds’s bravery will take us.

Joe Jones, an African-American resident of Dallas. Jones said that, after Castile’s death, his conversations with white acquaintances had been different from those he had had after past incidents of police violence. Jones believed that those who had previously been willing to accept violence as “just a natural part of policing” had begun to “feel and empathize in a way that" Jones had "never seen before.” Perhaps it was that Reynolds and her four-year-old child had been present in the car with Castile, Jones said, or that Castile had a permit to carry the gun he had told the officer was in the car with them. “Folks who I’d never seen sympathize with a young black man who’d been shot by a cop were able to say, for the first time, ‘I can see myself in that position,’ ” Jones said. Reynolds’s courageous act helped make this possible. She had “let the people see what I've seen,” as Mamie Till Bradley had put it.

Back in Chicago, Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, received his body and decided to have an open-casket funeral. “Let the people see what I’ve seen,” she told the funeral-home owner. On the day of the funeral, thousands of mourners lined up in the streets near the Roberts Temple Church of God, waiting for hours to reach the casket. Inside, people shrieked, wailed, and fainted. They were unprepared for what they saw: Till’s right eye was missing and his face was disfigured beyond recognition. Photographs were taken, and the black press disseminated the image of Till’s mutilated corpse far outside of Chicago, making Till’s death a national story. In the years that followed, many civil-rights activists would say that Till’s murder had been what spurred them to join the movement.

"Why should we look at these videos?" I wondered. The facts of these killings should have been enough to spark outrage and action. Were we becoming inured to seeing black suffering and death? But Diamond Reynolds’s act of heroism, and the conversation it prompted, made me reconsider my stance.

My concern was that, if we merely looked at photographs of lynchings, we risked being complicit in those terrible acts, in their attempts to rob their victims not just of life but also of dignity, honor, and, above all, privacy. I worried that we couldn’t help but be voyeurs, observing spectacles rather than bearing witness to atrocities.

But, by allowing us all to look, Bradley and Reynolds offered us real opportunities for empathy.

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People in power appeared to understand. In the mid-nineties, urban planners, architects, economists, transportation consultants, real-estate experts, and government wonks collaborated on a renovation strategy for the Ferry Building. The first floor, they decided, should mix commercial space and travel concourses. The top would remain offices. In between would be public space, a foyer looking out over the water. This vision was reiterated in the port’s immense Waterfront Land Use Plan, adopted in 1997, which aimed to create an “outdoor living room.” As part of the plan, the Ferry Building would have “activities available at different price levels” and no “conventional shopping center or tourist-oriented retail.”By 1998, the concept had begun, quietly, to change. Four developers submitted plans focussed on making the bottom floor what one reporter called a “global marketplace.” The winning proposal included high-end food shops, restaurants, and more than a hundred and fifty thousand square feet of premium office space. Commercial imperatives took hold. “If you made artisan cheese, you didn’t want to share a space with a low-quality bread shop,” one of the building’s architects explained. As the value of the complex rose, its ownership travelled among private hands. Last year, its current owner, the multinational Blackstone Group, announced that it was trying to sell off the remaining five decades of the master lease for an estimated three hundred million dollars; so far, there has been no sale.FacebookTwitterEmailShoppingThe nineties were not the first time that California’s public resources flowed into the private sector. But the decade marked a turn. Power, as never before, rested with people who had come of age after the atomization of American culture: the boomers, with their vapors of radical individualism, and the my-way-oriented Generation X. While the Ghirardelli Square model of public-private development had emerged from integrative pluralism, the Ferry Building, like the Sea Ranch, evolved to gratify a new and widespread tribal life-style ideal

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A San Franciscan era ended for my family recently. Pat died in 2011, when I was twenty-seven and finding my life as a writer in the magazines she’d once taken as dispatches from somewhere far away. Menchu, after a stretch of wheelchair naps and nonagenarian dementia, died two winters ago: less a hard event, it seemed, than a final crossing onto the dream river that had carried her from a torched house in steamy Manila to a living room in California. Only days after her death, across the bay, Steve lost his sight. His eyes swelled, as if afflicted by allergy, and wouldn’t open. When my siblings and I went to visit him in December, he was propped in a chair, his hair combed with a neatness that it never had when he combed it himself. The lawn outside was rich with California winter light—close, peach-colored, and thick. Since he could no longer read, we had brought him a Discman and audiobooks. We asked what kind of material he wanted next.Steve pursed his lips and thought for a long time. “Aviation,” he said at last: a dream of somewhere different and new.

To have grown up through San Francisco’s recent history is to be haunted by the visions of progressivism that did not end up where they were supposed to, that did not think far enough ahead and skidded past the better world they planned.

It was midwinter—not long after the grim, cold two-week stretch of libraries and nothingness before finals. A friendly guy who’d always had his door open in the staircase to my freshman room had just put up a novelty Web site, The Facebook, where you could list your favorite movies and “poke” people from class: a procrastinatory toy less onerous and clogged than e-mail. Harvard, once sharply class-channelled, was determined to remake itself as an affinity community, and The Facebook, though mildly subversive, fit that mold; it was ours, and, unlike the crowded Friendster and MySpace, private, fenced in. I don’t think it occurred to us—except maybe to one of us—that clannish group identity, the romance of people who think that they have found one another against conspiring odds, was the great ordering force of the new global century, and an endlessly iterable one at that.

The same is true elsewhere, of course. Kids born tomorrow in much of New York City will grow up in an unbroken maze of multimillion-dollar homes atop multimillion-dollar homes atop enlightened eateries. The people they meet in the street will be increasingly indistinguishable from the sorts who show up to visit at their parents’ houses. Whether they will notice is another matter: on the digital platforms where they’ll live much of their lives, these children will themselves be further funnelled, selection toward selection, like toward like.

A year or so earlier, Joe had shyly shuffled up to me with a question. His sartorial clock had stopped around the time his daughters left home. He wore bolos and flannel shirts and polyester pants. “So,” he’d said timidly, knitting his brows. “Have you decided what kind of business you want to go into?”I was his first grandchild. I hadn’t said then what I knew already, which was that I wouldn’t end up going into any kind of business, that I couldn’t find the appeal in the life he’d chased. That my goal was to get far from this. In Redwood City, in the summer, the sycamores dry and the grass bakes to a sweet hay smell, and the glaring sun and the tidy corners of the lawns can give you headaches through car windows in midafternoon. My grandfather had spent years inside a nightmare in the hope of bridging the great distance to this heaven. It mortified me to admit that I wanted something else.American opportunity is notoriously a path of unequal resistance. Test scores track with parental income; Zip Codes predict life expectancies. What these data do not capture is the fortuity and betrayal even in the smooth progress we seek. We say, We’re doing something for our children and our children’s children. We say, We want to give our kids the things we didn’t have. But every palace is someone’s prison; every era’s victory the future’s baseline for amendment. Our children and our children’s children: they will leave our dreams behind.

tribe, to hold its place, needs private history, turf, and a vision of the outside world. What came down to me as family habit started with a tie-dyed generation lounging on those heated floors. This crowd preached love and—in defiance of the old ways—unconstrained togetherness. Isenberg’s analysis, however, suggests that the children of this era undid much of the urban pluralism that their stodgier precursors had wrought. If Ghirardelli Square epitomized collaborative and participatory urban planning, the Sea Ranch, a hundred miles up the coast, helped presage its demise. The site was fifty-two hundred surf-sprayed coastal acres. In the mid-sixties, it opened as an unincorporated community designed by much of Ghirardelli’s cross-disciplinary crew. While the challenge in San Francisco had been to weave a modernist plaza into an old waterfront, the task at the Sea Ranch was to blend a modernist community into the moody bluffs: another place touted as being for the public benefit but actually conceived through private development.One of the Sea Ranch’s key designers was the graphic artist Barbara Stauffacher, who had made Ghirardelli Square’s signage. She created the Sea Ranch logo—two waves curling upward, like horns—and improvised the geometric, Pop-influenced murals that are its most distinctive feature. But Stauffacher came to hate the Sea Ranch. Individual properties sold for up to forty thousand dollars per acre. She began to worry that she’d participated in a profiteering land grab under the pretext of environmental custodianship. Returning from the Sea Ranch worksite, she later wrote, she experienced an urge to stop at “any bar along the highway not designed in good taste, not exclusive, not an enclave of the rich.”The Sea Ranch tracks a quiet shift in the postwar Bay Area dream. A decade earlier, the local social project had been to break out of a shell of hardened class and power and, buoyed by private interests, to create a fluid space that was at once civic, commercial, and social: the Ghirardelli model. By the late sixties, San Francisco and the nation had embraced an ideal of an open society, but hippies increasingly dealt with hippies, and Sea Ranchers believed so deeply in their new life that they put their savings behind it: a market was made. People like my grandparents kept entertaining the cosmopolitan crowd that they’d assembled years earlier, but local cosmopolitanism had changed. A Latino community was growing in the Mission. Industrial business was leaving the city. Once, private developers like Bill Roth had worked in good faith to support bottom-up planning. The private-ownership model now held as good faith started to seep out.

Rather than replacing a collapsed freeway along the bay, the city built waterside plazas. Downtown arteries became boulevards traced by Canary Island palms. The city eventually commissioned a sculpture of a giant foot, to mark the reclaimed “foot of Market Street”: a nexus of the flush, new, knowing Embarcadero.

Their house became a hub for people who, a generation earlier, might not have mixed. Some were from the old labor circle or a new Unitarian Universalist one, for whom my grandfather had designed a church. Antiquarian book dealers came by, and musicians in Zen-style robes, and the younger Oppenheimer brother.

William M. Roth, was persuaded to buy the plot instead. Rather than simply hiring an architect, Roth solicited ideas from real-estate brokers, landscape architects, and preservationists. He commissioned one architecture firm to draw up a plan for Ghirardelli Square, and then, like a movie producer polishing a screenplay, called in others to do subsequent drafts of buildings. Everybody’s style became a little cramped. And yet the messy pluralism forced differently minded people to work through one another’s sensibilities. Isenberg sees similar approaches in the Embarcadero Center (a multilevel commercial complex, monolithic at first but customized through collaboration with its tenants) and the Crown Zellerbach Building (the city’s first International Style tower, with a garden below).

In “Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay,” the historian Alison Isenberg points to a shift around this time in the way San Francisco practiced its urban renewal. Instead of being designed from on high, in the style of Robert Moses in New York, the postwar city grew largely through collaborative planning. This didn’t mean that messy neighborhoods were left alone to find their internal order (as in Jane Jacobs’s preservationist ideal) but that artists, property managers, activists, and others all got involved. “People who are elsewhere peripheral and invisible in the history of urban design are here networked through the center,” Isenberg writes.

At the moment of my grandparents’ marriage, the Bay Area was in the process of changing its tribal myths, tilting toward a fresh civic ideal. By the time their hair turned gray, a new private order, with new myths, had emerged, though San Francisco was more than ever aligned with their left politics. How this happens—how a place can break open to a new phase of social confluence and then re-sort itself, without ever changing its beliefs—is the real family story of the Bay Area over the past sixty years.

Today, as long ago, the city is in vexed thrall to a cast of fresh-made titans. Now, as before, private gifts are meant to heal the public sphere. Ed Lee, a San Francisco mayor who died in office this past December, liked to praise what he called “a new twenty-first-century philanthropy movement”: the local gentry stepping in to modernize the city.

They ultimately held a lot of property. They were builders for a while, and then philanthropists. My grandfather was trained in his family’s performance of a public social life for the benefit of columnists and others.

Public space was meant to come from private riches. Stern Grove: woods bought up by Sigmund Stern’s widow, and donated. (The Sterns intermarried with the Hellers, but chose better in their commercial partnerships, and went into business with a drygoods Jew named Levi Strauss.) The nearby zoo: a thirty-acre plot built up by Herbert Fleishhacker, a great-great-uncle, apparently because he had a thing for elephants.

People like my grandparents, freed from the old hierarchies, joined a growing crowd of Bay Area residents trying to build a more open society.

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