MUNI Diaries brings us a pretty intense story from the 22:
…A few seconds later, these guys walked around to the front of the bus shelter where I was standing. There were three of them. Three Hispanic guys who spoke only Spanish. They were all over the place. One guy was even wandering in the street. I noticed that each of them had a bottle of tequila in their hand.
Suddenly, a black guy came out of nowhere and started speaking broken Spanish to these guys. The black guy walked in the street a bit and around the bus shelter, in plain sight of me, but out of view of the cameras located at the intersection. I’m not sure what triggered it, but one of the Spanish-speaking guys must have pissed off the black guy. This black guy was a young kid with nothing to lose. He seemed to be by himself and started talking mad shit to these guys in Spanish. It almost seemed like he was trying to egg them on into a fight. As soon as the black guy walked right in front of me, he lifted up his sweatshirt to show the fact that he had a gun in his drawers. Everyone standing in the bus shelter bolted out of the area, including myself. The other guys saw the gun, but continued talking back to the black guy. It was like the threat of the black guy having a gun and using it didn’t even phase them. These guys were obviously intoxicated.
So I suppose the narrative voice here is by default a white person?
“It was like the threat of the black guy having a gun and using it didn’t even phase them.” Well, yes, if you hadn’t qualified “has a gun” with “black guy” then I would not have been scared.
This was posted because of the writer’s fantastic reliance on the passive voice and complete inability to employ brevity, right? Seriously, what is this blog trying to communicate? The woe and struggle for gentrification?
what does this have to do with “gentrification”?
One possible response: holy shit, people with knives and guns running amok in the streets and on public transit. This is crazy and we should all be making a concerted effort to remedy this situation.
Insane response: tut-tut, the use of race in describing the scene displays a clear racial bias. Also the writing style employed was amateur. The author is probably so evil that they even pay a mortgage.
Agreed.
You know how people complain about the lack of representation of their race in the media? How images like the one above are constantly propagated by the media? There could be a thousand Muni stories on this blog: stories of love, heartache, loss, hilarity…and this is the one you choose. All of it might be true. It might also be true that after the big world cup qualifier there was vomit and piss in the streets. It may be true that China Fun Fast Food serves up diarrhea on a stick. But if this is all you have to say about the all the other people in this neighborhood, then it’s not very multidimensional is it? If someone who didn’t know about this neighborhood were to stumbled upon this blog then they wouldn’t even begin to understand about the complexity, the beauty and the ugliness that is this little corner of our world.
So far in the last three days people like me (your reader)look like a bunch of pinata smacking, knife wielding, street pissing vomiting drunks.
Not cool and I am just not down.
Sigh.
Screw it. I’m out.
I suppose you are right; there is nothing beautiful about artistic “shitty kitties” and dogs welcomed into our neighborhood bars, the community openly embracing a Tamale Lady, tasty organic ice cream, mapping people’s emotions as they walk around the neighborhood, 1st graders making maps of our hood out of milk cartons, juggling knives and mathematical street art.
Kevin you savage racist jerk. Capp Street is clearly getting to you.
“When the bus finally arrived, everyone charged the bus. Usually people wait for the other people to get off the bus, but not this time.”
This person regularly picks up the 22 at 16th and Mission? Not only is that a scary-ass bus stop, but during peak hours (i.e., 4-8 M-F), getting on and off at that stop is all shoving and elbows. Boarders shove the disembarkers aside at the back door, and the front door is a bottleneck. It is the worst. But then, the 22 is generally terrible.
just to be clear, this entry was authored and posted on Muni Diaries by Kathleen Neves (Cielo Gold) — not Kevin or MissionMission.
but since you are speaking on/of generalizations, Meave, im not sure how this aggregated post on your blog is any different: http://vegansaurus.com/post/122196267/soy-makes-you-gay ??
that is all, carry on.
We posted a link to an article about one of the most ridiculous claims about the effects of soy products on humans. With some sarcasm. Did the sarcasm not come across to you, or am I missing something else?
The amount of comments here is insane aquarium! Go Mission Mission! I can’t even begin to read all of them right now because I have to not get fired but just to respond to this Plug1 fella:
Whoa there, dude. The name of the post on Vegansaurus is clearly a joke. The article is funny because you don’t often get to see such an amazingly ignorant bit of commentary. And this is the internet we’re talking about! That’s saying something! It’s both super ugly gay-bashing AND mis-informed soy-bashing (read: anti-vegetarian), all wrapped up with a more than a sprinkle of SUPER FUCKING CRAZY.
Did you read it? You should! It’s hilarious in its stupidity.
Anyway, to bring the Vegansaurus post up in this thread…you’re just missing the point, that’s all.
Okay, carry on!
Just to be clear, I’ve tried hard to make this a dialogue.
Name calling is too easy.
hi everybody, mission resident and Muni Diaries co-founder/editor jeff here. i thought i’d weigh in on this conversation. just for the record, at Muni Diaries we post people’s stories about things that happen on or around the bus. our criteria is that we do not publish incitements to violence or hate speech. in fact, we’ve deleted a few submissions and comments to that effect. this post from kathleen (whom we do not “know” in the traditional sense of knowing) is a story told from her perspective. we assume she used descriptors like “black” and “hispanic” mostly to identify/differentiate characters in her story. we don’t see it as degrading in any way. just a story, told from one’s perspective of the world. my own story, told from my perspective, might not include those adjectives. but we respect the writer’s voice as much as possible. that’s all. good day!
a ha! just as i suspected.
I think people are getting bogged down in the specific and missing the bigger picture and the point I was trying to make. My argument was in reference to repeated postings of this ilk that when compounded serve to paint a pretty one sided and slanted picture.
But it’s funny you should post Jeff because I actually have a date tonight to go to your event at the Make Out Room and have a pretty good story of my own involving a VERY large potted plant and a homeless dude trying to care for it.
And by the way, I didn’t wake up this morning and decide to have a diatribe against one person. And I apologize to all the readers for how much space this has taken up. But I started noticing a pattern of posting that really started to rub me the wrong way so I thought I’d speak up.
I’m a frequent contributor to this blog, and I thought I was a part of this little community but lately I’m not so sure.
thanks for the explanation.
but i still don’t get it. which ilk? snarky joke references? non inclusion? racism? piss and puke? “gentrification”?
not surprising i dont get it though, i can be kind of dense.
I’d say it’s a little bit of everything you’ve listed. Sorry if that’s not helpful. I guess above all it’s a certain mean spiritedness, and a lack of balance. One tamale lady posting doesn’t quite counter balance knife fights, vomiting and public urination- especially if this is all that will be gleaned from this site about Latinos.
I don’t know, call me naive and wide eyed but I after 12 years here I am still just so filled with a love and wonder for this place- warts and all. But recently I think we’ve been focusing too much on the warts (especially on one particular segment of our population) and have forgotten to stand back and look at the overall beauty of this place.
that’s a thoughtful response. thank you.
but the part i still don’t get….what’s the “particular segment”?
Well to be perfectly blunt, I mean non-whites.
It’s kind of entertaining that just because I refer to a character in my story as being a black man with a gun (true story) and three guys speaking Spanish as being Mexican whom which one of them pulled out a knife on the bus sitting right next to me (true story as well), now this makes me some sort of racist and I get accused of racial profiling.
Like I said in my comment on Muni Diaries, white, black, red, brown, man, woman….anytime a person pulls out a knife or gun, I am going to be just as scared and surprised. I was simply using the men’s race to help the identify the different characters in the story. It was never my intention to racially profile anyone.
I think maybe you should read the whole thread very carefully and in it’s entirety.
I think the issue is not of racial profiling, but that the character’s race was not relevant to the story.
If all the characters in your story where white, would you mention that?
Would you have said this white man with a gun?
“three guys speaking Spanish as being Mexican”
How do you know that the spanish speakers where Mexican and not Guatemalan or Salvadorian?
Why didn’t you mention the race of the bus driver?
Jeezus. Stop being so touchy. If she had mentioned the race of the bus driver you would be freaking about that, too.
It’s less the fact that race was mentioned, but maybe more of lines like, “This black guy was a young kid with nothing to lose.”
Where does this come from?
Maybe I’m just offended by how the post is so poorly written.
I thought your story was great and really appreciated it. I love living in the Mission but let’s not try to pretend it doesn’t have some rough edges. I think Mission Mission does a good job of showing the full spectrum of life in the Mission. (and the comments section shows just how hyper-sensitive some people can be).
I’ve struggled with MuniDiaries posts generally for the same reason as Lindylula; it’s not a specific terminology or subject matter issue, it’s more that posts reflect a sense of the stunned sensibilities of people who are on the outside looking in at the city. People who are more righteously indignant about the way others conduct themselves in the public space, instead of viewing the use of public space as a symbiotic thing we’re all part of. And the negativity grates a bit, when it focuses not on real systemic failings and their solutions, but the cosmetic aspects of situations the authors seem to fail to really feel the root causes of. I think some of it is a perspective difference between transient dabblers in San Francisco and people for whom it’s just home. When it’s just part of long-term existence, weird shit on Muni really ain’t no thang.
Lindylula, there’s a blog I like, http://thedeucedeuce.blogspot.com/, that is a little more of a love affair.
Thanks for the heads up. I think you’ve been able to pinpoint my argument way more succinctly, and more eloquently than I’ve managed.
I would also like to point out a book by a guy named Erick Lyle called On the Lower Frequencies. By far one of the best books I’ve read about San Francisco’s class struggle in the Mission and Tenderloin during the dot com era. Absolutely beautifully and poetically written, by a guy who has been kicked around by the city and still refuses to give her up.
i think you’re making some pretty broad assumptions and judgments when you say “transient dabblers in San Francisco and people for whom it’s just home”.
just because someone doens’t have the same values as you, or doesn’t ascribe to the same system of rules, doesn’t make them into a “dabbler”.
there are PLENTY of people in the city and hood who skew on the “moderate” side more than the “progressive”.
change is inevitable.
Agreed. You can accept that people, having different values &c. than you, will behave differently than you in public. However, there are certain social guidelines that are not racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, &c. that the majority of us must follow so that society maintains itself. Such as: not carrying weapons on buses; not threatening others with weapons on buses.
Your reaction to such events will differ, as I said, based on your own background, but in this city, we ascribe to a “no public violence” rule. Objecting to that is not out of line.
More generally, you can spend plenty of time here without taking public transportation, especially if you’re wealthy enough to have a car, and might be just as shocked as a first-timer when you finally end up on, say, an outbound 9 at 10 pm on a Thursday.
(Obviously, knives and guns and violence are real issues; wasn’t referring to CieloGold’s post specifically in last comment. Only replying to Lindylula.)
Regardless of the character’s skin color and ethnicity, did you miss the fact that the characters in my story were bearing guns and knives on public transportation and exposing them at will to innocent bystanders? That is the point I was really trying to make here in telling my story.
I understand your point and your story – shocking times -but the way you wrote it perpetuates racial prejudices. There are several ways you could have referred to the person (how about the “kid”?) but you used “black guy” 7 times in one paragraph. How often have you read a story where it said “white guy” that repeatedly?
I know this is just a blog posting and isn’t usually held to the same writing standards as professionals. It’s your blog – write whatever the hell you want. But if you are trying to appeal to a wider audience it would behoove you to educate yourself about unconscious prejudices. We all have these by the way – if anyone thinks they’re not prejudiced they’re kidding themselves.
that’s fine, then you should not distract your readers with words that are not relevant to your story.
With all due respect born and raised,I don’t think this is the point or the spirit of the message I was trying to convey, nor was the criticism directed at Cielo. To be honest, I might have told that story the same way. The argument I had was with certain repeated, reoccuring remarks and posts on the blog and the style in which it’s being curated. Have a look. I’d love your opinion.
I think it is safe to say other people have different issues with this post.
Point taken.
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