As I often profess, both verbally and in writing, I love San Francisco. I love the weather, the hills, the food, and basically everything. There are parts of SF, though, that make me extremely, well, uncomfortable. I can’t give you a more specific word because I haven’t yet decided on which specific emotions are being activated. All I know is I am often taken to places I rather wouldn’t go, and it happens a lot.

While I can’t yet explain the ‘effect’ I can tell you the ‘cause’ – San Francisco’s enormous population of homeless people. Having grown up in the suburbs, the transition to the radical contrasts of extravagant wealth and desperate poverty has not been easy. I’m continually roped into awkward interactions due to my making eye contact or some sort of acknowledgement, being asked for money, and making up a lie about how I can’t give anything. I do also occasionally give spare change or even cash to panhandlers, but the pure joy and sense of philanthropy I once felt has transformed into self-reflection as to why I gave money to one over the other, how helpful my donation really is, whether I’m part of the problem, and what the problem is to begin with.

No other situation throws me into a spiral of troubled, introspective, and often self-depreciative reflection as interaction with one of SF’s countless black homeless people. To begin, some homework for my fellow San Franciscans (whether or not you’re black, but especially if you are): next time you’re on a crowded bus, train, or sidewalk in SF, count the number of black people that seem to be of what one could consider the ‘upper class’, which is to say they aren’t driving your Uber, making your food, bussing your table, or simply homeless. Once you realize it, it is horrifying how racially stratified San Francisco, and Silicon Valley as a whole, is compared to anywhere else I’ve been. In the vast majority of situations in which I do this exercise (I just did a glance around the coffee shop on Haight that I’m writing this in) I am the only black person who cannot be considered poor. It’s sort of like kicking an anthill open, not seeing any ants for a bit, and upon spotting one, seeing thousands, just in reverse – nothing seems off when you live in blissful ignorance, but upon being cognizant everything seems really fucked up.

The lack of diversity in tech has been widely reported and is obvious and inarguable. I always maintained a positive attitude towards SF as a whole, though, because of my feeling that the city as a whole is an incredibly diverse place. In many ways it is – there is an extremely eclectic mix of Hispanics, Chinese, Japanese, white, and black people that make up the different neighborhoods. By population, I’m sure the numbers are actually pretty promising. But as an insider to what I would consider the recent influx of “new money” (which is to say that I work in tech, not that I am rich, which I am very far from being), and having now lived in both Marina and Haight Ashbury for substantial amounts of time, I will say don’t let the numbers fool you. There are basically no wealthy black people in San Francisco.

The counterpoint here is obvious – there aren’t many wealthy black people anywhere. I can’t argue with this. In Athens, GA, the average black resident was indeed poorer than the average white resident, and I would be surprised if there was any city in America in which this reality didn’t hold up. This phenomenon is not one that I am ready to attack here. What is most saddening, and what brings me back to my point, is that there are very few black people in SF that are not desperately poor. I will beat this point to death: the average black person I am exposed to in San Francisco is way, way, way poorer than everyone else I am surrounded by. It is weird, sad, and disturbing.

Zooming out a bit here. The typical response from people who have lived in SF or another big city is to ignore homeless people – just sort of tune them out and go on with your business. It is a move I know is at times necessary to live one’s life, but one which I am barely, barely starting to get the hang of and still feel is condescending and somewhat barbaric. (I worry that inevitably, once I have ensconced myself into a protective bubble of wealth and the blissful ignorance of the world’s problems which it accompanies, I will be able to keep my eyes stubbornly on my phone or the road ahead without the desperation in my periphery distracting me from self-contentedness.)

It is almost impossible to pull this off with the city’s homeless blacks. Firstly, there is a connection which I have felt with other black people in areas of very little diversity – the unspoken eye contact or ‘what up’ inverted nod when passing each other on the street. Sometimes it isn’t even that lowkey; my favorite example is a time in which I was at a bar with my girlfriend and her friend (in which it must have seemed like I was really wheeling and dealing) in which another biracial guy in the line to the bathroom went “Yo, are you mixed? I am too and it looks like you’re really killing it over there”, shook my hand, and gave me his name. While this is an extreme example, I would guess that almost all black or biracial people will tell of a sense of spoken or unspoken solidarity in areas with small black populations.

But it is this connection which really screws me over when trying to ignore black homeless people in the way that I have been taught is necessary to remain sane in San Francisco. I have received very, very negative reactions from purposefully and nervously trying to avoid the unspoken acknowledgments which I share with my fellow “upper class” black counterparts. They have ranged from irritating to scary – in an extreme case, I was walking alone in Tenderloin and followed by a homeless man asking “why you think you’re better than me?” While this again is an extreme case, I have been made feel uncomfortable almost exclusively by homeless people who are also black.

Zooming in now. What I just said is so, so fucked up. It is the kind of thought stream that makes me really hate myself sometimes. To be upset that someone is making me feel “uncomfortable” because they are voicing their frustration at my treating them like dirt (because they are worse off than me) is the kind of thing I wish to extract from my psyche. It’s the first step in the transformation into an entitled, oblivious state of mind of which the wealthy in America are sick with like a cancer. “If only those bums just went and got a job,” I might say in a few years, shuffling my feet faster on the sidewalk when I pass them and only travelling through Tenderloin in the safety of my BMW.

The sad truth is, though, that I think that way a lot these days. I am trying so, so hard to stop it, but it happens all the time. And when I notice it happening, I end up just feeling shitty about myself – bummed about what I am becoming, bummed I too am becoming obsessed with the idea of being rich and have lost the desire to make the world a better place, bummed that I may have never had it to begin with. To try to enter the world of capitalism while trying to remain sympathetic to the poor is like becoming a competitive hot dog eater without becoming fat. It is possible theoretically, but it is very, very hard. And if you truly want to become the best hot dog eater, you probably shouldn’t remain skinny to begin with.

I’ll leave you with an experience I had which truly sums up how I feel about the city. I was eating at the Subway on Van Ness and Market next to a window when a (black) homeless person came up to me on the other side of the glass. He started gesturing and staring at me, and, much like the loyal sellout which I am, I did my best to completely ignore him. He was relentless – before too long, he had made his way into the Subway, smiling at me, gesturing to signify that he liked my hair, and saying things I couldn’t understand in slurred words. The manager was quick to gently tell him to leave; I presume that most businesses have a policy of not entertaining the homeless. As it so happened, I had finished my sandwich so I was walking out as well, and, despite trying to scoot past him and into anonymity, he followed me and was immediately by my side on the street.

As he continued to talk, I began to understand him through his drawl. He began to tell me how he was once also a good looking dude and wished his dad had stayed around. He told me that shit just hadn’t worked out for him – that he was just a decent guy who was down on his luck. Bourgy James new he was just buttering me up and I waited for him to hit me for the donation request. I was actually pretty well prepped, and had he hit me right there I would have given him the “sorry, man” and walked into subway tunnel triumphant and unshaken.

What really fucked with me, though, was when he told me how proud of me he was. What? Proud of me? Of me?? The guy who was I was trying my very best to tell to fuck off was telling me he was proud of me. He said he was proud of where I’d gotten (I hadn’t told him where I’d gotten) and that I should keep it up. He said he saw some of himself in me, but I had won and he had lost.

I didn’t know what to say – the shuffle/sprint I had planned to activate at that precise moment seemed impossible and I was rooted to the ground. I was not just speechless, I was thoughtless.

Then he hit me with the sales pitch: “can you just help me out a little?” The Bourgy devil on my shoulder whispered how he’d told me so as the other shoulder was still in shock with what was occurring. Trying to compromise with both, I pulled out my wallet and tore out a 1 dollar bill and stuck it out to him. He continued “I’m just trying to get a sandwich, man, I’m so hungry… can you go maybe just buy me a sandwich over there…”

Bourgy James finally reclaimed control – hooray! Order was restored. “I’m sorry man,” I choked as my wallet shot back into my pocket, the five dollar and twenty dollar bill that were sticking out now sweetly hidden from view. He took my one dollar of charity from me without a word, silent for the first time since seeing me, as I turned around and shuffled/sprinted/trudged into the safety of the metro station, a tavern which the Muni workers kept free of the homeless and bothersome. I felt sick as I rode back to Haight Ashbury, staring at the same spot on the ceiling and wondering what the fuck had just happened.

I took a long look in the mirror that night, thinking about both nothing and everything at the same time. I wondered whether the things I thought were right were wrong, whether the goals I thought important actually trivial, whether my idea of success was actually failure. I thought about the 25 dollars in my wallet and how disgusted I felt to still have them and how proud of my having them my friend on the street was. I thought of what he was doing with my dollar, and wondered if he was still hungry.

Mostly, though, I just felt uncomfortable. I guess I will feel that way until I can tell him that I am sorry, or until I don’t feel that I am the only black person in Financial District that isn’t homeless when I walk around on lunch breaks. Which I guess means I will be uncomfortable for as long as I live and work here unless something truly dramatic happens. So the best thing is probably just not to think about it.

Right?

-James