San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Packing a punch
Leave it to Rebecca Solnit to give new meaning to a familiar journalistic trope in her essay “Break the Story.”
The essay, part of her potent new collection, “Call Them by Their True Names” — and originally presented as a commencement speech for UC Berkeley journalism graduates — urges fledgling newshounds to undermine the dominant paradigm, which erases or marginalizes key players and focuses on those with power, wealth or celebrity. She cites the legions of reporters who descended on New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina but ignored violence against the most powerless victims: “killings by police and crimes by white vigilantes.” That narrative had to be shattered for the real stories to emerge.
“Every bad story is a prison,” she asserts. “Breaking the story breaks someone out of prison. It’s liberation work. It matters. It changes the world.”
Solnit, the Bay Area journalist, historian and activist, is the author of more than 20 books, including the international bestseller “Men Explain Things to Me,” which inspired the creation of the pitch-perfect verb “mansplaining,” now in the popular lexicon.
In this collection, she takes on issues as diverse — and to Solnit — as interconnected, as climate change, feminism, homelessness, the death penalty and the brutal founding of the state of California. The essays are witty, well researched, and pack a powerful political punch.
“Eight Million Ways to Belong,” is a letter
from Solnit to Donald Trump on the eve of the 2016 election: “I wonder if you have ever actually explored the New York City you claim to live in . ... You talk as if should lots of undocumented immigrants and Muslims show up here, there’ll be trouble. I have news for you: they’re here, and it seems to be working out rather well.”
Her cutting critique of the candidate is also a paean to the city where the speakers of 800 languages (in the borough of Queens alone!) “make a conversation in which many languages belong, and a place of refuge.”
Preaching to the choir is not such a bad thing, she argues, in an eponymous essay. And though you may assume you are in that choir — sharing her premises and reading the same newspapers — her unique reflections provide fresh insight.
For example, she writes in “The Monument Wars,” an essay about the fate of Confederate statues, “A city is a book we read by wandering its streets, a text that favors one version of history and suppresses others, enlarges your identity or reduces it … depending on who you are.”
I never quite thought of a city that way, but I will from now on, thanks to Solnit, who also created innovative atlases of San Francisco, New Orleans and New York City.
Though Solnit is unstinting in her critique of the president — skewering him as a “reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, infinitely vulgar, climate changedenying, white nationalist misogynist” — she saves her harshest reviews for “naïve cynics,” charging that armchair quarterbacking leads to passivity and defeat. “Most new ideas begin in the margins or shadows and move toward the center,” she writes in “Twenty Million Missing Storytellers,” encouraging readers to keep the faith despite setbacks and ubiquitous naysayers.
It is, in fact, her fierce exhortation of hope that binds together these essays. “In Praise of Indirect Consequences” describes hope as “a belief that what we do might matter.” That essay disabuses readers, who may be activists like Solnit herself, of the premise that the effectiveness of a movement can be measured by its immediate impact. Martin Luther King Jr. said that the Montgomery Bus Boycott was influenced by Gandhi’s protest against the Raj, who in turn said he was inspired by British suffragists who occupied Parliament for the right to vote. “We are carried along by the heroines and heroes who came before and opened the doors of possibility and imagination,” Solnit writes.
A few of the essays, especially those about the 2016 election, seem dated, as so much has happened since. When you come across one of those, do not be deterred — they are mere bumps in the road of this otherwise refreshing and insightful collection.
One of the strongest essays, “Death by Gentrification,” details the 2014 police killing of 28-year-old Alex Nieto on San Francisco’s Bernal Hill. Nieto had spent his life in that traditional working-class neighborhood, which had recently been discovered by tech workers. A former teen counselor in the local community center, Nieto was a college student, part-time security guard and Buddhist. He had never been arrested and had no police record. But one March evening, a couple of new residents walking their dog thought he looked suspicious. One of them called 911, reporting that a young man might have a gun. After that call, Solnit writes, Nieto “had about five minutes more to live.” Four police officers ascended the hill and killed Nieto in a barrage of bullets.
“What’s clear in the case of Nieto’s death,” Solnit argues, “is that a series of white men perceived him as more dangerous than he was, and he died of it.”
Solnit digs deep beneath this tragic slaying to examine the changing demographics of San Francisco. At times when newcomers arrive in a flood, like the Gold Rush or the rapid influx of affluent tech workers, they tend to “scour out what was there before.”
What was there before was Alex Nieto’s family as well as thousands of Latino and African American families who were evicted, priced out and displaced. Many local mainstays like bookstores and nonprofits also disappeared. The sense of community was eroded. “How many threads could you pull out before the social fabric disintegrated?” Solnit asks.
Most San Franciscans would agree that this latest wave of gentrification has been divisive and harsh, but is it, as Solnit attests, fatal?
The memorial to Alex Nieto on Bernal Hill, lovingly tended by his family with native plants and colorful cloth flowers, and a growing cairn of memorial stones placed by neighbors, answers that question with a haunting silence.
Elaine Elinson is the coauthor of “Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California.” Email: books@ sfchronicle.com