Here’s why I voted Tuesday for a caretaker interim mayor
I’ve put off making an endorsement in the mayor’s race because I believe we need to turn this city upside down.
Behind the last mayoral administration and the one before that, there were the same handful of tech moguls and real estate billionaires who make this a city where the middle class is no longer welcome.
The policies these powerful men champion are the ones that have decimated the African American community and are doing the same to the Latino community. LGBTQ people are being pushed out in alarming numbers, and I believe Asian Americans are next.
So far, the dominant narrative about our vote for interim mayor has centered on the identity of London Breed — that an African American woman who has overcome tremendous adversity should be chosen as interim. I’m also moved tremendously by Breed’s accomplishments and by how much the African American community has spoken up to support her.
But I have to be honest: The same rich white men who steered the policies that have created the mess we are in today are firmly behind the candidacy of Breed. They have been bullying people to support the board president’s run for mayor, including threatening people’s careers if they don’t support her. The majority of your elected representatives, on both sides of the aisle, felt that we couldn’t stay silent and allow these men to continue to buy our elections.
I take identity and representation very seriously and think they are tremendously important in this mayoral race.
At this point, when the African American community has been largely displaced from San Francisco, when incarceration rates for African Americans continue to be incredibly disproportionate both locally and nationally, when our president described white supremacists as “good people,” I hear loud and clear the community members who are calling for an African American mayor to represent San Francisco.
I’ve also heard from the LGBT community how meaningful a gay mayor would be to them. Last year, 2017, was the deadliest year on record for the LGBT community in the United States, according to the Human Rights Campaign, with murders and hate crimes happening almost every week — all while our president tried to remove trans people from the military and make discriminating against LGBT people legal. And I hear the pain from our LGBT residents when they tell us that, even though we live in the gayest city in America, we’ve yet to have a gay mayor.
And my heart also goes out to the Asian Americans who just tragically lost the first Asian American mayor of a city that was founded and built on the backs of the Asian community. After 100 years of deeply racist laws, brutal attacks in Chinatown, and the rounding up of our Japanese residents into internment camps, to lose a mayor who worked so hard to correct decades of political disenfranchisement is truly heartbreaking. The Asian community has to be heard and acknowledged when it calls for an Asian American mayor.
As a straight white woman, my privilege means I’m in no way qualified to decide which of the mayoral candidates’ backgrounds makes them more deserving of the huge advantage of running while having the entire apparatus of the mayor’s office at their disposal.
I believe that the power and resources of the mayor’s office will give an insurmountable advantage to any candidate. And that would be an unethical silencing of the voters of San Francisco.
So I am going to do what I always do when I don’t know the answer to an important question: I’m going to listen to the people.
In this particular instance, listening means letting the people vote.
So on Tuesday night, I voted to support Supervisor Mark Farrell as a caretaker mayor to fill the position for the next four months. Farrell cannot run for mayor in June because he has not filed to do so.
I’m looking forward to hearing the candidates’ plans to solve the very real problems that my constituents are facing, and I wish all of the candidates luck in their mayoral campaigns.