San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Racial unity event in S.F. draws crowd in solidarity
Two oranges. A bag of rice. A glossy red envelope.
Betty Hunter beamed as she pulled each item out of a black canvas bag — one of 347 “solidarity kits” that the San Francisco Human Rights Commission handed out Saturday afternoon in Civic Center Plaza.
“These kits are really intentional — it’s not just a swag bag,” said Hunter, who serves as the commission’s educational equity liaison. She pointed to the kit’s other contents, including free tickets to the Asian Art Museum and a picture book with a cultural theme. The one she held, “Grandfather Tang’s Story,” showed a young girl and an old man on the cover.
The commission was cohosting the Campaign for Solidarity, which drew more than 100 people to Civic Center and was intended to ease friction between members of different communities.
A new survey from the Public Policy Institute of California shows that half of the state’s Asian American residents think race relations are worse than they were a year ago, compared with 48% of white residents and 44% of Black residents who say the same thing.
“We can’t allow influences in this country to continue to divide us,” said Jon Osaki, executive director of the Japanese Community Youth Council. His group was among several that helped put together the event.
A string of crimes against Asian Americans had left residents of San Francisco and neighboring cities bewildered, as they also witnessed sporadic bursts of violence throughout the nation. Last month a gunman shot eight people — including six women of Asian descent — outside Atlanta. On Thursday, another mass shooting at a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis killed eight people, at least four of whom were members of the Sikh community.
“We can’t address the pandemic of COVID19 without addressing the pandemic of racism, of ageism, of genderism, of all these different spectrums of ‘isms,’ ” Human Rights Commission director Sheryl Davis told the crowd, speaking through a megaphone on Civic Center lawn.
Davis said the commission is approaching racial solidarity as though it were a form of retail politics, acknowledging that the best way to reach people is not by preaching in abstract concepts, but by holding events in public squares, handing out gift bags and — given the constraints of COVID19 — gathering on Zoom. The commission has held a series of public meetings over the past several weeks for members of the Black and Asian and
Pacific Islander communities.
Saturday’s event was part of that initiative, called Stand Together SF. After the speeches, people sat in a drum circle, banging djembes, while members of the Japanese Community Youth Council folded origami hearts and threw them into a bucket that soon overflowed with paper creations. Some attendees sported Black Lives Matter shirts.
Grassroots organizations donated many of the prizes, all displayed on tables beneath the plaza’s canopy of London plane trees. People lined up there to assemble the kits, each one an illustration of the cultural patchwork of San Francisco.
Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who represents the Outer Mission and Excelsior areas, had just arrived from a similar event at Merced Heights Playground.
“I just want people to know this isn’t a oneday thing,” Safaí said. “It’s a shift in the culture.”