By Emma Welty, HAC Outreach Administrative Assistant
What about our work at HAC do our clients find valuable? Is it the ca$h value of benefits received at the beginning of every month? Or perhaps the security that dollar bills purchase (a safe place to stay, somewhere to sleep)? Maybe it’s the second or third degree benefits, like having survival needs guaranteed (food, water, utilities, etc.) and having more time for passions or interests. Perhaps it’s the stuff of nonmonetary value – things like the satisfaction of being able to buy your grandchild a birthday gift.
Recognizing the value in HAC’s work is important for a variety of reasons. Endless tomes have been written on “value” as a theoretical and practical concept, but for our purposes we don’t need a Ph.D. to develop a basic understanding of the effect HAC is having within our community. Instead, we can try to build a picture of our impact from some basic common sense, along with knowledge of concepts like autonomy, power, relationships, and interdependency.
As all artists know, your art is in part determined by your material resources. Will you be using oils or watercolors? Will you be painting on canvas or paper? These combinations of material factors impact the range of possible artistic creation. It’s the same with life. Before we construct sociological conclusions, we should try to understand the material background of any given situation to identify causal factors at play in determining social outcomes.
If we want to understand the world, we need to ask: what historical factors made “X or Y event” probable. Having a clear picture of our relationships with the world and our effect within it is essential for moving through the world intentionally, with a harm reduction mentality.
Without historical background, statistics can leave us vulnerable to a variety of false narratives.
We can begin with some statistics: approximately 55% of HAC’s clients self-identify as Black and/or African American. Around 84% of our clients are nonwhite. According to the 2022 U.S. census, Oakland’s Black population accounted for approximately 21% of the total population (a nearly 22% decrease since 1990)1, and Black people accounted for just over 5% of the total population throughout the state of California. These numbers certainly paint a picture. However, without historical background they sit decontextualized from causal factors, leaving us vulnerable to a variety of false narratives often proliferated by bad actors, who may use statistics to deliberately mislead or distort people’s sense of reality.
During an epidemic of disinformation, historical literacy can inoculate us and provide long-lasting ideological immunity. When it comes to anti-Blackness specifically, an honest examination of the historical record presents a serious problem for those who harbor such sentiments: does history challenge us to reflect on our beliefs/behaviors in relation to history, deny racist sentiments and preconceptions, and grow into better versions of ourselves? Or do we let that internal conflict push us towards reaction? We are all a product of our time, of history, and more specifically of modern racialized society, such that we each have internalized some of the presumptions underlying societal power dynamics.
Core Events in our Current Racial Social Landscape
An outline of some core events in the U.S. which have played a crucial role in determining our current racial social landscape provides context for this process. The historical legacy of slavery and resistance of enslaved people -> leading to the Civil War and Emancipation -> leading to Reconstruction, the formation of the KKK, and the nadir of race relations in the US -> leading to Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement -> leading to COINTELPRO and mass incarceration (i.e., “Slavery Under Another Name”) -> leading to the first Black president, the ‘08 financial crisis and the “largest transfer of Black wealth in modern history” -> leading further still towards the backlash against Critical Race Theory and the present attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion and civil rights more broadly2.
This timeline represents a violent and deliberate process of racial subjugation. It is the pretext to our regional history, with migration of Black communities to California, redlining and segregation, Black radicalism and self-defense, the Silicon Valley tech boom, gentrification and the displacement of nonwhite communities throughout the Bay Area, homelessness and poverty, the formation of nonprofits (like HAC) and community organizations seeking to stem the tide, and whatever comes next.
Reckoning with one’s complicity in a system of power and violence isn’t always an easy or comfortable experience, and we often turn to denial and away from honest self-reflection. Indeed, we can see this phenomenon unfold in-real-time, as the corporate media amplify stories of “crime”, “drugs”, and “homelessness” (completely decontextualized from history and social policy) to provoke a reactionary response. This then helps to create an environment of fear and hatred, which in turn produces the reactionary politician, who points to these distortions of history and reality, promising false “security” (a euphemism for state violence) and threatening the little real security of marginalized peoples. When we’re exposed to the bloody lessons of history, we each must confront the moral implications of attachment to constructs like “whiteness”.
When we’re exposed to the bloody lessons of history, we each must confront the moral implications of attachment to constructs like “whiteness”.
For many people, the shift to fuller awareness is easy enough – for example, if your reading of history instills lessons that approximate your daily experience with power, then the lessons themselves may just result in validation and a stronger sense of the social moral landscape and yourself within it. However, if we’re on the other side of things (i.e., an attachment to whiteness) then under the right circumstances exposure to history, or exposure to anti-whiteness, can challenge our very sense of self and what is real. So-called “radical awakenings” are often described as a kind of identity crisis or a revelatory spiritual experience. Thankfully, the past decade or more has seen the parallel development of millions of people acquiring historical and political literacy and choosing to deny space in their hearts for power, hatred, and fear.
Historical background is important because without it we are vulnerable to the false premises underlying and driving power and inequity in society. As the late historian Howard Zinn once said, “If you don’t know history, it is as if you were born yesterday … and anybody … in a position of power can tell you anything.”3 As an organization providing direct services to an historically marginalized population, it is HAC’s responsibility to know this historical context and to understand how it directly factors into the lives of our clients and the role/impact of our work. It isn’t enough to be well-intentioned, we must also be well-informed.
Without this awareness, our sense of the work will always be malformed and the sensitivity which follows from awareness never develops, making it more likely we will cause harm. For instance, the idea of “marginalized people” in the minds of many is synonymous with “pitiful” or even “undignified”. This is a mistake that follows from a misunderstanding of autonomy: while the brief history outlined above provides some context for an understanding of race and homelessness in the U.S., it does not adequately capture the full scope of human autonomy, in which subjugated peoples both suffer from poverty and destitution while also finding unique forms of meaning and fulfillment from the social relations they’ve created.
Autonomy of Historically Marginalized People
One way to think of autonomy is to view it dimensionally, as existing on different realms of human “being”, in relation to every autonomous entity. Creating a coherent, likeable, and fully realized version of ourselves from the pieces of possibilities scattered all about us is hard, especially when the world is hard [to you] too, but I’ve found we can do a lot with a little. All the most meaningful, valuable, and fulfilling parts of my life were only realized because of other people. Our lives are just made richer and more full by those around us!
For HAC staff and clients, our autonomous possibilities are directly contingent on the historical and social contexts in which we exist. For staff, having the security of employment AND doing meaningful work provides us with opportunities to engage with the world and grow into fuller versions of ourselves. Similarly, for our clients, having additional resources allows them to do the same, but within the unique social context of their lives. Not having to hustle 24/7 to survive means they can do more of what they’d like, which is really a big part of what life ought to be all about. While our work is limited in scope, the significance of our work can be felt in the voices of our clients, who we stand to learn a thing or two about the world from and who by merit of their standing pose an ever-open question about our relationships to social problems, our commitment to concepts like freedom, and our value as an org in the community.