Innocence is the Crime

A letter to my three children

                                                                                                                        May 10, 2023

Dear Sasha, Raf, and Axia,

My darling children, I’ve tried to write this letter several times and each time I’ve deleted it and started over. It’s a hard letter to write.

I have sometimes apologized to you for the world you are inheriting. You are always very kind and tell me that I’m not personally responsible for climate change, poverty, inequality, or our ailing democracy. And of course on an autobiographical level I know I’m not to blame for the brokenness of our beautiful world, but as your mom, I’ve always felt that it was my job to give you the world as a gift, perfect, shining in the sun.

Remember those mornings when we were camping, and you’d come out of the tent in the hours after dawn, sleepy, pulling on a fleece, while the grownups drank coffee and made oatmeal, and you’d gather with the other kids to start the fire. The world was there for you, gloriously beautiful, misty and cool, with the sun just peeking through the leaves, and you had your whole day ahead of you – you could climb trees or explore the stream or go tide-pooling or catch lizards or take a hike or just sit in a camp chair and read. It was a terrain for you to have adventures, whether in the physical world or through the book tucked under your sleeping bag. I want our world to be like those campground mornings – bursting with promise and possibility.

But alas, since you are now young adults and no longer little kids, you have long since figured out that this world of ours is full of pain and ugliness. And it’s high time I gave up this fantasy.

Here’s a funny, dark poem I read recently.

Good Bones by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

This semester at Harvard I’ve been studying our country’s shameful racist history. I know this is not news to you. All three of you, at one time or another, walked out of Berkeley High and joined a march to support Black Lives Matter. Sasha, I think you protested with your high school friends by marching to the UC Berkeley campus and staging a “die-in” after the murder of Trayvon Martin? Or was it Michael Brown? Or Eric Garner? How horrifying that these men, each of whom was once their mother’s darling baby boy, have now become names in a list of casualties, victims of our country’s racial violence.

And what a list it is. You know that our country was founded by colonists who wanted to get rich by taking land that wasn’t theirs and by employing free labor from people they had kidnapped. This foundational “get rich quick” scheme has been called settler colonialism, to differentiate it from classic extractive colonialism practiced by colonizers who had no desire to live in the places they despoiled. If classic colonialism resembles the Odyssey’s circular motion – travel and return – settler colonialism follows the straight-line pattern of the Aeneid. The goal is to transform the new colony into a home.

As far as I know, none of your ancestors were early colonialists: they all came over much later, Jews fleeing persecution, Swedes avoiding poverty, or Irish escaping hunger. Nonetheless, our home, in the leafy hills of Berkeley California, is the fruit and flower of this act of colonization and its attendant violence.

In some ways, settler colonialism was beneficial. It made for a more peaceful and prosperous land. In the literature on comparative economic development, one of the best predictors for how rich a country is today is how little malaria there was during the age of European expansion. Where mortality rates were low, colonists were far more eager to settle, and they brought European institutions with them. Whatever we think of European institutions, they helped promote business, trade, and innovation. Today, a negative correlation remains between malaria rates during the early colonial period and wealth.

But riches don’t come without a price. Since settler colonialists wanted to make a home in the new land, their first task was getting rid of the people who already lived there. And so in Berkeley, we climb around on Indian Rock and walk under the oak trees at Codornices Park but see no signs of the Ohlone people who once ground their acorns under the trees and wove baskets on the shores of Codornices creek. Across the United States, the inaugural genocide against native peoples set our nation on a path of brutality and oppression.

The second challenge for the settler colonialists was turning nature into property, with devastating consequences for the environment. The wetlands in the Bay, which once harbored flocks of migratory birds and provided a home for frogs, coyotes, raccoons, voles, and foxes, have been paved over for freeways, Ikea, and the boutique stores of Fourth Street.

The third project was securing cheap labor by kidnapping people from Africa and holding them as slaves.

When you bring children into the world, as you may learn in the years to come, you have this sense of a fresh start – of an innocence and a capacity for goodness – a clean slate, a new beginning. But I am sad to say that the world your father and I brought you into was neither innocent nor clean. Behind your faces are all those other faces which are yours, a long line of white Americans who “have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it,” in the searing words of James Baldwin. We cannot undo what our ancestors have done, but the first thing we can do is acknowledge it: “it is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

So this letter is the start of what I hope will be a longer project – a racial stock-taking, an acknowledgement, an effort to “cease fleeing reality and begin to change it.” And our project begins at home.

You probably learned about red-lining at Berkeley High, one of many ways in which white realtors, home builders, politicians, judges, and residents kept neighborhoods racially segregated throughout the twentieth century, during the years when my parents moved to the Berkeley hills and started a family. Did you learn which street in Berkeley was the red line? The street that divided Black and Asian residents on the West (in the flats, built on land-fill) from white residents of the East? In my childhood it was called Grove Street. You know it as Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Mortgage brokers wouldn’t show homes uphill of MLK to Black families, and banks wouldn’t provide mortgages for them to purchase houses in “white” neighborhoods.

Needless to say, our house lies on the white side of that line.

Redlining wasn’t the only strategy for keeping communities separate. Did you know that the City of Berkeley invented the concept of “single-family zoning,” the designation of parts of town where apartment buildings are illegal, in order to keep Black folks out of our nice white neighborhoods? It began in the Elmwood neighborhood in 1916, with new real estate rules that were explicitly designed to protect “the home against the intrusion of the less desirable and floating renter class.” In the Claremont neighborhood, where the largest and fanciest houses in Berkeley are located, racial covenants made it illegal for owners to sell to Black buyers.

Black folks who wanted to live in white neighborhoods faced racial violence. Angry homeowners burned crosses on the lawns of their Black neighbors. Yes, in California. Small business owners in Black Berkeley neighborhoods couldn’t insure their properties.

The truth is ugly. “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

After the murder of George Floyd, the California legislature commissioned a report on reparations owed to Black Californians; the report was completed in 2022. It’s a document of barbarism. It doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive, but it compiles a nauseating sampling of violence, injustice, and discrimination: enslavement, racial terror, disenfranchisement, housing segregation, separate and unequal education, racism in environment and infrastructure, pathologizing Black families, exclusion from cultural and intellectual life, stolen labor, an unjust legal system, disparities in mental and physical health, and the wealth gap. It’s a hard read.

To illustrate residential segregation, the report uses a map of Berkeley in 1937.

Here’s one tiny if illustrative story. In 1958, shortly before my father arrived in Berkeley as a young professor, a Black school teacher was looking for a place to live. In the Elmwood neighborhood, a fellow white teacher rented him a house. Neighbors complained. The Berkeley police investigated, then referred the case to the FBI. No laws had been broken, so the FBI dropped the case, but the Federal Housing Authority warned the white homeowner that any future applications from him for mortgage insurance would be rejected.

This is the city where I grew up and where you grew up.  

Do you know the bronze statue of a man in the middle of Sacramento Street near Ashby? I just learned who that guy was: William Byron Rumford Sr. was a Black Berkeley city council member who became the Bay Area’s first Black state legislator in 1948. In 1963, five years before the national Fair Housing Act outlawed residential segregation, he authored the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which banned housing discrimination in California.

But it was and is an uphill battle. When my parents bought our house in the late 1960s, our part of the city was less than one percent Black. Today, though racial covenants and redlining are a thing of the past, Black borrowers pay higher interest rates and are more likely to be turned down for loans.

I can literally count every Black and Asian family that has lived on our street since I was a kid, more than fifty years ago, and it only requires the fingers of one hand.

Residential segregation, of course, is just one part of our racist heritage, but it casts a long shadow. When Black Berkeley residents were confined to the area West of MLK, they were also shut out of large houses, tree-lined streets, and beautiful parks. Their children were kept out of the best schools, until a few years before I started school, when Berkeley integrated our schools. Their families grew up breathing the exhaust and pollution that came from the nearby freeways, railroad tracks, and the industrial facilities of West Berkeley. And as Berkeley real estate began booming in the 1970s, Black homeowners benefited less and had less to pass on to their kids, leaving an entire community at a disadvantage in terms of wealth.

The California reparations panel determined that the cumulative cost of housing segregation was $148,099 per person. I imagine it’s an underestimate.

But it’s not as simple as saying that Black families were excluded from white prosperity. In fact, it’s so much worse than that, because white prosperity has been based on exclusion. In the case of our home, part of its ridiculous value (today it would probably sell for forty times what it cost when Jonas and Milie bought it in 1967) comes from its location on a “premier” street in Berkeley. We might translate “premier” as “white.”

The scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who began her working life as a tenant advocate taking community college classes at night school, has documented the way in which race structures housing prices, even today. Whiteness is a central index of the “quality” of a neighborhood. “Housing value in the U.S. continued to be scaled according to the proximity of African Americans…. The distance from Black communities continues to factor into the superior value of white neighborhoods.”

For Black Berkeley residents, over the decades, this means their homes were less likely to be an engine of accumulation and wealth and more likely to be the site of extraction and exploitation. For white Berkeley residents, it means our home (that patch of land and structure of wood that will one day be your material inheritance) owes its value to the exclusion of Black and Asian neighbors over the course of a hundred years.

“The stones of your houses are cemented with the blood of African slaves,” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr.

It’s hard to reconcile the ideals that Berkeley seems to represent today – liberation, equality, diversity, resistance against oppression – with the hideous racism of our history. It’s hard to connect the progressive artists, academics, and activists who lived on Tamalpais Road with its racial exclusiveness. But yes, those things went together. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written: “America begins in Black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary.”

King urged us to face the ugliness of our history and the brutality of our present:

“In human relations the truth is hard to come by, because most groups are deceived about themselves. Rationalization and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our individual and collective sins. But the day has passed for bland euphemisms. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

As I am sure you know, those last words (from the Book of John) are engraved on the walls of Berkeley High.

So it’s time for a new way of thinking about our imperfect hometown. It’s time to face the truth about our home, our city, and our country. It’s not a truth we can run away from by moving to another country. And it’s high time for me to abandon the idea of giving you a perfect, unspoiled world as your heritage. Not only did such a world never exist, not only is its persistence in fantasy a privilege that most children never experience, even on weekend camping trips, but the fiction itself is a racist mirage, a delusion that lets us believe we can somehow banish everything we don’t like and don’t want to see from our everyday lives. Accepting the truth means appreciating complexity, messiness, the juxtaposition of beauty with pain. And it gives us the opportunity to work for change.

As Baldwin wrote, “innocence must die, if we are ever to begin that journey toward the greater innocence called wisdom.”

Perhaps if I can’t give you an unsullied world, I can offer you the invitation to live in truth. I love you so much.

Your mom