let yourself be haunted

my commencement address for UC Berkeley's Geography department

Today’s edition is a bit different from my normal fair. As most of you know, I think, I’ve been working on a book about environmental justice in West Oakland, which is to say … about the Port of Oakland and air pollution and race and logistics. Brandi Summers, an associate professor in UC Berkeley’s Geography Department, was one of my early draft readers, and she delivered much good and bad news about the state of the work. But she must have seen something in it because I believe she was responsible for the invite that I got from her department to deliver a commencement address. I’d never done this before, but I did my best, and I think it worked for the students on this occasion, which was the point. But I thought I’d share it here, too, as I realized that it explains what doing this work for the last eight years has done to me, and maybe also … why I’ve kept at it. The address is entitled, Let Yourself Be Haunted. It’s reprinted below.

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I am deeply honored to be here, especially as someone who has been like some remora fish attached to the great nurse shark of academia. I also envy you all, who found this field early enough to study within it. I have to tell you that writing a novel for your college thesis sounds a lot more fun than it is. But that’s how I ended up a writer who would like to be a geographer. 

There are many long crises in this world that could be addressed. So many of them are about maps and partitionings, and the violence it takes to make one preferred map fit onto the real and actual world. But I want to focus on the area that I know best. 

I have been researching and writing a book for the last 8 years now about this little loop of land in West Oakland reaching from the Prescott neighborhood out through the Port of Oakland. In my mind, that loop starts at Mandela Parkway, which used to be the Cypress Structure, an overhead freeway, and 7th Street, which you’ve probably heard used to be a bustling Black business district, crossfading into an insurgent Mexican one. Right there is the BART station, which used to be people’s homes, people like Beatrice Sneed, who led the resistance to the transit agency’s actions in West Oakland. I acquired a map of all the properties taken by BART, and I want everyone to know… when you’re standing on the platform heading to downtown Oakland or Berkeley, you’re probably just about hovering on the roof of her ghost house. 

You can see the problem with working a patch of land over and over, searching out people who know what happened there, and digging in the archives for the receipts. Your vision of this present moment becomes haunted with all the other things that have gone before. I can’t see that BART station without seeing Beatrice Sneed. And as with the BART station, so it is with so many things: the street itself, the massive post office you see from the BART train, the old Army base on the Port, the huge container terminals.

Even the water in what is generously called the Oakland estuary. In my mind, I see the moments where those huge cargo ships slice right through the water, which parts and then reassembles into the same smooth surface, as if nothing at all had passed… not even the biggest ships in what I call the Pacific Circuit. 

That circuit is this set of relationships that allow small numbers of Americans, many of them along the west coast, to control massive numbers of workers in Asian production facilities, using the technologies of communication and computation developed by Silicon Valley’s companies. 

There are many capitalisms, but this one is ours, and it has particular productive and destructive capacities. In West Oakland, where this system attaches to our lifeworld, those forces are represented by the trucks that move goods from the container yards out to the warehouses and on to the Amazon trucks and Target aisles. The drivers are nearly exclusively immigrant men, most from countries that the United States wrapped in a destructive embrace during the Cold War. Their jobs are what you find at the end of a race to the bottom. Hard, long hours, crap pay, precarity. 

And while environmental justice advocates like Ms. Margaret Gordon have forced reforms that have cleaned up the West Oakland air… for decades, these trucks poured particulate emissions in the hearts and lungs of neighborhood residents, leading to what are sometimes bloodlessly called health inequities between flatlands people and those at the literal higher altitudes in this place. On a map, this could be represented as a darker area of asthma rates, or even, as has been calculated, lower average life expectancy. I feel a different kind of ghost here, all those years of healthy life that might have been experienced by people, had they not had to breathe that particular air in that particular place. 

I’ve met the people, too, who work the ships that bring the goods. A quarter of them are from the Philippines alone. One young man I knew had started working the ships to help pay for his little siblings’ education. That guy, about y’alls age, would work nine months aboard a ship, spending just a day or two at ports in between weeks of sailing. It’d been years since he’d seen his own father because that parent also worked on the ships. His boss, dressed in a perfect vintage Raiders jacket, had been doing this stuff since the Raiders were in Oakland and good, and still he dreamed of retiring one day and opening up a pizzeria. For their families, what could they become, if not ghosts?

All of these people are connected, ultimately, to the production workers across Asia. Activists in the 70s and 80s realized that people working at chip facilities in Silicon Valley were literally on the same production line as assemblers in Malaysia, usually on an island in Penang which was known regionally as Silicon Island. Pulling in young women from conservative rural households, there is a whole literature on what happened there, and how the women suffered, how they often complained that the facilities were haunted by spirits. 

The institutional response to the everyday histories of working people has been to bury them, in West Oakland, often literally under concrete and infrastructure. That has been the model of so-called economic development, and it remains that way, today. In a scientific reality that is also a metaphor, the pollution that’s down there will be pushed up by global warming’s sea level rise into what Berkeley researchers in another department here call “toxic tides.” 

To complete the loop I’ve been telling you about, we’d pass back from the Port under 880, which is very near the original Oakland shoreline, and pop back up to sea level on 7th Street, right at Esther’s Orbit Room, the last of the great old bars to go out of business. From that vantage point, you can look down 7th and see all that was destroyed in the midcentury. What had been the very center of Black life and culture in the East Bay has been turned into logistics infrastructure on one side and a hodgepodge of buildings in disrepair on the other, as BART screeches overhead

From this exact spot, I’ve asked myself the question, over and over… Why was this done? How?

And the answer I came to, over and over in this research, were these invisible systems, these ideas that were placed over the top of the land—ways of thinking about race and risk, about property and ownership, about the collective of the state and the individualism of the nation. Appraisal methodologies, zoning maps, imperial umbrellas, free trade zones, city council districts, areas of resistance. 

So much power converted into forms that you cannot see, but only feel, that you can feel, but not gain purchase on. The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has identified these times we’re living in as liquid modernity, where anything can happen, yet nothing can be done. 

If this feels like a plea for history … maybe? But this is a living world and the temporal scope of our action is now. I have a friend, the Colombian-American author, Ingrid Rojas Contreras. And her last book is about a mission she and her mother took to appease the ghost of her father. She says the reason Americans don’t believe in ghosts is that we deny our past. 

Perhaps this is why so many powerful people are bewildered that our cities are in such trouble. Any honest accounting of the urban crises that began after World War II would say: no, we have never made an honest attempt as a society to build a fair, equal multiracial democracy. No, we have never accounted for the brutalities visited on Black people specifically and migrants  to our cities generally. No, urban renewal did not renew. No, the market did not lead to optimal distribution of resources. Decisions were made that extracted the most from those with the least, over and over again.

To look honestly at these things would require feeling the bonds of these lineages… their inescapability and need for reckoning. As Ingrid says: “With the framework of ghosts, we can suddenly think about what are the debts that we inherit and how can we begin to think about these debts? What gestures might we do now to appease the ghosts that are following us?” 

My work on the Pacific Circuit has convinced me that a first offering is standing with a place, not allowing it to be merely a box on a map or a node in a network or property to borrow against, but a specific piece of earth, with all its histories, its legacies woven into its soil and the chemistry of its flowers, the peel of its paint and the poems written on its porch. Make of the world an altar — as sacred as marigold, as profane as tequila (or maybe it’s the other way around). Recognize the hands and minds and lungs who formed this place in struggle and in joy. 

And then we can ask: do we fight for this place, or do we leave it behind? What do I need?  What do the people who live here now and once lived here need from me? I’m an immigrant’s son and I believe in change and the future, and I don’t think you have to stay wherever fate plopped you down on this earth. But perhaps it is my religion that you must honor the ancestors, not just those in your family tree, but all those who have tended to and are embedded in your home.

So, my tiny piece of advice, my life suggestion is … let yourself be haunted. Let yourself be haunted! Let yourself be haunted by what you have learned. Nobody knows how to make the city of my dreams, so I’m counting on you.

And congratulations.