more from Nikole Hannah-Jones

Segregation in housing is the way you can accomplish segregation in every aspect of life. Housing segregation means that certain jobs are located in certain communities, that certain grocery stores are located in certain communities; it determines where parks are located, if streets are repaired, if toxic dump sites are built nearby. Segregation accomplishes so many other inequalities because you effectively contain a population to a geographic area and suddenly all the other civil rights laws don't matter.

We don't have to discriminate if we're living in totally segregated neighborhoods; all the work is already done. If you look at the history of civil rights legislation, it's the Fair Housing laws that get passed last — and barely so. Dr. King had to get assassinated in order for it to get passed, and that was because it was considered the Northern civil rights bill. It was civil rights made personal; it was determining who would live next door to you and therefore who would be able to share the resources that you received. The same is true of school desegregation.

Education and housing are the two most intimate areas of American life, and they're the areas where we've made the least progress. And we believe that schools are the primary driver of opportunity, and white children have benefited from an unequal system. And why is this so? Why have white people allowed this? Because it benefited them to have it that way.

fire and wind

I went to Laughing Monk this afternoon to help write postcards to voters in Virginia, and then I went for a walk at Candlestick with A and her dog W. It was warm -- it felt like 80 -- and that was a little disconcerting, given the fires up north. I don't have much to say about the fires because they are too horrific. It's terrible to think about all the houses burned, the people who have died, the firefighters (including the prisoners) who have been struggling to contain the fires. The aftermath isn't quite here yet, as far as I can tell from reading about it online. But the air in my corner of SF was much less smoky today.

After I got home I watered out front. Then I went in and called Wallace; we chatted about his treatment and his recovery reading list while I brought in the clothes that I had hung out back, washed a few dishes, and started making myself dinner. He has been in and out of the hospital this past week. It is odd, I barely know him and yet I'm concerned about his prognosis. I guess that's not odd, really. It's human.

yosemite/parallel universes

On the same day that nb and I drove through the valley, a rock from El Capitan fell into someone else's car, through the sun roof. The day before, climbers died. But we didn't know anything about that until after we got home. As far as we were concerned, it was a wonderful camping trip, except for the noisy neighbors and the smoke from other campfires. This is modern life, in a nutshell.

Awful things go on all over the world, and we hear about some of them but we just . . . move on. It's very difficult to fathom, especially after I've spent all day reading through a manuscript that makes very little sense. After a night of fractured sleep, thanks to the raccoons making noise right outside my bedroom window. I got up at one point and looked out at two young ones trying to figure out where to go from the top of my fence. When they saw me looking out at them, they moved closer to my bedroom window, and I was frightened. How would I have done on the frontier? Not well, I'm afraid.