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Comment by outis | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco was only ever really tolerant of the right kind of differences, AFAICT. For example, it appears to be a near-complete political monoculture. It even has a prominent road in the largest city park named after a living and active Democratic politician, just to make sure everyone knows whose turf it is.

More recently, there is the animosity against the tech crowd, which I don't need to describe.

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Hm, I thought you were going somewhere different after that first sentence, because San Francisco history is actually deeply embedded with racism. It is often egregiously racist, in the late 1800s so much so to the point of the entire justice system being supplanted by vigilante mobs (composed of the white merchant class) that tried and hung Australian, Chinese, and Mexican immigrants. There are countless stories of SF being the first state to defeat some racist law or another, like how the city outlawed wooden laundromats for fire code reasons, but only used it to enforce on Asian laundromats (and not white ones). IANAL but that ended up being a Supreme Court case that more or less said laws had to be enforced equally, irrespective of race.

It's a deep history, and in interpreting it you have to be careful who you decide is "San Francisco" -- is it the institutions at the time, or the citizens who act up against it?

I agree though that it's important not to take progressive politics for granted.

Thanks, I was not aware of that aspect of San Francisco's history. It does not seem to have much of a connection to the present situation, though - or maybe it does? The Democrats used to be the slavery party, after all.

Is there a good source for the political history of San Francisco that does not automatically take the point of view of the current incumbents?

a near-complete political monoculture

Not true at all. The Green Party is welcome to compete respectfully with the Democratic machine sometimes and even Libertarians are not complete exiles

And I always suspected the animosity against the tech crowd is mostly aimed at non-white techies more than techies in general. It's just phrased as anti-techie out of political correctness.

...what? The vast majority of techies are whites and affluent Asian Americans. Are there even non-white techies to protest?

A deep study of the technicalities of race and its sociobiological construction reveals a shocking result: asians aren't white.

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