Stupid White Tricks

That issue, however, didn't come up at last week's meeting.

Instead, the measure to house Katrina victims here was criticized as providing insufficient succor to potential refugee guests. How can we be so cruel as to house them there, doubters of the policy essentially said; that's where we oppress our own African-American poor.

If you think that argument sounds silly, consider this: San Francisco public housing projects happen to be deadly shooting galleries where known killers continue killing with relative impunity. Our Police Department remains one of the most dysfunctional in the country, with an abysmal record of solving murders.

The mayor's PR office has managed to downplay this continuing phenomenon with rolled-sleeve mayoral appearances near murderous housing projects. Creating the impression that the city was focusing its resources on the problem, even though little actual policy change had occurred, wasn't hard; residents of the city's wealthier areas have never paid much mind to the problem of poor people shooting one another in their own neighborhoods anyway.

Many of San Francisco's ghetto-shooting victims were friends with one another. Some of them have criminal records. Much of the carnage, therefore, remains within a single extended social circle, one that most San Franciscans won't ever touch, unless they happen to belong to a victim's extended family, are members of those families' churches, are friends with aggrieved churchgoers -- or happen to live in public housing near the killing sites and fear for their own lives.

This type of fear creates the kind of stress that nobody should wish upon traumatized guests, skeptics of the Hurricane Katrina housing proposal said. "We need to make sure we are not bringing people from the frying pan to the skillet," said Housing Authority Commissioner Amos Brown during a Thursday meeting. "There will be additional trauma to what they are now experiencing, such as guns being fired at the wee hours of the morning, as we have in some of our units. This pattern of death -- some may say they had this in New Orleans. If they did have this in New Orleans, it's still wrong."

Most of the time, Amos Brown is dismissible as a grandstanding blowhard. But he had a perverse point this time around.

It's certainly nonsense to say refugees from New Orleans housing projects might blanch at life in our own public slums. San Francisco's crime rate is nothing compared to what theirs used to be.

But this bit of blowhard grandstanding resonated last week because it contained more than a bit of truth-telling that was embarrassing for us all. Certain areas of this city, home in large part to poor African-Americans, are plagued by an ongoing killing spree that our city for the most part manages to ignore. That this issue would re-enter the public mind only because the city is preparing to house traumatized, poor Gulf Coast guests -- well, that's what you might call an awkward situation.

It's enough to make a white person want to go hide -- at a renaissance fair, perhaps, or maybe next to a tiny table spread with wine and crackers at the San Francisco Chronicle's "Opera in the Park," or, perchance, watching Friends reruns with some Green Party pals.