Eric Porter's "A People's History of SFO"

Eric Porter is Professor of History, History of Consciousness, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes about half way through a chapter on Black labor and antidiscrimination struggles at San Francisco Airport. The chapter covers such activism from the late 1950s into the 1980s while illustrating how individual and group efforts by Black people to secure jobs and economic advancement at SFO were shaped by the interfaces of heterogeneous actors and systems that redistributed power at the airport and beyond. These include shifts in the national and global economy; public and private capital investment; government and corporate antidiscrimination and affirmative action programs; the work of local and national networks of business elites, labor organizers, and activists; and a concomitant symbolic economy regarding the Black presence in the Bay Area. On this page we see how primarily white unions and employers opposed some of the City of San Francisco’s early, airport-related affirmative action programs but also how local Black activists tried to push the City of San Francisco to do more about employment discrimination at the airport by mobilizing opposition to a general obligation bond measure designed to fund an airport expansion.

This chapter marks a pivot in this book’s narrative, as it shifts some focus away from the powerful and toward those less powerful actors who sought to make more reasonable lives for themselves by entangling themselves in expanding sets of relationships manifest at the airport. A significant theme of the book is how efforts to gain access to and justice in a region known for its hospitality and cos­mopolitanism could reproduce inequalities and exclusions in complicated ways. The test works pretty well in illustrating this theme. Page 99 indeed gives a hint of the complexity of such social justice struggles and their outcomes as it touches upon successes and failures, conflicts and contradictions. The remainder the chapter offers more in this regard by examining the work of Black labor organizations and employee groups, entrepreneurs, and participants in anti-discrimination lawsuits.

Learn more about A People's History of SFO at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue