And the conversation went on in this way back and forth for a few minutes, with Joshua expressing his sympathies and his plans, and Shelly expressing her doubts. When her stop arrived, Joshua thanked her for the talk and promised to bring up her concerns at the next city council meeting. He invited her to that night’s green jobs event. She heaved her backpack over each shoulder, stood framed in the doorway, and said, “You seem like a good enough young man, but there’s a lot, a lot, a lot of angry people in this city, people you can’t just sit down on the train with and talk civilized to. Know that.”
Later, on our walk to his apartment, I could hear Joshua muttering to himself: “Shelly Retivat, bus furlough, Twenty-third and Telegraph.”
“You memorize all your constituents?” I asked.
He looked back at me. “Only the angry ones,” he said. “So, yeah. All of them.”
THE TRANSCRIPT, 2/3
DK: Tell me about the incident with the Confederate mascot.
JS: I’d rather talk about my plans for the City of Oakland. Can we—?
DK: Really quick, I want to get your take on what some people see as the reason you’re in politics in the first place.
JS: Well, that’s not entirely true. I was always the kid who participated. I ran cross-country in elementary school, did every geography and spelling bee in middle school, and did the whole pep rally, spirit thing in high school. It wasn’t until I got to Stanford that the urge to engage just sort of arrived in the form of politics. But, sure. We can talk about the mascot, briefly. Being the mascot was a mistake — I’m reminded every day by black voters who’ve seen those pictures of me. But I was a kid — and a lonely one, at that. I was fourteen, fifteen, and my main focus was just getting through my time in the AV. I was my mother’s son back then more than I am now, and I wanted to be as undisruptive as possible. Even though I knew what the Civil War was all about, obviously, I’d internalized the idea that the Confederate flag had become a postracial symbol of independence, nothing more. Remember, there weren’t many black kids in our high school, and the others didn’t seem to want anything to do with me because I was on the pep squad with all these white kids, and [sounds of the espresso machine]. So, I understand why Hollywood stars and progressive talking heads were furious on my behalf — a Confederate mascot in California in the twenty-first century simply shocked people who don’t know how un-California most of California is — and I appreciated their concern. But the truth is: I was the one who had to keep going to that high school once the mascot was changed. And most of the students and teachers and parents — many of whom had gone to Antelope Valley High themselves — hated me for messing up a tradition they’d come to love. The parents were the worst. They saw it as the triumph of political correctness, or else feared the mascot-change represented some larger change they weren’t ready for. I don’t know. A lot of racists can coexist with black folks just fine as long as you don’t ask them to change anything. The way they saw it, you’ve got how many hundreds and hundreds of students, and you have to change the mascot on account of hurting a few black kids’ feelings? I had a mother leave a message on my home answering machine, politely informing me that if I wanted to be more comfortable, Compton was only an hour away. I got threatening letters from self-proclaimed skinheads and Nazis. I looked around and couldn’t spot any of the people who’d had my back before the mascot changed — not a single movie star, director, talking head, or politician. They’d all gone back to their lives of making money, and I was left to defend this political stand I’d never had any intention of taking in the first place.
DK: So, the media attention during that time shaped your career, inadvertently, in a productive way?
JS: Let’s just say I learned how to pick a fight — I’ll never pick one I don’t intend to fight forever. And now, that fight is for Oakland, so can we talk about that?
THE SHOOT
When we arrived at Joshua’s apartment, the photographer was already there, dragging a reclining chair from one side of the room to the other.
“You’re going to sit here,” she told Joshua, “and you get to choose six books to stack on this radiator next to you. Not five, not seven. Six.”
Jenna King was an old friend of Joshua’s from his days in the Black Student Union at Stanford. Some of the curls in her short hair were painted blue, and a yellow ring hung from her right nostril. When I asked if she’d been given a spare key to Joshua’s apartment, she said, “Man, Josh has a spare key to my apartment.” I figured out the two of them lived there together. Nina Simone’s Black Gold was spinning on an actual record player while Jenna set up the lights and probes. To get out of the way, I stayed in the kitchenette overlooking the living room and—“Is it cool if I…?”—brewed some coffee. Jenna King and Joshua Stilt danced lightly near the bookshelves, deciding which six books to include in the photograph.
“I love Nina,” I said.
“Who’s Nina?” Jenna asked.
“Nina Simone,” I said, pointing to the record player.
“Oh, okay. Just wanted to make sure you called her by her first name like you knew her.” She laughed, and Joshua laughed, too.
At one point while Joshua browsed the spines along his shelves, Jenna came over to pour herself a cup of coffee. Without saying anything, she reached around me to grab the pot. I moved and said, “Sorry. I know my one job here is to stay out of the way, and I’ve failed.” I was hoping she’d laugh, but when it became clear she wasn’t going to, I started toward Joshua to see which books he’d selected to be photographed with.
“Why couldn’t you get an Oakland writer to do this,” Jenna asked Joshua. “I don’t know. Maybe a black writer, even.”
“We go back,” Joshua said. “He’s from my hometown.”
“Oh, good,” Jenna said. “So his article that’s supposed to be about you and the City of Oakland is actually going to be about him and Nazi Valley.” She looked at me. “You seem uncomfortable.”
I was. My discomfort was the result, I think, of simultaneously wanting (a) to engage in the discourse on race and the unavoidable white frame of my article, and (b) to pretend that because I had acknowledged said frame, I’d earned the right to ignore it altogether. The fact was, Jenna was right: I was finding myself less interested in Joshua’s political career, and increasingly drawn to the ways in which our histories had collided, the odd angles at which they’d spun out after the collision.
“You know we need all kinds of folks behind us,” Joshua said.
“Folks,” Jenna laughed.
“The truth is,” I said, “I’m not putting anything about myself in the story. My editor won’t let it happen, and I’m boring anyway.”
She studied the tiny alligator on my polo shirt, the pleats in my skinny-legged khakis. “You don’t say.” Then: “Why do you need to be here — Daley, right? I mean, here here. In this room. Do you want to be in the picture, too?”
“I’m doing a day-in-the-life kind of thing—”
“Jenna,” Joshua said. “Come take my picture.”
“Look,” she said. “I’m not mad. But hear me out. I’m from Oakland. I think you’d be a great mayor, Josh, because you’re my friend, and you’re brilliant, and I know you’ve got your heart in the right place. But you should’ve got a local writer to do this story! Dude, he’s from your hometown. I get that. But if you want this kid around your campaign, maybe you should go run for mayor out there.” She let out a harsh laugh and turned her attention to me. “Shit, you guys should go run together in the city. It’s a long, vibrant tradition in San Francisco for white people to take credit for everything good Oakland’s ever done.”