If you don’t believe there is systemic racism in this country, take the № 19 bus to Hunters Point
For six weeks I walked, drove, biked and bused around San Francisco, counting people for the 2020 Census. I was part of an army of half a million enumerators whose job was to visit the tens of millions of households across the country that had not yet responded to the Census — a massive undertaking the Census Bureau officially calls Nonresponse Followup, or NRFU. After attending an orientation session and completing about 20 hours of online training I was set loose on the streets of San Francisco armed with an iPhone, a clipboard and a black satchel filled with forms.
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Fifteen years ago San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom threw open the gilded doors of City Hall to gay and lesbian couples applying for marriage licenses. In so doing, San Francisco became the first city in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage. The flurry of marriages that followed was short-lived — a court ruled that Newsom did not have the authority to bypass state law — but for a few days the scene outside City Hall was a queer lovefest. I wrote the story below and sent it to the New Yorker, hoping they might publish it in the Talk of…
Peter Kupfer
I am a writer, editor and photographer based in San Francisco. I recently completed a memoir about my father, a refugee from Nazi Germany.
