Being raised as an ethical vegetarian in the West meant being in the minority. It rarely caused tension, but when it did, people would sometimes push on my dietary choices by turning to the scriptures. “But God put animals on Earth for us!” I was told more than once over the years.
And so I grew up taking it for granted that my family’s choices were not just exotic, but alien to the dominant faith in North America and Europe. Seventh Day Adventists excepted, my ethical brethren when it came to vegetarianism belonged to the Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. Years passed. I became vegan in 2003, at which point I did not ever consider my ethical choices to be in communion with any major Christian denomination, and certainly not Catholicism.
SF Chronicle editor-in-chief accuses the racist labor mayoral candidate of adultery and his dad of sundry immoralities. Candidate fires back, “His mom ran a whorehouse.” Enraged editor shoots the candidate in the street, once in the chest, once as he ran away. Wounded candidate gets elected Mayor of SF. A few months later, the mayor’s son assassinates the editor in the Chronicle building.
All of this really happened, between August 1879 and April 1880.
A new site logo has dropped: it’s a sea lion, sittin’ on a rock in the Bay, channeling Mr. Redding, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. It’s a reclamation of heritage, both personal and municipal. To understand what I mean by that, I need to explain its origins in a racist 19th-century rag.
Illustration of the Beale Street Wharf fire of July 25, 1877
Coöpting a Genocidal San Francisco
The new seal is inspired by the masthead of the 1884 The San Franciscan newspaper, a periodical so racist it openly called for the ethnic cleansing of Chinese San Franciscans in an 1885 editorial1. That was eight years after the anti-Chinese pogrom of 1877.
Original 1884 art
Now, in a more civilized time, it’s been revived in high resolution for 2025 by a Mexican of mostly Native descent living on Beale Street, the same street burned during that July’s anti-Chinese riot.
