A couple months back i went to a soul food restaurant in SF with a good friend. We were seated and scanned the menu. We sat waiting for our ribs and fried chicken. We looked at the pictures on the wall, pictures that reflected the city that we lived in. I looked at the people in the restaurant. I looked at the servers. There was something strange. Then it hit me–there were no black people in the restaurant (except for one, sitting with an Asian girl eating). But this soul food restaurant had no black servers or cooks. It was the strangest thing, almost like going into a Chinese restaurant and not seeing any Chinese people. I brought this to the attention of our server, a pleasant Asian girl. She didn’t really notice, being busy serving macaroni and cheese etc. To me it’s a damn shame, the dwindling numbers of African Americans in San Francisco, the mass exodus. It is said that the black population is approximately the same number as the seating at Candlestick Park. A soul food restaurant without black people. The food was good but it was missing something. Maybe it was soul.
For inquiries/bookings: tonyrobles1964@hotmail.com
The People's Poet Tony Robles--SF Art commission award winning Author of Cool Don't Live Here No More and Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike 
Um. Yeah. …heard of the film “Medicine for the Melancholy”? Check it. Where is there a city with good intermixing diversity and not just pockets, as it were of different ethnicities? Are people going to continue to be more comfortable with people who generally Look like them, Talk like them, Eat like them, etc? I want to explore the burrows in NYC this summer. I’m not sure where I’m going to eventually call home. I do know that just last week, I was in a Vietnamese restaurant in my historically Norwegian neighborhood in Seattle (Ballard) and THREE mixed families came in…parents and children. I was happy to see “people who look like me”!
ahh such an important observation. a frightening one