Bay anglers organize.

• Author: Anner, John
• Position: San Francisco Bay fishermen

San Francisco

"The fishing piers are like the ghettos of the bay," says community organizer Wendall Chin, as he looks out over the glittering expanse of water that stretches between San Francisco, Oakland, and Silicon Valley. "Fish and Game doesn't care what happens out here--nobody cares. Poor people, people of color, people who don't speak English. These are not the folks Fish and Game is thinking about."

The Department of Fish and Game, however, is starting to feel political heat from some of the people who regularly cast their lines into San Francisco Bay. Concerned over the possibility of high levels of toxins in the fish they catch, local fisherman have formed a community group they call SAFER (Southbay Anglers for Environmental Rights). They have been organizing on the fishing piers that jut into the bay, using classic community-organizing tactics. Their goal is to persuade the Department of Fish and Game to post multilingual signs on the piers warning about the dangers of eating too much fish from the bay and to force the Department of Health to test fish for the presence of toxins. Activists are simply trying to get the authorities to pay the same attention to their health that they do to the safety of sport fishermen.

If you didn't know the race or class characteristics of a random angler, you could find out by examining his or her catch of the day. If it's striped bass, chances are good the angler is white and is probably not going to eat the fish. If the catch is kingfish, shark, white croaker, sturgeon, or perch, it's a safe bet it was hauled from the bay by a low-income person of color who is planning on fish for dinner.

"Way over 60 per cent of the people who fish from the piers are people of color," says Chin. "And most of them eat what they catch--especially the Vietnamese." Informal interviews conducted on several piers confirmed Chin's observation...