homo bay areaus

What is it about the Bay Area? I lived there for eight years and I’ve continued to maintain ties for another fifteen. Yet, it wasn’t until last Thursday, when I was visiting with my former student Rashawn Ray, that I was bluntly asked “what’s the deal with Bay Area people?” It’s not just an urban place, it’s not just a diverse place, and it’s not just a liberal place. There’s something more to it than that.

Let’s start with the Bay Area’s unique geography. It’s a ring shaped community that stretches from Silicon Valley, up through Richmond, around Marin, into San Francisco and then down into the peninsula. Each area represents a different type of community. In Silicon Valley, you are at the commanding heights of the world economy, while in Richmond you have the remnants of the Black working class. In Berkeley and Stanford, you have intellect and high culture. San Francisco is a petri dish of grungy subcultures. There’s also the Bay Area’s place in the global economy. It’s a compact metropolitan area perched between the American West and the Pacific.

This helps us flesh out the Bay Area ethos. It’s intellectual, multicultural, and highly liberal. It’s ambitious and extremely competitive, while being precious and a bit snooty. It’s also grungy and alternative. Appearing effete from the outside, but up close, it’s a culture based on hard work. As my spouse likes to say, Danville is where you live if you’ve earned your money. You’ll see a lot of Asian engineers and managers in Danville.

There’s one aspect of the Bay Area ethos that deserves mention – its heterogeneous pragmatism. People will bring together all kinds of different skills and life experiences in their work. For example, I recently met a man who was in the army, studies circus art, like juggling, and now does traditional healing like shiatsu. This man exposed his son to many of these skills, which helped the son excel in high school athletics and earn a scholarship at a leading university.

It’s this ability to successfully bring together seemingly unrelated skills is very Bay Area. Perhaps the most remarkable example is Steve Jobs, who brought a love of calligraphy and design to the staid hobby of home computing. It’s not surprising that Jobs grew up in the Bay Area. In contrast, most of the other Silicon Valley moguls built their fortunes by exploiting a single idea (e.g., DOS or social networking), often hatched in other places.

The Bay Area ethos is a rare conglomerate of things that don’t normally go together. It should be enjoyed.

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