Number worship: Race, place and numbers in 'the San Francisco America pretends does not exist'

Abstract

Numerical knowledge is critical to global public health, but numbers often emerge from contexts that require serious attention to historical and contextual factors shaped by race and place-based marginalisations. Without such attention, even progressive anti-racist public health projects can cause harm in neighbourhoods like Bayview Hunters Point in San Francisco. The central role of numbers in governance has received substantial scholarly attention and ethnographic studies often foreground the subjective stakes and selective erasures that result from privileging numerical ways of knowing. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research conducted in 2003-2004, we track different interpretations around the closure of an HIV/AIDS medication adherence program in San Francisco's only majority Black neighbourhood. Drawing on Du Bois' double consciousness, we show the entanglement of numbers, race and place through the story of how a program's closure was interpreted by clients in terms of racialised neglect and experimental violence. Twenty years later, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the quest for numbers continues to evoke community tensions.

Keywords: Du Bois; HIV/AIDS; Numbers; medical anthropology; place; race.