On one of my Bar and Cocktail History tours, a guest asked (or rather suggested) that the whole “Don’t Call it Frisco” thing is specifically anti-Black. I hadn’t thought about it, and decided to investigate.
People have been trained on “Don’t Call it Frisco” much in the way that they’re trained to say that shaking a Martini “bruises the gin.” It has never made any sense, but people know that’s the “right” answer and say it reflexively. That doesn’t mean it’s not racist though.
Personally I never understood the argument against the term. “Frisco” sounds like a worthy, friendly, fun shorthand. (“San Fran” on the other hand… admittedly hurts my ears a little.) Also, language changes and it’s not that big of a deal.
But as my tour guest suggested, “Frisco” is the type of familiar shorthand that grows in Black and Brown communities, and expected white pushback is expected.
I won’t go through the history of the terminology, but this blog post has a great timeline of the anti-“Frisco” movement. It starts in the 1800s. There seem to be two groups who call it Frisco – people who don’t live here (outsiders/tourists who don’t know better) and commoners/sailors.
As for tourists: “No, we don’t call it Frisco, that’s tenderfoot talk,” “Anyone who goes about the country asserting that his home is in ‘Frisco’ may at once be set down as an imposter,” ““The term ‘Frisco’ as a name for San Francisco, employed by nonresidents.”
As for Common: “‘Frisco’ is not only erroneous, but substitutes a rather ordinary name for a very beautiful one.” “I think we are comfortably informal—although we do insist on the full name San Francisco rather than Frisco.” “it demeans the city’s namesake, St. Francis.”
Later in life, in 1993, Herb Caen somewhat recanted, he called the term a “a salty nickname, redolent of the days when we had a bustling waterfront.” (He wrote a book titled Don’t Call It Frisco that was published 40 years earlier in 1953.)
As for anti-black specifically, the SF Weekly ran a story in 2014 addressing the issue head-on. The title of the story is “Don’t Call It “Frisco” — If You’re Old and White” with the conclusion “the only people driven to complain about ‘Frisco’ appear to be aging Caucasians.”
The writer interviews some Black San Franciscans, some of whom had not even heard of the “Don’t call it Frisco” movement. Frisco was and is a super common term in Black communities.
In San Francisco, diversity is a concept people are most at ease with when it remains a concept.
“African-American and white communities don’t really interact as much as you’d think they would, considering desegregation,” said professor John Rickford, a Stanford University linguist. “That’s why African-American vernacular remains relatively distinct.” So it equates that “African-Americans would be shocked that white people feel differently about this.”
For communities to truly influence each other’s way of thinking and speaking, Rickford continues, “they have to meet and mingle and talk in a deep sense. In a sense that matters.”
So where does that leave us? I guess my personal vibe on it is that most (white) people say “don’t call it Frisco” out of reflex, rather than out of reflection or purposeful racism. They say it because they know to say it. But this also probably indicates a lack of exposure to local Black communities by the people who use the expression, as the above quote makes clear.
The possibly-racist origin of the anti-Frisco thing is less clear to me. I don’t get the impression that saying it’s a term of commoners, low-class, a workingman’s term, or a term that sailors used is shorthand for Black people – in the 1800s anyway.
My impression, which could be incorrect, is that sailors/dock workers/etc in SF were not majority Black and not the dominant culture of dockworkers/sailors. But this might depend on the decade and whether we’re talking about Fisherman’s Wharf (Asian, then Italian), the Ferry Building (immigrants generally) or Hunter’s Point shipyards (Black but starting in the 1940s). But Herb Caen’s book Don’t Call it Frisco was published in the early 1950s…
So my thoughts (for now, my opinions change when presented with new evidence) is that the anti-“Frisco” movement has origins in general snobbery dating to the late-1800s, and potentially took on racist connotations in the 1950s, but “Don’t call it Frisco” is an outdated expression revealing a lack of awareness of the term’s use in Black and Brown communities today in any case.
Regardless of its origins, racist or not, “Don’t Call it Frisco” seems like a saying – and type of thinking – best left in the past.
Leave a Reply