Tag: JR Valrey

The Education, COVID-19 and Communities of Color Sanctuaries Virtual Town Hall will be on Zoom on Wednesday, July 15, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Everyone, especially from the East Oakland community, is encouraged to join. You may RSVP by calling 510-712-2855 or emailing Kristina.Molina4Education@gmail.com.

“We’re just tired and fed up with people calling 911 for non-emergencies. Any action with law enforcement can get Black people and people of color killed. And that abuse has to stop.” – San Francisco District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton

“I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.” – El Hajj Malik Shabazz aka Malcolm X

“Bit” is a 34-minute short comedy, directed by Morgan Mathews, about a young Black tech entrepreneur, Houston, and his ambition to create a start-up around his trivia game app, “Jambo.” The film, set mostly in downtown Oakland, is on the post-racialism fringes of the ever-growing Silicon Valley.

Dr. Kim Rhoads, MD, MS, MPH, is an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF); director of the Office of Community Engagement at UCSF; and member of the COVID-19 Equity Task Forces in both San Francisco and Alameda County.

“Our power comes from the fact that we create the wealth. Wealth is power; we have the ability to withhold that power.” – Boots Riley, filmmaker and activist, Juneteenth 2020 ILWU shutdown Port of Oakland

As new issues in our community continue to mount as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine, education of Black youth is taking center stage. In Black communities locally and across the nation, there were already learning gaps, achievement gaps, a digital divide, and a lack of knowledge of self that Black youth as a body were already struggling to overcome before this forced pivot to online school.

Preventive medicine is the best medicine, especially in a capitalist country where the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed long encrusted health disparities that have been in place for centuries. Presently, people have had their ability to move around freely curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine’s shelter-in-place policy.

The San Francisco Black Film Festival, starting June 18 and going for a month strictly online, features a documentary, “70 Years of Blackness: The Untangling of Race and Adoption”, by filmmaker Christopher Windfield. Subject Verda Byrd is a Black woman adopted in the ‘50s into a Black family only to find out 70 years later that both of her birth parents were white.

As the longtime publicist for the San Francisco Black Film Festival, I have to go on record and say that “Digging for Weldon Irvine” is, out of over 200 films, one of the most informative and well crafted documentaries that has been selected to screen in the 22nd San Francisco Black Film Festival.

“An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment” – Huey P. Newton, co-founder and Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party

The coronavirus pandemic and quarantine has created a massive mental health challenge to an already terribly inadequate mental health system that has been teetering on collapse in the Black community since mental health became a science in this country.

Karega is an intelligent and principled brother of extraordinary patience, diplomacy and reasoning ability. He and his wife Felecia have come up with a new book called “SOL Affirmations.” Now that we are in the season of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is absolutely necessary that we become more aware of our mental health and start to learn the tools and techniques that we could use to deal with stress.

It is not an option for the much anticipated “Black Woman Is God” exhibit to be canceled; it is scheduled for Oct. 21, 2020 and is one of the premiere annual events of the Black Bay Area.

Some high risk patients may slip through the widening gaps of an already broken system. However, there is hope in that there are many people and organizations working to change that. The work of maternal equity has been well under way, and we have been doing our best to adapt and adjust during this pandemic to continue to support and meet the needs of the community.

“Ingenuity is the reigning order of the day” would be my choice of words if I had to sum up the COVID-19 pandemic’s quarantine into a sentence for small business owners.

“American prisons are death traps. They are the places with the highest rate of coronavirus infection in the world. Incarceration in the time of COVID skirts the genocidal cruelty of death by disease of the Nazis.” J. Fernandez

In June, San Francisco Mayor London Breed is expected to lower San Francisco’s alert level to a COVID-19 semi-quarantine status, meaning that some of the shelter-in-place restrictions implemented in mid-March are expected to be lifted, if infection rates continue to decrease. But according to rumors heard in city government circles, big gatherings of dozens of people will not be allowed in the City until 2021 at the earliest. This may include movie theaters.

Distance learning has proven to be a failure in many cases over the last two months throughout the Bay Area and the nation for a myriad of reasons. For example, teachers were never trained adequately in how to pivot from classroom teaching to a cyber environment; school districts had to organize distance learning without having planned for its implementation; huge portions of the student body in the Bay’s Black and Brown neighborhoods don’t have access to the technology needed to be able to engage; and many students have no internet access at home.

Candice Elder, founder and executive director of the East Oakland Collective, is a force to reckon with in Oakland when the issue of homelessness is brought up. During this quarantine season, her comrades as well as herself have successfully organized a moratorium on the police sweeping of homeless encampments in Oakland, which was passed unanimously by the City Council.