Tag: poverty skolaz

With solutions being offered and critical work being done by Homfulness, City of Oakland gets pushback for not walking their talk about the housing crisis.

Tiny Gray-Garcia beams glaring exposure on the ongoing shameless colonialist violence against our houseless brothers and sisters during the Stolen Land-Hoarded Resources UnTour across occupied Western Turtle Island.

As a professor with UC Berkeley’s Global Poverty and Practice Program, this is the book I have been waiting for, and that I want all of my students to read. I am so grateful for the effort that has gone into the writing and publishing of this essential book.

Poor, homeless and disabled scholars are releasing a book sharing their truly innovative solutions to homelessness and poverty and launch a national theatre production on poverty, homelessness and criminalization of poor people. This book and curriculum release will be accompanied by a series of theatre and poetry workshops in community centers, schools and jails with other homeless and formerly homeless communities.

The new Kevin Hart movie, “Night School,” was about so many things, but like a good artist, as my poverty skola-teacher Mama Dee used to say, Kevin Hart didn’t pound on the table. Through subtle and sketch comedy, pranks, relationship issues, innuendo and character development, he showed an often unseen part of Mans Skoo (as I call it), which is an ableist, racist, classist institution known as Special Education, which so many of us who live with so-called “learning disabilities” know way too much about.

This was a cop calling me. He had my 13-year-old son, Tibu, who he had “detained” at West Oakland BART for doing nothing wrong – for selling the newspapers that he and his comrades at Deecolonize Academy produced. The cop profiled him as “a runaway” – code for houseless youth. It’s a constitutional right to free speech that Tibu and the other newspaper sellers are exercising, something the youth skolaz are learning right now in their oppressed People’s Herstory class at school.

Whack, tap, crack – the sound of the steel police flashlight on a car window is like no other, and it always had the same effect on homeless me and mama: blood-curdling fear. I thought about our constant police harassment, abuse and eventual arrest for the sole act of being houseless in Amerikkka when I heard about South Carolina’s “new” law that officially made it illegal to be homeless in downtown Columbia, S.C.