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Dr. Macheo Payne: Challenging teachers to commit to Black male students’ learning
May 31, 2013
Dr. Macheo Payne is making his mark in the field of education by focusing on new practices around keeping Black male youth in the classroom. His dissertation, “The Three Commitments: Critical Race Theory and Disproportionate Suspension of Black Males,” challenges classroom teachers and other school site staff to re-examine their approaches to student learning, particularly learning for young Black men.
Assata Shakur is a freedom fighter, not a terrorist
May 15, 2013
The inclusion of Assata Shakur on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Terrorists list last month – marking 29 years since her liberation from a New Jersey maximum security prison in 1979 by members of the Black Liberation Army – while aimed at Cuba’s leadership should also be interpreted as a shot across the bow of any internal revolutionary movement or revolutionary activists in the United States.
Game tight
April 29, 2013
Young people, to start, you must acknowledge that for everything you think you know, there is a great deal you don’t know. That the first pursuit of man is to acquire knowledge. But until you can discern the real from the fake, true knowledge and the wisdom to wield it effectively will always escape you.
Culture of violence
December 24, 2012
General measures could move the cultural discussion and peoples’ behaviors in the right direction, whereas a focus on restricting gun ownership – except for people who fit appropriate medico-legal exclusion criteria – will probably worsen our cultural crisis, increase discrimination and police attacks, and increase the danger of greater social violence and chaos.
The army sergeant and Lovelle Mixon: Mass killings, race and state power
April 23, 2012
Policing in our cities is a militarized process, with features quite similar to counter-insurgency in war zones. Just within California, the LAPD trained U.S. soldiers going to Iraq in urban policing, returning soldiers from Afghanistan have trained the Salinas anti-gang squad, and Israeli police and Bahranian military recently trained the Oakland Police and UC-Berkeley police.
Occupy the Airwaves: an interview wit’ the rap group Rebel Diaz
December 24, 2011
We feel it’s important to be a part of this conversation. If there’s a national and international conversation going on against capitalism and imperialism, we need to be a part of that. But folks also gotta undersand that racism needs to be talked about and that white privilege still exists.
Oakland Freedom School encourages literacy in Black youth
September 29, 2011
Students learned many things about African and African American history, ranging from the classical African civilizations of Kemet (ancient Egypt), Songhai and Mali to the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance. The African-centered curriculum is designed to encourage youth to read during the summer while building self-esteem and a strong cultural identity.
Buy Black Wednesdays: Money talk
August 17, 2011
Berkeley, Calif.: The most liberal city in America and the world, some say. And yet Berkeley High School, with over 3,500 students and 250 teachers, has only eight Black teachers. Scandalous!
From North Africa to North Oakland, poverty scholars speak on the revolution
February 19, 2011
What can po’ folks learn from the revolutions in North Africa? Lessons in revolutions not dictated by non-profit industrial complex agendas and philanthro-pimps but revolutions guided by angry mamaz, hungry babies, houseless elders, jobless fathers, profiled and criminalized migrants and gang injunctioned youth of color.
A rose growing from concrete: an interview wit’ poet Jazz Hudson
February 12, 2011
Jazz Hudson is one of the new up and coming poets out of the Bay who has been making a name for herself at poetry readings – one of the most loquacious and passionate young sistas to come out of the concrete jungle of Oakland in a long time.
The Tough House
January 3, 2011
Bayview Hunters Point is a community not exempt from poverty, violence, racism, police terrorism, gentrification, institutionalized ignorance, displacement and demonizing media coverage. With the Tough House Project, founder Jamal James Modica hopes to give this community a voice.
Clarion call: VIOLENCE is a public health emergency!
September 29, 2010
“Violence is now so pervasive it can no longer be usefully viewed as only a problem of desperate acts by individual offenders.” – C. Everett Koop, M.D., The Surgeon General’s Workshop on Violence and Public Health, 1985
Solidarity and struggle: More on the Jan. 31 riot at Ely State Prison
March 21, 2010
Yes, it was a battle. My first report on this riot gave people a look into the ugly violence and bloodshed. I’ve reported it the way it happened, but nothing is to be glorified or celebrated here. It felt good, though, to be a part of struggle and change, to see solidarity in action.
CBS5 interviews Bay Area Black Builders: ‘The only thing this country understands is violence’
February 15, 2010
“This is a critical situation,” says Joe Debro, president of Bay Area Black Builders, a new organization that joins the forces of Black contractors, workers, jobseekers and design professionals to stop the lockout and win contracts and jobs in the construction industry by any means necessary, in an explosive interview broadcast Feb. 12 on CBS5 News.
‘Oakland Lockdown’
October 21, 2009
Using footage from local policing activity in Oakland, intimate interviews with marginalized residents who have been imprisoned or impacted by the imprisonment of close family members, “Oakland Lockdown” brings to light the trauma, destruction and frustration experienced by those who remain repetitively wreaked by the economic, psychological, social and moral stigmatization of criminalization.
We ARE we
August 13, 2009
On the first of January this year, 2009, Oscar Grant was murdered by a BART police officer. This crime gained national media attention and united a community as people from various walks of life came together to demonstrate, voice their righteous indignation and demand justice. People protested, marched, rallied and attended numerous community meetings. Thirty days later, on Jan. 30, my son was shot 17 times and his friend was murdered. There were no marches. There were no rallies. There were no protests.