Daily Archives: December 7, 2016

Oakland needs the motto “Love Life” as a way of spreading brotherly-sisterly love to everyone. To put it differently, “love thy neighbor,” even if you live in a luxury apartment and your neighbor lives in an encampment. Oakland had a visible homeless community even before people started calling it the “new” Oakland. Treating people like trash and clearing homeless encampments are acts of violence because they violate someone’s humanity – no matter what excuse is used to justify it.

The trial of the killer cop who shot an unarmed Black man (named Walter Scott) is off. Hung jury. If the videotaped killing of Scott wasn’t shock enough, the hung jury certainly suffices. The images are, to say the least, chilling. But video, apparently, wasn’t enough, at least to one of the jurors hearing the case, who refused to convict ex-cop Michael Slager of the killing. The murder of Walter Scott, caught on tape, proves, if proof were needed, that Black lives don’t matter, at least for that juror. And guess what? Apparently, videotape doesn’t matter – when a Black person gets killed by a white cop.

This fight, Andre Ward vs. Sergey Kovalev, felt like the Jack Johnson vs. James J. Jeffries fight of July 4, 1910, between world heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson and undefeated, coming out of retirement heavyweight contender, James J. Jeffries. Both fights were billed as the “Fight of the Century.” Both occurred during a time of hostility and escalating racial tensions between Afrikan people and people of European descent – and in a U.S. known for its Jim Crow laws and the rise of the KKK.