Monthly Archives: October 2017

Residents and community organization leaders in the Fillmore District are banding together to ensure that the community benefits package promised to them by the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development actually materializes with the forthcoming sale of the Fillmore Heritage Center. The New Community Leadership Foundation will host a rally on Thursday, Nov. 2 at 12 noon outside of the Fillmore Heritage Center at 1330 Fillmore St. to formally announce the creation of the Fillmore Heritage Center Oversight Board and solicit applications.

Khlood cannot imagine life without her son, cannot accept losing this child forever and knows her son is hurting even more. Imagine being a boy who is loved like no boy has ever been loved before and then suddenly losing that love forever. Nothing can ever replace a mother’s love. If this child is not allowed to reunite with his mother, he will always be empty inside. The 1997 creation of incentivized adoption, which severely limited the amount of time parents have to reunify with children, has been the biggest desecration to the American family since slavery.

For most of the 23 years Romarilyn Ralston spent in a California prison, she made 37 cents an hour, unable to afford crafty birthday cards for her two sons, let alone the financial support she desperately wanted to give them. Ralston did clerical and recreational work at the California Institution for Women in Chino, while voluntarily training women who have recently made national headlines for being on the front lines of the state’s biggest wildfires.

What I loved this year was all the celebratory dancing from just before our ancestors crossed into the unknown territory to landing on these shores and celebrating life and the possibility of freedom, which remained physically just beyond reach for centuries. In small steps as we regained agency over ourselves, even if our bodies then and now continue to be exploited, liberation was a bit sweeter.

Thursday, Sept. 28, 2017, marked the death of the 1,044th person that we know of killed by Tasers in North America, the most recent in Oakland after a man, Marcellus Toney, tried to flee a multi-vehicle accident. This unnecessary death reveals the primary reason why San Franciscans have consistently rejected Tasers for the SFPD. Yet on Nov. 3, the San Francisco Police Commission voted and approved  a renewed proposal to arm the SFPD with these weapons. This begs the question: Who are the proponents of Tasers?

Oct. 20, 2017, marks the sixth anniversary of the martyrdom of Muammar Qaddafi, revolutionary Pan-Africanist and champion of the Global South. This day also marks the sixth anniversary of the historic battle of Sirte, where Qaddafi, along with a heroic army, including his son, Mutassim Billal Qaddafi, and veteran freedom fighter Abu-Bakr Yunis Jabr, fought until their convoy was bombed by French fighter planes. Wounded and demobilized, they were captured by Qatari scavengers and executed by Al-Qaeda operatives.

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Oct. 14 marked the seventh anniversary of Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire’s arrest shortly after she attempted to run for president against Rwanda’s military dictator, President Paul Kagame. The Brussels-based International Women’s Network for Democracy and Peace commemorates Oct. 14 as Ingabire Day, a day of solidarity with Victoire Ingabire and all political prisoners. I asked Claude Gatebuke, Rwandan genocide survivor and founder of the African Great Lakes Action Network, to explain Victoire Ingabire’s message.

A clinician actually fighting for America’s ultimate underdogs – as his academic “focus” – immediately grabbed my attention. Dr. Jonathan Lassiter, PhD, a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor of psychology at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, visited San Francisco this past summer, as he was enrolled in the Visiting Professors’ Program at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at UCSF. He’s a polymath, a critical thinker and notably a healer.

I recently attended the first Caribbean Peace Conference in Bridgetown, Barbados, Oct. 6-7, 2017. The theme of the Conference was “Resisting Nuclear and Environmental Disaster: Building Peace in the Caribbean.” Attendees included representatives from Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia, Venezuela and Barbados. The purpose of this conference was to consolidate a serious Caribbean Peace Movement equipped with a concrete agenda and guiding philosophy.

As the trial over the police murder of Luis Demetrio Gongora Pat, an innocent, unhoused Mayan father, husband, brother and son who was killed 18 months ago on the streets of San Francisco, approaches, the witnesses to his murder are mysteriously dying. One witness, John Visor, died in his single room occupancy (SRO) hotel room on Aug. 11. Last week another person related to the case also died mysteriously in his SRO room in the same hotel. “It is critical that the death of John Visor be examined by an independent agency to uncover any foul play that might have occurred,” said lawyer for the people Adante Pointer.

On Oct. 15, 2017, Prisoners United in Glenn Dyer Detention Center courageously led the way in a hunger strike that will span across two counties and four jails. Santa Rita Jail, Santa Clara County Main Jail and Elmwood D.O.C. will continue the strike in solidarity on Oct. 22. We are calling for support from families and the community to contact the Alameda County Sheriff administration, at 510-272-6878, and Alameda County Board of Supervisors, at 510-272-6347, to meet our demands.

In a disturbing report leaked to Foreign Policy, the FBI manufactures threats from so-called “Black Identity Extremists” (BIE): “The FBI assesses it is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence,” the report reads.

Gentrifiers, the City and developers all share responsibility for gentrification – the process and system that created the encampments. For years, Oakland leaders wanted to make Oakland a hipster playground. They invested in making Oakland attractive to outsiders – gentrifiers. City planners courted the businesses and high-end condos that catered to them. Making Oakland into a hipster playground meant whitening, or at least “de-blackening,” Oakland. The fact that the “hip” people are mainly white and the people in the encampments mainly Black reminds us that not everyone benefits equally from the “new” Oakland.

The Oct. 14, 2015, victory was achieved through three hunger strikes and the non-violent legal and political action of thousands of California prisoners, their families, supporters and their attorneys. Now, however, we believe that CDCR is still engaged in constitutional violations that deny prisoners due process and seeks to put us back in the hole – for many, indeterminately under the guise of Administrative SHU.

“Whose Streets?” exemplifies what the great Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) stated about an organized Black people, that there is nothing we cannot accomplish. Although the policeman who killed Mike Brown escaped punishment, “Whose Streets?” shows how the people still won and continue to win. What is beautiful about “Whose Streets?” is the peoples’ will and commitment to not relinquishing their power and right to claim what is theirs – their neighborhoods, their streets and their right to occupy both.

Shanon Nelson, owner of Amari Hair Extensions, the online hair boutique, is both anxious and excited about the future. The seasoned entrepreneur and former business professor with an MBA is poised to take her love of travel and international business for a foray into the massive $500 billion Black hair care and beauty industry.

Eighty-four percent of the population of Uganda are rural subsistence farmers. They are resisting both rampant land grabbing and U.S. ally Gen. Yoweri Museveni’s attempt to rule for life. I spoke to Phil Wilmot, an American-born activist who now lives in rural Uganda. Land grabbing is one of the manifestations of dictatorship in northern Uganda. In 2012, we started Solidarity Uganda to resist evictions and land grabs.

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