Daily Archives: April 4, 2020

The Bay View is serializing the introduction to “Annotated Tears, Vol. 2,” by Talib Williams, who is currently incarcerated in Soledad, California, and has written the history of that storied place. In the spirit of Sankofa, we learn the past to build the future.

There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in America. I am one of them.

We’ve never had to deal with a pandemic like COVID-19 that upended our lives overnight, with schools, universities and most businesses shut down, hospitals scrambling to prepare for an onslaught of novel coronavirus victims, and government orders to stay at home indefinitely.

Civil rights pioneers like Frederick Douglass knew their activism had to include advocacy efforts centered on participation in the Census. That’s the reason Douglass made sure to count himself and his entire family in the 1860 Census. This was a particularly bold act since Douglass was one of few free African Americans who were able to participate in the Census.

Covering medical care costs isn’t part of the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill passed by the U.S. government. Politicians tell us testing for the virus, when it becomes widely available, will be free. If you get sick from COVID-19, you are on your own.

Twenty years before COVID-19, poor and people of color, some with disabilities, and low- and middle-income market rate renters were subjected to the island’s high winds carrying toxins creating a respiratory disease cluster.