Yearly Archives: 2020

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“Our power comes from the fact that we create the wealth. Wealth is power; we have the ability to withhold that power.” – Boots Riley, filmmaker and activist, Juneteenth 2020 ILWU shutdown Port of Oakland

Burundi happens to be the birthplace of my hero, Prince Louis Rwagasore. Burundians are not drawn to spinning or showcasing their country, so little is known outside of the biases and prejudices of archived material or contemporary writers, largely Anglophones.

As new issues in our community continue to mount as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine, education of Black youth is taking center stage. In Black communities locally and across the nation, there were already learning gaps, achievement gaps, a digital divide, and a lack of knowledge of self that Black youth as a body were already struggling to overcome before this forced pivot to online school.

Preventive medicine is the best medicine, especially in a capitalist country where the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed long encrusted health disparities that have been in place for centuries. Presently, people have had their ability to move around freely curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine’s shelter-in-place policy.

No justice, no peace! These are the words that are filling streets around the world. This is a cry out from a people who are fed up.

The San Francisco Black Film Festival, starting June 18 and going for a month strictly online, features a documentary, “70 Years of Blackness: The Untangling of Race and Adoption”, by filmmaker Christopher Windfield. Subject Verda Byrd is a Black woman adopted in the ‘50s into a Black family only to find out 70 years later that both of her birth parents were white.

As the longtime publicist for the San Francisco Black Film Festival, I have to go on record and say that “Digging for Weldon Irvine” is, out of over 200 films, one of the most informative and well crafted documentaries that has been selected to screen in the 22nd San Francisco Black Film Festival.

“An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment” – Huey P. Newton, co-founder and Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party

It is said that Mark Twain once quipped that “history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” One cannot escape comparisons with 1968, and with widespread civil unrest, troops in the streets, warring abroad and a rabidly reactionary Republican president seeking re-election while executing his own Southern Strategy replete with dog-whistle appeals to “law and order,” such comparisons are not without merit.

Inspired by Last Friday in Washington, D.C., where “Black Lives Matter” was painted in 35-foot-high yellow letters on a street leading to the White House, San Francisco now has its own “Black Lives Matter” street mural painted by over 100 Fillmore District residents and allies on Fulton Street between Webster and Octavia streets, in bright yellow block letters.

San Francisco – Disproportionately Black homeless residents may face massive police enforcement due to a settlement reached between the City of San Francisco and UC Hastings College of Law, which compels the City to “employ enforcement measures” for those who do not accept shelter placements or safe sleeping sites – yet provides less than 10 percent of homeless residents with such offers.

Oakland – On Monday, young people from across the East Bay led a peaceful march to show solidarity with George Floyd’s family and the Black community at large, which falls victim to the systemic racism and barbarity of America’s police forces.

In all of my 16 years of life, I have never seen a year like this. First a global pandemic, then protests break out globally in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. When I heard about the protest in my city, it instantly caught my eye. One because I am Black, two because I am pro-Black, and three because it was in my city.

The coronavirus pandemic and quarantine has created a massive mental health challenge to an already terribly inadequate mental health system that has been teetering on collapse in the Black community since mental health became a science in this country.

Like denying a paternity suit when the baby looks just like you – "Toxic Metals Found in Shipyard Neighbors".

Inmates at Louisiana State Penitentiary being exposed to COVID-19 say prison officials are not doing enough to protect their health and lives. Department of Corrections violates state and federal guidelines that protect the life and health of those incarcerated due to Angola’s unique double bunked and overcrowding. LSP pays fines to the fire marshal, but fines do not make up for lives lost.

San Luis Obispo – From February through April 2020, prisoners with valid subscriptions to the San Francisco Bay View newspaper were denied their monthly publications by the mailroom supervisor and her sergeant. However, a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation memorandum, dated May 8, 2020, sent to “Wardens/Mailrooms,” subject: “Response to Institutional Request for Approval of Temporarily Withheld Publications,” was denied by Acting Deputy Director Charles W. Callahan.

I was sitting here in my 4-and-a-half-by-10-foot prison cell on San Quentin’s death row when suddenly I saw “breaking news” flash across the TV screen. To my horror, the image that followed was that of a white Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin driving his knee into the back of the neck of a Black man named George Floyd.

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. Part 2 begins with the continuation of a letter written by George Jackson to his lawyer, Kay Stender, from his book, “Soledad Brother.”