Yearly Archives: 2026

As the third-generation director of the San Francisco Black Film Festival, Cree Ray is carrying more than a family legacy — she is helping preserve a vital piece of Black Bay Area culture in a region where Black communities continue to be displaced and diminished. In this conversation, Ray reflects on inheriting the vision of her grandmother, Ave Montague, and her father, Kali O’Ray, while charting a future that embraces new filmmakers, emerging technologies and the next generation of storytellers. More than a film festival, she argues, SFBFF remains a gathering place where culture, community and ownership of Black stories can be protected, nurtured and passed forward.

This open letter to Karmelo Anthony, reflects on race, justice and the unequal ways Americans experience the legal system. Part personal message and part social commentary, the piece examines the public reaction to Anthony’s case while questioning who receives empathy, who receives grace, and how those differences continue to shape outcomes in America.

Look beyond the political theater surrounding redistricting and voting rights and ask a more uncomfortable question: What tangible gains have Black Americans received from decades of electoral representation? At its core, the piece is a call to distinguish between political rhetoric and measurable outcomes, and to build power that extends beyond election season.

The long history of Rafiki Coalition, 40 years to be exact, displays service to black and marginalized people that includes accessible health care, food banks support, community education opportunities, and various policy work.

A woman flees death squad violence in Haiti. For Haitians, this is an all-too-familiar scenario in 2026.

Let me be clear: this moment is bigger than Louisiana. This is a civil rights inflection point.

The conditions are ripe for growing Black political consciousness, but revolutionary movements must broaden their reach to all sectors and classes of the people.

Built to fail: The untold story of Black housing in San Francisco  — Housing Series, Part II

“Burlesque is the art of seduction, storytelling, confidence and performance. True burlesque is theater. It’s dance. It’s glamour. It’s comedy, sensuality, character work, music, fashion, and personal expression all living in the same space." - Jujuana Williams

After spending nearly 31 years behind prison walls, including time in solitary confinement, Uhuru Rowe argues that the people best equipped to explain the realities of incarceration are not academics or policy experts, but those who survived it firsthand. In this powerful reflection, Rowe challenges readers to reconsider who gets recognized as an authority on the prison industrial complex, drawing on decades of lived experience to expose the violence, isolation and dehumanization that statistics alone can never fully capture. His message is simple: if society is serious about prison abolition and justice, it must center the voices of those who have endured the system from the inside.

Every summer, thousands gather to celebrate culture, community and resistance through music, dance, food and pageantry at Oakland Carnaval. More than a festival, organizers say Carnaval is a living expression of African cultural survival across the Americas, tracing its roots from ancient Africa to the Caribbean, Brazil and beyond. In this conversation, longtime Carnaval leader Theo Aytchan Williams reflects on the history of the celebration, Oakland’s unique contribution to the tradition, and why creating spaces for Black joy, wellness and cultural pride remains a revolutionary act in the Town.

Cuba has always defended the need for international relations based on sovereign equality, dialogue and cooperation, rather than hegemonic doctrines or threats of force. The peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean have the right to freely determine their own destiny, without external interference.

The Oakland Police Department has been receiving federal oversight since the conclusion of the Oakland Riders trial in 2003 because of its accountability issues and the fact that it has been run like a mafia that is above the law.

“Enough is enough. The Congressional Black Caucus will not stand by and allow this administration to continue this barbaric policy that generates unimaginable human suffering in Cuba. We are demanding that you end the oil blockade and lift the sanctions on Cuba.” - CBC Chair Yvette Clarke

As San Francisco leaders move to hand control of Ella Hill Hutch Community Center programming to Shakirah Simley through a 13-month lease pushed by Bilal Mahmood and Daniel Lurie, many longtime Fillmore residents say the process has ignored the very community the center was built to serve. Against the backdrop of youth violence, public corruption scandals and growing distrust of City Hall, residents and neighborhood leaders are calling not just for summer programming, but for transparency, accountability and a genuine community voice in deciding the future of one of the Fillmore’s most historic institutions.

For more than 60 years, the U.S. government has economically targeted Cuba while mainstream corporate media often repeats official narratives without fully examining the human cost of sanctions and blockades on everyday Cuban people. In this conversation, Havana-based journalist Liz Oliva Fernández offers a perspective rarely heard in U.S. media — one rooted not in politics from afar, but in the lived reality of surviving, reporting and resisting from inside Cuba itself.

The Y encourages people to recognize their value as individuals, have a sense of belonging, and to become the best version of themselves. The YMCA of Bayview Hunters Point is no exception to this motto of growth.

The film centers around humanizing the lives of boosters, people who steal clothes from corporate stores to resell at a discount on the streets, in contrast to US media's normalization of humanizing corporate and government war criminals and environmental and ecological terrorists. 

Although two previous universal healthcare bills (CalCare) had failed to advance out of the California State Assembly during the last four years, I had hopes that the 2026 version, AB 1900, would fare better.

"Voters have a right to choose between every candidate the Constitution makes eligible. The Secretary of State does not get to thin that field through arbitrary procedural traps." Dr. Butch Ware, Candidate for Governor