Tag: Black Codes

The people must be enabled to go into business or expand their businesses so as to employ our youth and unemployed. Truly opening up economic opportunity could resolve previous injustices – with justice. The problem with crime in the community can be traced to lack of employment opportunities for young adults.

We give honor to Mother Earth, her birthday celebrated the weekend of April 22 with many great events in the Bay Area, “Love Yo Mama” in East Oakland hosted by Nehanda Imara of Citizens for a Better Environment, one of my favorite community events. My granddaughter and I enjoyed visiting the Tassafaronga Farm.

This June 19, millions of Americans, particularly African Americans, will celebrate Juneteenth. Yet slavery’s abolishment, under the 13th Amendment, didn’t really end slavery, as many people believe. The 13th Amendment merely codified America’s “peculiar institution” under penal statutes.

Jamie and Gladys Scott walked out of prison Friday into the free world. Yet the sisters' "debt to society" is still far from paid. The conditions of their release stipulate that Gladys Scott must give Jamie Scott a kidney, and the sisters will have to pay out money to maintain their freedom.

Michelle Alexander's most salient point in her book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” is her finding that America’s Black population constitutes a “racial caste” that feeds and perpetuates mass incarceration.

Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” (published by The New Press, 2010) looks at the invisible people and the invisible birdcage that keeps the masses of Black people locked in and alienated from society – the targets of the War on Drugs.

Rhodessa, dressed in an orange prison jumper from South Africa (orange the universal prison attire, like a brand), appears with a whip. All the sensations: cold, hard, eerie darkness, unfamiliar sounds, smells, give the audience plenty to contemplate, especially those in the first two rows where the whip spinning in Rhodessa’s hand over our heads, which she then flicks, we feel, too close to our faces as its breeze and the sting of its impact hits the ground again too close for comfort. But this theme – the Black holocaust – is it supposed to be an idea that brings ease?

We arrived in Palestine on Jan. 2, the fourth day of the attacks on Gaza and the day after the murder of Oscar Grant III by the subway police in Oakland.