Tag: Black Lives Matter

It is a collective wound that keeps being opened by the racist killing machine of the police departments in our communities of Black and Brown people. We can stop the bleeding by standing up in our collective outrage for Grandma Addie’s Steven Taylor, and every new injustice and pain perpetrated upon another family in our community.

The election is over – the work is not. What’s not working for Black and Brown people, and what’s killing them, is one long familiar list. And there’s the other list that continues to demand our devoted attention to change and build the world we deserve by loving and uplifting our ravaged communities through relentless action.

A spectacular simultaneously real and virtual party/fundraiser lifted the love and light on Nov. 20-21, 2020 in the Bayview community! The SF Bay View editor’s torch was passed by Mary and Willie Ratcliff to Malik Washington who, along with Wanda Sabir and new managing editor Nube Brown and so many others, remembered the ancestors and highlighted art, dance, music, food, interviews, homegrown business and voices from the community.

Assistant SF Bay View Editor Washington shines a bright light on the get-down commitment of Bayview Hunters Point native, Fathina Holmes, to get it done and create space for opportunities and second chances to become realized for people who look like her.

Rope, bullet or knee. Rand Gould gives us a clear and present opportunity to digest the story, the players and the possibilities, to take charge, to identify and build our communities to join the movement and feel the strength of unity to actualize the change we demand.

Kevin Cooper, still caged in San Quentin after 37 years, 35 years on Death Row, speaks with KPFA’s Flashpoints Dennis Bernstein in an exclusive in-depth interview. Cooper talks about simultaneously surviving Death Row and the COVID-19 pandemic, the blues and highlights the opportunity for Governor Gavin Newsom to order an Innocence Investigation, which will shine direct light on prosecutorial wrongdoings and new DNA evidence to support his innocence.

The story of the 2020 sports-strike-wave-against-racism is already one of both inspiration and cooptation. To have any sense of where this story might go, we need to understand why it detonated in the first place.

Black San Franciscans are at ongoing and increasing risk of death by police, with little hope for justice, as a result of historical lack of support from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (BOS) to address policing in San Francisco.

The silver lining is always part of a disaster or tragedy – even the COVID-19 pandemic. Many have experienced this phenomenon with the emergence of innovation, new Black businesses, and new business leaders popping up as the silver lining of the 2020 shelter in place.

Their dirty laundry has been aired. The story on sfbayview.com has been viewed by over 50,000 people across the country. Now Warden Craig Koenig of Soledad State Prison and other officials have decided that they’d better come up with a good reason for the brutal 3 a.m. assault on 100-200 Black inmates. The guards made it clear the raid intentionally exposed the men to COVID-19. Emerge the scapegoat: validate prisoners known not to be active in prison culture, including prison gangs.

To deny with a lie. To not take responsibility. To want to be chosen and resentful when we are not. We as a people today must ask ourselves whether we want to be like Cain, i.e. whether we are willing to let our brother suffer and die because we believe in that moment that we would benefit.

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.

Sacred prayers to everyone sacrificing and organizing to serve those who have lost their jobs, sources of income and housing. And, to those who have tested positive for the covid-19 virus, suffered from other illnesses, had loved ones become ill or, worse, suffered the ultimate tragedy of death from the corporate-state violence of impoverishment, torturous military-police and white racist terrorism. Asé.

Happy Juneteenth or Black People’s Liberation Day, June 19, 1865! Stay strong folks and be safe. Fists up to the youth who are leaders in this Movement for Racial Justice and their parents who raised them righteous.

Civil rights attorneys John Burris and Adante Pointer filed a legal claim against the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department on behalf of the 14-year-old boy who was brutally assaulted by Sacramento Sheriff Deputy Brian Fowell. Deputy Fowell is contracted out to the City of Rancho Cordova as a police officer.

State Sen. Scott Wiener’s re-election website recently posted a Green New Deal pledge, including a vow not to accept contributions over $200 from oil, gas and coal industry executives, lobbyists or PACs. However, according to filing reports with the California Secretary of State’s office, Wiener has accepted over $23,000 in campaign contributions above $200 from the fossil fuel industry, including corporations such as PG&E, Southern California Edison, Calpine Corp., and Sempra Energy. An independent expenditure supporting Scott Wiener has also accepted $170,000 in donations from fossil fuel corporations including Chevron, Southern California Edison and Sempra Energy.

What would MLK think about our fractured and divisive country and world of today? He would be shocked by so many unhoused, hungry, suffering people, mass incarceration, children in cages, extreme poverty, the climate crisis, and trillions spent on the Pentagon, ongoing wars and now, nukes in space (Space Force), a new war for oil looming, and extreme income inequality. He would be upset by the lying fascists running and ruining our country.

While this is not the first time a White House occupant was a White supremacist, the vociferous espousing of ethnic cleansing of America has become an open debate and policy. Yet Black activists, as far as I know, are giving little attention to the prospects of being expelled from the U.S. in light of the U.S. government’s vicious expulsion of Latin Americans, or Hispanics, and others.

There has been no independent community-wide human biomonitoring program implemented in the United States designed to screen residents living adjacent to a federal Superfund site for toxic chemicals and radionuclides … until HP Biomonitoring! The new clinic, at 5021 Third St., next to the library, will be open soon.