Tag: COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced schools to close across the world. As an educator, I know firsthand the disparities that exist in the classroom. When the pandemic began, I recognized how inequities in education would manifest themselves as distance education unfolded.

Demand justice! Demand respect! Demand humanity! Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, made a target of abusive and retaliatory practices back in May for publicizing the dangerous, inhumane and unsanitary conditions perpetrated upon himself and fellow prisoners at Pendleton Correctional Facility, continues to suffer retaliation for speaking truth!

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.

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.

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.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: While you’ve been busy reopening the state for business, via your Michigan Safe Start plan, the COVID-19 pandemic is exploding like a biological time-bomb in Michigan’s aging and overcrowded prisons, with a 50 percent infection rate among state prisoners confirmed by recent news broadcasts. Your current plan to expedite the parole of state prisoners who are past their earliest release dates will, at best, only release a thousand prisoners, more or less.

Shortly after the flood in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, local residents risked their lives launching small boats to rescue people stranded on top of their roofs. This ad hoc group, which included many skilled Cajun boat pilots, became known as the Cajun Navy, a volunteer group who have saved thousands of people in other disasters including Hurricanes Florence, Harvey, Irma and Michael.

“If you do not understand white supremacy (racism) – what it is and how it works – everything else that you understand will only confuse you.” – Neely Fuller Jr. (1971)

Our job as pastor isn’t really about preaching great, having a big church or even a nice suit. It is 100 percent about the care, love and spiritual development of PEOPLE. Which means it’s our duty to make sure that no matter what, we are leading in a manner that protects the people that God has entrusted us with.

In my humble opinion being on death row with this COVID-19 pandemic raging is like having another death sentence. I can and do only speak for myself in this essay, and I must admit that I am scared of this virus!

Open letter to Gov. Kay Ivey and concerned Alabama citizens, juvenile advocates and state leaders – Re: Children in juvenile detention facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic: Where is their advocacy and why isn’t anyone demanding their release?

Interstitial lung disease occurs in both COVID-19 infections and in people chronically exposed to air pollution. Little focus has been given to the fact that the disproportionate incidence of COVID-19 cases and deaths occurring in densely populated low income communities of color – like San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point 94124 zip code – are contributed to by the co-morbid risk of damage to the same regions of the lung by both toxic air contaminants and the novel coronavirus.

The neighborhood known as Fillmore or Western Addition has been one of the most, if not the most, organized Black communities in the Bay Area when it comes to providing and distributing resources to its residents in need. This has been the case for years, and in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, nothing has changed.

On April 9, the Kitsap Sun reported that Pentagon and Navy brass were in conflict about whether there’s a COVID-19 outbreak on the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Chester Nimitz docked at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington. I grew up in Bremerton, so much of this story is familiar to me, but like all COVID-19 stories, it’s changing fast.

As COVID-19 outbreaks continue to explode in prisons and jails across the United States, a new report challenges governors to make full use of their executive power to release larger numbers of people from detention in order to create less crowded, less dangerous conditions in the face of the pandemic.