Tag: COVID-19

Writer Marcus ‘Zahir’ Blevins joyfully shares his personal, seminal, transformative and enlightening journey into the 25th Annual Virtual Maafa Commemoration, an experience expressed as moving beyond any perceived boundaries.

AfroComicCon brings real and actual kicks this Saturday, Oct. 24 to comic fans old and new, young and old. Virtual this year due to COVID-19, the annual event started in 2017 by the Oakland Technology & Education Center, will be held for free – a day full of live and pre-recorded programming – sponsored by the NNPA, the Oakland A’s and Pixar Entertainment.

"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." COVID-19 has dug in its heals and igniteded the creative juices of entrepreneurs like Jerry Mixon and Yolanda Lewis to join forces in combining their already-established tech entities to light the fires of opportunities for a much broader spectrum of systemically excluded Black, Brown, and other marginalized communities.

At San Quentin Prison on Saturday, Oct. 10, a demonstration and vigil hosted by No Justice Under Capitalism, California Prison Focus and KAGE Universal (Kings & Queens Against Genocidal Environments) will take place to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the Agreement to End Hostilities and recognize the ongoing history of prison resistance.

With love, light and mic, Mother Brown’s loves up the Bayview Hunters Point community. For years Mother Brown’s has been delivering free delicious homemade food to anyone who is hungry, accompanied often by the tunes of Maestro Curtis and San Francisco’s First Family of Song, the Curtis Family Cnotes – body and soul nourishment.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates the U.S. capitalist oppressive impact of legal modern slavery on Black communities and shines an even brighter light on the disproportionate distribution of wealth, privilege and opportunity in society.

Incarcerated people are vulnerable to severe illness due to COVID-19, and the pandemic is spreading rapidly in prisons, jails and detention centers because of lack of health care and adequate access to basic necessities, such as soap and disinfectant.

Taking a look at the lens through which one might judge as anti-Semitic the view of the Israeli regime under Netanyahu and its treatment of the Palestinian people, Jalil Muntaqim argues that criticizing this corrupt government for genocidal, colonial and imperial behavior over, and its clear disdain for the Palestinian people is not anti-Semitic. Instead, it is the undeniable sense of human justice.

Cutting public transportation is a racial unjust act against particularly Black and Brown and low income communities. Working people, students, people with disabilities and elderly folks depend on the public bus system as part of their daily lives and would be further disenfranchised without it.

Prisoners at California’s largest prison, Corcoran Substance Abuse Treatment Facility (SATF), cry out their fear of a re-enactment of the recent deaths at San Quentin from the imposed COVID-19 outbreak. Transfers into SATF are being made with egregious disregard for health and safety practices, coupled with continued historical institutional abuse and neglect.

A costly mistake at age 15 holds 26-year-old Eric Allen Jr. in prison serving a 50-year-to-life plus life sentence, plus COVID-19. Eric intimately shares his fear of dying in prison alone, about his being stripped of all human rights and dignity, dehumanized and treated as an animal in a 24-hour cage who can’t fend for himself, with no voice or caretaker and at the mercy of guards who lie and falsify documents to hide inhumane wrongdoing.

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.

San Francisco County, as of Aug. 10, 2020, will no longer generate revenue from incarcerated people and their families through phone calls. All phone calls and video calls from jails will be free under a first-in-the-nation fixed rate contract negotiated by the Sheriff’s Office. Additionally in April 2020, the Sheriff’s Office eliminated commission or profit in the jail commissary (jail store) and prices dropped an average of 43 percent.

"We need a healthcare system that treats all workers and patients equally, and we need the state of California to make sure that all healthcare workers and patients – especially those inside correctional facilities – can be immediately tested for COVID-19." - Sal Rosselli, president of the National Union of Healthcare Workers

A killer like healthcare denial or scarcity is still free to claim lives and roam our neighborhoods in spite of all kinds of laws passed in the name of justice and equality.

When we least expect it, trouble comes. “I came in contact with a door handle, now I got COVID-19. It’s bad enough my immune system is compromised. I have emphysema and I might not make it out of this.”

Before Warden Craig Koenig ordered a 3 a.m. raid on peaceful Black prisoners at Soledad State Prison, there were no active cases of COVID-19 in the entire facility. Koenig has bragged about his prison being coronavirus-free, which is probably part of the reason that he allowed a transfer of new prisoners into the facility on Aug. 6.

Most Californians are aware of the state’s dangerous wildfire season and the heroic bravery of CAL FIRE staff. Many more are unaware that these fires would cease to be contained and countless lives might be lost without the help of California’s incarcerated firefighters, who earn at most $5.12 a day. A new program promises real jobs with full pay when they’re released.

Government mandate that children return to school via the internet has bred an experimental system called “distance learning.” The educational system, already ravaged by the COVID-19 shelter-in-place-order by Mayor London Breed on March 12, 2020, now faces new challenges with education via internet.

Aug. 8, the day after getting the news that Kali O’Ray, director of the San Francisco Black Film Festival, passed away, came the news that my cousin’s cousin “Cuban Pete” was murdered in Oakland in a different incident, and my comrade Chester from the Black Panther Commemoration Committee was also shot in a separate incident still. This was in addition to a dreaded text from a life-long friend that her sons had been shot.