Tag: Martin

Black voices in speculative fiction aren’t new, but awareness of our participation in sci-fi, horror and fantasy is on the rise. This is partially due to the scandals and also to the increase in Black audiences in the sci-fi, fantasy and horror television and motion picture industries.

Radicals and revolutionaries fought for freedom from all forms of oppression. And the last I looked, that was a good thing.

Taking place the day before Oakland Pride, Oakland’s First Annual Transmarch highlighted the plight of Black transwomen in the United States and internationally.

“I know what concentration camps are … I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again.”

Breed returned to her childhood neighborhood to lead a formal unveiling of the brilliantly-colored, collaboratively-created “Spirit of Fillmore” mural enlivening the exterior of the Rosa Parks building.

Prosecuting and convicting Assange for the crime of possessing and publishing classified material would establish a precedent for convicting any journalist, media outlet, or citizen who publishes, republishes, cites, quotes, or even tweets classified material.    

The 15-minute political satirical comedy, “The United States of Paranoia,” by writer and director Rashan Castro is one of the crown jewels of the San Francisco Black Film Festival this year. Halfway through and thousands of police shootings and racial attacks into the Trump presidency, this film could not have picked a more relevant time to debut.

It’s been a hard silence for the past five days since Operation PUSH launched a statewide prisoner strike in the Florida Department of Corrections prison system (FDOC or FDC) coinciding with Martin Luther King Day. Information from prisoners is coming in at a much slower pace than people on the outside had anticipated, but reports are slowly and steadily making their way through the walls, despite many obstacles.

The first book I read after I decided to consciously educate myself to be a part of the movement was Sanyika Shakur’s “Monster” in the mid-‘90s. I was inspired by the sharpness of his ideas, his vocabulary and his grasp on history. I respected him in the same way I respected Tupac Shakur. I knew that one day I wanted to be able express myself as articulately as the two of them.

A recent evening at the African American Museum and Library in Oakland was special. The line wrapped around the corner of 14th Street at Martin Luther King Jr. Way as people lined up to hear Isabel Wilkerson talk about her book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”