Tag: The New Yorker

From behind bars, as a result of being arrested while peacefully protesting in civil disobedience the Vallejo police killing of Sean Monterrosa six months ago, Maggie Harrison writes a respectful open letter to Gov. Newsom asking him to be his word, meet with the family and address investigating Sean Monterrosa’s killing.

One of the most important moments perhaps in the process of a Black child’s life is “The Talk.” The COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the upheaval caused by the recent police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others, are pushing parents with an urgency to have “The Talk” with their children earlier than later.

We can’t sit on the sidelines waiting for someone to save us. We need to link arms and remember that all we have is each other, and we’d better get organized to take housing, to take land, to take back a future for ourselves and our children.

America’s Declaration of Independence has served as a model for other nations. One hundred sixty-nine years after its ratification, on Sept. 2, 1945, the leader of the independence movement in Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh, stood in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi to deliver his Proclamation of the Birth of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, “Tuyen Ngon Doc Lap Viet Nam Dan Chu Cong Hoa.”

I began writing a eulogy for Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores years ago, though she died only last week. Berta was assassinated by Honduran government-backed death squads on March 3. Like many who knew and worked with her, I was aware that this fighter was not destined to die of old age. She spoke too much truth to too much power. Long may Berta live, in the hearts, minds, passions and actions of all of us.

In spite of the AMA protocol on torture, the CDCR’s medical and mental health physicians have yet to offer California prisoners any qualitative medical or mental health treatment, intervention or service. And they have been present and dead silent on the issue of how we prisoners have been tortured in CDCR’s SHU and CMU, where social deprivation – torture – has been the norm for the past 10 to 40-plus years.