Tag: Tuskegee

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.

More than 500 high school juniors and seniors from around the Bay Area convened at San Francisco’s Mission High School for the Seventh Annual Historically Black Colleges and Universities Recruitment Fair. Dozens of students were admitted to schools on the spot while many walked away with merit-based scholarships. The annual fair provides students with an opportunity to get a head start in the college admissions process while learning about historically Black colleges and universities and seeing them as viable options.

Slavery has indeed marked this nation. Its soot leaves a residue the best detergent cannot wipe away or wash out. Truth – bitter, the missing ingredient is hard to swallow, let alone see – yet this is what The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and by extension The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration demands we face. It is not in your head or imagination that these atrocities to other people reside.

“Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp” is a documentary about the illustrious life of a pimp who metamorphosed into one of the most well known Black writers in this nation’s history. In the opening lines of the documentary, “Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp,” taken from his autobiography, “Pimp,” Iceberg Slim states: “In this book, I will take you the reader with me into the secret inner-world of the pimp. I will lay bare my life and thoughts as a pimp.”

Congratulations to William Rhodes on a successful trip to South Africa, where he took a quilt created by his students at Dr. Charles Drew Elementary School in San Francisco to honor the legacy of an international hero, President Nelson Mandela, and returned with art panels from workshops conducted with youth in various townships and regions from Cape Town to Johannesburg.

Gina M. Paige explained that the organization, African Ancestry, started with Dr. Rick Kittles, genetic researcher at Howard University who was interested in isolating the gene that caused prostate cancer, one of the leading causes of death in our community. He found this research methodology applicable in other genetic detective research and so in 2003 African Ancestry was founded with Ms. Paige.

New Orleans has become a national laboratory for government reforms. But the process through which those experiments have been carried out rarely has been transparent or democratic. The results have been divisive, pitting new residents against those who grew up here, rich against poor, and white against Black.

Dr. V. Diane Woods is the architect of the California Reducing Disparities Project’s African American Strategic Workgroup report, “We Ain’t Crazy! Just Coping with a Crazy System,” which looks qualitatively and quantitatively at Black mental health in California and its blatant racialized disparities.

“Equinox” is a ground-breaking film on Black male and female relationships by local director and filmmaker Baayan Bakari. It will be screened Thursday, Nov. 18, 6:30 p.m., at the Black Dot Café, 1195 Pine St., West Oakland. Watch the trailer and learn more about the cast and the film at http://www.equinoxmovie.com.