Tag: University of San Francisco

Black Graduation 2021 was a proud showcase of young people who stretched themselves with grit in the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic to proceed through the Rites of Passage ceremony with hearts full and heads held high.

Dear Mayor Breed – The signatories to this letter are members of MegaBlack SF, a collective of Black-led organizations and Black individuals fighting for visibility, sovereignty, dignity and justice for Black San Franciscans.

The new Kevin Hart movie, “Night School,” was about so many things, but like a good artist, as my poverty skola-teacher Mama Dee used to say, Kevin Hart didn’t pound on the table. Through subtle and sketch comedy, pranks, relationship issues, innuendo and character development, he showed an often unseen part of Mans Skoo (as I call it), which is an ableist, racist, classist institution known as Special Education, which so many of us who live with so-called “learning disabilities” know way too much about.

Board​ of Supervisors president and candidate for mayor London Breed is urging first-time voters to register for the upcoming June 5th election. Sunday, she hosted a rally for her #500forLondon voter registration drive, which coincided with the grand opening of her Bayview campaign office. “We need to make sure that every eligible San Francisco voter has a voice in this election,” said President Breed to a throng of supporters.

Board of Supervisors President and candidate for mayor London Breed has announced an aggressive plan to address San Francisco’s homelessness crisis, focused on building more housing, more quickly; preventing those who are currently housed from falling into homelessness; improving street behavior and offering more services for addiction and mental health issues; and getting tent encampments off the street.

Know who Aaron Pointer is? How about Cuno Barragan? Or Dave Roberts, Wayne Cage and Bill Murphy? They are all retired persons of color who currently don’t receive pensions from having played Major League Baseball (MLB). Mr. Pointer doesn’t receive a traditional pension from MLB because the rules for receiving MLB pensions changed in 1980. Pointer and the other men do not get pensions because they didn’t accrue four years of service credit.

Last June, an inspiring and thought provoking art exhibition took place in London, in the UK. From June 24 to July 6, 2016, approximately 20 inmates from San Quentin’s death row showcased their work alongside mine; I make collages and sculptures from discarded objects I pick up along the banks of the River Thames. The name of the exhibition was ArtReach (reaching out with art), and the aim of it was to enable prisoners to share their work with the outside world.

We, as concerned law students at the University of San Francisco, are outraged at the officers of the San Francisco Police Department who shot and killed Mario Woods without justification. This use of unnecessary lethal force, and subsequent denial of fault by the San Francisco Police Department, epitomizes the failure of American policing that has become the spotlight of protest in communities around the country.

It appears that Mayor Ed Lee’s liaison to the Black community, Theo Miller, has been reassigned to direct Lee’s continued marginalization of San Francisco Blacks for the next four years. In mid-2013, Theodore Miller was hired on a three year $360,000 contract to “try” and reverse the outmigration of Blacks from San Francisco using the Gavin Newson-commissioned 2009 Black outmigration report as his guide.

On the 20th anniversary of the demise of my father, Fred Ali Batin Sr., the 18th anniversary of the Maafa Commemoration San Francisco Bay Area – the Ritual Sunday is Oct. 13, 2013; see http://maafasfbayarea.com/ – and approximately the 60th day of the hunger strike to end the inhuman conditions in California’s Security Housing Units or SHUs, I just want to pause and reflect.

Mathias O is 34 years old. He is one of about 600,000 people still homeless from the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. He lives with his wife and her 2-year-old under a homemade shelter made out of several tarps. They sleep on the rocky ground inside. The side tarp walls are reinforced by pieces of cardboard boxes taped together. Candles provide the only inside light at night. There is no running water. No electricity. They live near a canal and suffer from lots of mosquitoes.