by JR Valrey

The only music group that has been able to break the English-only music barrier of street popularity in the Bay has been the Spanish speaking rap group Los Rakas. These Black Panamanian Oaklanders are just as comfortable performing at the Fifth Annual Afro Latinx Concert, which is Oct. 3 at the Ruth Williams Bayview Opera House, as they were performing at the Black Cultural Zone’s summer concert series, held in Arroyo Park in Deep East Oakland a few months ago.

The chemistry that the duo, made up of Raka Dun and Raka Rich, has making music with gives them tunes with thunderous Bay Area rap music beds, that they rap over in Spanish with a Bay Area cadence, which is why it sounds familiar to non-Spanish speaking local rap fans. Los Rakas has a near cult following, where at festivals in Northern Cali it is common to see nearly half a dozen people passing by, sporting their logo of the Raka face on t-shirts and hats. During a trip to Medellin, Colombia, that I took in early 2024, I had some non-Black hip hop heads lose their minds when I told them I was from the Bay Area, and they asked if I knew Los Rakas, and I replied “personally.”

The group is an international phenomenon, and with the rise of international Black musics like Amapiano, Afrobeat and Soca – the Bay needs to give this groundbreaking group its flowers at home, or another hood around the world will recognize their musical genius before we do.

I did this Q&A with Raka Dun, exclusively for the SF Bay View newspaper.

JR Valrey: What does Los Rakas mean?

Raka Dun: The name “Raka” originates from the Panamanian slang term “Rakataka,” which is often used derogatorily to describe someone from the ghetto. We chose this name for our group to assert that being from the hood does not define our character or potential. Our goal was to create a movement that reflects pride in our roots, and thankfully, we’ve succeeded.

JR Valrey: What has your experience been like being a Panamanian rap group from Oakland? What does it mean to embody both cultures?

Raka Dun: It’s an honor to represent both Panama and Oakland. Both places have significantly influenced global culture, and being recognized and embraced by these cities carries immense weight. Our backgrounds contribute to our unique sound and resilience, setting us apart in the music industry.

JR Valrey: I went to Colombia and found out that y’all are huge there. Why is it important for you to cater to an international audience?

Raka Dun: Since our teenage years, we have dreamt big and never wanted our music to be confined to just one city or country. We are grateful for the opportunity to travel and share our Bay Area culture globally, connecting with fans everywhere.

JR Valrey: What two countries, other than the U.S., do you enjoy performing in the most?**

Raka Dun: Mexico and Colombia stand out for us; the fans there are incredibly passionate and express their love openly.

JR Valrey: How would you describe your music?

Raka Dun: Our music is simply different.

JR Valrey: What do you have out now?

Raka Dun: We recently released two music videos filmed in Panama: “En la Esquina” and “Deja la envidia Pelao,” featuring a dope upcoming artist Don Pablo Mures. The message is: Say no to hate, focus on your journey, and never envy others. Make sure to check out both videos on our YouTube channel!

JR Valrey: You have a performance coming up at the Opera House on Oct. 3 for the Afro-Latinx show. What can people expect?

Raka Dun: Expect a lively and fun experience! We love to rock for the people, and it’s always a Raka party when we hit the stage. Pull up on us; it’s gonna be a vibe!

JR Valrey: How can people stay in touch with you?

Raka Dun: Visit our website at SoyRaka.com to stay updated and check out our merchandise. As an independent movement, we appreciate all the support from our fans — shout out to all the Rakas out there!

SF Bay View Editor-in-Chief JR Valrey is a veteran journalist. His work can also be heard on www.blockreportradioworld.com. He can be reached at jr@sfbayview.com.

The post The Makers of Spanish Speaking Bay Area Slap: Los Raka appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

A conversation with children’s book author Jahaira Telles

by Leah Harmony

The issue when sending one’s own child out into the big, wide world, whether it’s just to grandma’s house, a summer camp, school or a friend’s house, is that with every step they take away from home, they’re being influenced, formed and molded. Our children are ill-prepared for all they will encounter navigating the layers of the world. They pass through the frequencies of family expectations, social racism, poverty and the mindless noise of the internet, with its tricky web as the top disruptor. I’d even argue that chaos is a feature, not a flaw. One only has to look at how the world deems the term “self-conscious” as a negative.

The last voice children are taught to hear is their own.

That is what author Jahaira Telles aims to change with “Listen to Yourself: Honor Your Inner Voice,” her affirmation book for children. You won’t find sweet little sayings pretending a few positive words can make danger or injustice disappear. It is a toolbox: language children can use to recognize worth, honor instinct and build inner authority the outside world cannot take.

You do not have to be raising a child to understand the need. Us grown folks all carry some memory of the first voice that made us feel seen — or the opinions that taught us to shrink. We know how a sentence spoken at the right moment can provide reassurance of safety and how the wrong words, repeated by people with power, become a piece of a forming person. A children’s book about listening inward is therefore also an invitation to examine what we say around children, what our institutions say about them and whether the world we have built supports or contradicts the truths we encourage them to speak.

Telles is a writer, researcher, educator and self-described world-builder. Her work sits at the intersection of language, psychology, imagination, environment and underserved communities. But the idea at the heart of this book is beautifully simple.

“Before the world tells you who you are,” she says, “you should have already met yourself.”

For Telles, affirmation first gives a child language — words for dignity, possibility, boundaries, identity and hope. Those words do not remove hardship. They can, however, get ahead of the lie that hardship is the whole of who that child is.

That distinction matters, especially for children growing up under pressure no child created and no child should be expected to solve. Telles refuses to sell affirmation as a substitute for food, safety, resources or justice.

“You cannot affirm your way out of systemic neglect,” she says. “You cannot hand a child an ‘I am powerful’ card and then send them back into an environment where every adult and institution repeatedly demonstrates that they are powerless. Affirmation without material support can become almost insulting. The language has to eventually meet the conditions.”

This is what makes “Listen to Yourself” useful beyond the social media fluff that solves every problem with a positivity meme. Telles believes words can help alter material reality, but not because speaking a sentence magically makes struggle vanish. The power is quieter and more practical.

“Language affects attention. Attention affects choices. Choices affect behavior. Repeated behavior becomes pattern, and patterns absolutely alter material reality,” she explains. “What you repeatedly tell yourself influences what you notice, tolerate, pursue, reject and ultimately believe is available to you. The magic, perhaps, is how quietly language becomes reality.”

She learned the staying power of a sentence early. Telles grew up in crack-era Los Angeles in the 1990s, in the projects, with a mother battling addiction and circumstances that made it impossible to pretend the world was always safe or fair. While on the set of Mario Van Peebles’ Panther in 1995, she became upset when they wanted to cut her hair for a scene. One of the actresses told her, “Just tell yourself it all leads to something new.”

Telles carried that sentence through the rest of her childhood, whispering it to herself. Novelty remains a major theme in her life.

“One sentence can change a child’s entire reality,” she says.

But she is not arguing that adults should paint every painful reality in bright colors and call it fixed. “I don’t believe in teaching children that everything is beautiful. I believe in teaching them that they are still capable of creating beauty inside things that aren’t.”

There is a difference, she says, between optimism and delusion. Children can understand that the world is unfair. What they should not inherit is the belief that an unfair world means there is something wrong with them.

For children experiencing racism and erasure, self-esteem alone is not enough. They need what Telles calls historical, cultural and intellectual location: the knowledge that they did not suddenly appear in somebody else’s story.

The affirmations she offers are declarations of presence and belonging: “This world is not whole without my input and without my impact.” “My version of the story belongs in the collective.” “My existence and my history matter.” “I come from people worth knowing.”

These are not empty pats on the head. They tell a child that their people, their memory and their way of seeing are part of the human record. In a society willing to erase whole communities from classrooms and bookshelves, teaching a child to locate themselves in history is its own form of protection.

Protection means adults have to be careful with the words we ask children to repeat. Take the familiar affirmation “I am safe.” What does that sentence do to a child who knows they are not safe?

“I would never ask a child to override their own nervous system with language,” Telles says. “If their body is saying, ‘Something is wrong,’ teaching them to repeat ‘I am safe’ can actually teach them to distrust themselves.”

Honest affirmations make room for a child’s reality: “I deserve to be safe.” “I can tell someone when I don’t feel safe.” “My body is allowed to warn me.”

An affirmation can describe identity — “I am creative” — without denying what is happening. It can establish a right: “I deserve kindness.” It can point toward growth: “I am learning how to trust myself.” As Telles puts it, “Children don’t need language pretending they’ve already arrived. They need language that helps them recognize where they’re going.”

And adults cannot hand children brave words, walk away and expect them to manifest a better world alone. Affirmation must be followed by advocacy.

“Tell the child they matter and then construct a life that demonstrates it,” she says. “Feed them. Protect them. Fund their schools. Defend their curiosity. Give teachers resources. Build safe parks. Keep libraries open. Create beautiful spaces in poor neighborhoods. Listen when children say something hurts. Don’t make children do all the manifesting. Adults have assignments too.”

The same principle applies to technology because though children today were born digital, they have no understanding of who designed it or what it wants from them. Telles does not reject technology, but she insists it remain in its place.

“Technology should be a tool in the room, not the architect of the room,” she says. It should extend human imagination, not replace teachers, physical exploration, conversation, boredom, nature, books or community. “Technology should open a door and then have the good sense to get out of the doorway. If the machine becomes more interesting than the world, we’ve designed the wrong world.”

The children Telles imagines for the future are “curious as hell,” hard to manipulate, emotionally literate, historically aware and comfortable with complexity. They are creative enough to imagine alternatives and educated enough to build them.

That is what makes “Listen to Yourself” a book for adults too — because responsibility and reality go hand in hand. The child learns to ask: What does my body know? What story have I been handed? What do I deserve? What might I create? The grown-up must answer with more than applause.

“I don’t want children trained merely to become excellent employees inside whatever world we leave behind,” Telles says. “I want them asking, ‘Who said the world had to work like this?’ And then having enough imagination, knowledge, community and audacity to redesign it.”

Listening to yourself is more than a slogan. It is a practice. For a child, it teaches boundaries, curiosity and freedom. For us, it is a demand to build a world where a child’s inner voice is as respected, if not more, than what their ears digest.

There’s not a single most important affirmation in the book; the entire work takes us all to task: A child’s voice is not preparation for some future life. It matters now. Our job is more than teaching children to believe that. Our job is to move and build as if we believe it too.

Leah Harmony is Manager of Production at the San Francisco Bay View and can be reached at leah@sfbayview.com.

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by Mary Ratcliff

SF Bay View Publisher Dr. Willie Ratcliff proudly turns 94 this month during the golden anniversary of his beloved newspaper. A legend not only in the Bay Area but in Alaska, where he lived for over 30 years, he is still honored by Alaska’s Black community every year as an Alaska pioneer.

Now, in the runup to the November elections, the question of whether Trump will lose control of the U.S. Senate is a major issue. At the top of the list of candidates to watch, according to Forbes and Newsweek, is Alaska Native and former Congresswoman Mary Peltola of Alaska, who just beat Trump-supported incumbent Dan Sullivan by five points in the Aug. 18 primary. Dr. Ratcliff’s eldest living son, Pastor Glenn Ratcliff and other Black leaders in Alaska have strongly supported Peltola since she began running for statewide office.

Pastor Glenn Ratcliff observes: “As a Black pastor, I see in Mary Peltola a spirit that resonates deeply with our own history of resilience and fighting for justice. Just as our community has long stood for the dignity of the marginalized, Mary, as a Native woman, carries the wisdom of her ancestors and a profound understanding of what it means to protect the land and the people. She doesn’t just talk about representation; she lives it, bringing a perspective to the table that prioritizes the health and future of all our families. I support her because she understands that when we lift up the most vulnerable among us, we all rise together.”

In the 1970s, Willie Ratcliff was known as the second most powerful man in Alaska next to the governor, just as Willie Brown was known as the second most powerful man in California next to the governor. Both came to San Francisco from Texas.

In 1950, Ratcliff, still in his teens, brought his little family – a wife and newborn baby girl – from Houston to San Francisco, the city he’d dreamed of ever since he saw a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge when he was 6. They stayed in the Fillmore, “Harlem of the West.” Singer Etta James lived down the hall.

He shined shoes until he found a job at the Hunters Point Shipyard that paid both Blacks and whites $1 an hour, which seemed pretty good until he heard he could earn $3 an hour in Alaska. Fresh off the plane in Fairbanks, he was greeted by the dispatcher with a snarl: “No Blacks!” “You want me to break your leg?” young Ratcliff shot back, and he went to work the next day.

He settled in Fairbanks, the state’s second largest city, and built by himself a five-bedroom house for his growing family and earned a reputation for solving problems that stumped other builders there near the Arctic Circle, where temperatures drop from the 80s in the summer to 80 below zero in the winter. Soon national construction companies were putting him in charge of their biggest, toughest projects in Alaska. He could have been a rich man but for his motto, “I never let the door close behind me.”

By the early 1970s, the big house Ratcliff built in Fairbanks resounded with the exuberance of children and teens. Located only a few blocks from the high school, the Ratcliffs’ house was where every kid in Fairbanks wanted to be after school. Willie Ratcliff had grown up in a Black school built by his Black community when the county refused. He’d been taught real Black history by a principal and teachers with PhD degrees who’d traveled the world. He demanded no less for his children.

Ratcliff leaped into politics to make his demands, forming the South Side Voters League in his early 20s, persuading community leaders who were unbought and unbossed to run for office and electing them. He would say, looking back, “When I came to Fairbanks, Black teachers were barred from public schools; when I left, we had a Black schools superintendent.”

Until the world’s largest oil companies built the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline and tried to colonize Alaska as an oil fiefdom, Alaska was one of the most progressive states in the U.S. In 1963, a year before passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Alaska Legislature created the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights. After Gov. Bill Egan appointed Willie Ratcliff to the commission in 1971, the commissioners elected him chair, and by the mid-1970s, Alaska’s HRC was recognized as the most aggressive human rights commission in the country.

Alaska’s Human Rights Commission was a “quasi-judicial” agency, meaning Ratcliff and his fellow commissioners acted literally as judges whose decisions could be appealed to the courts. HRC’s staff of tough attorneys investigated each case so rigorously that the commission’s decisions were rarely reversed. Any Alaskan, especially people of color claiming discrimination that put them in danger, had simply to call the HRC, and an investigator would be dispatched, within 24 hours if possible, by plane if necessary, to open a case if justified and warn the perpetrator to cease and desist.

The cultural genocide of Indigenous people by forcing their children to leave their villages to attend government-funded boarding schools and assimilate into Euro-American society as an underclass undeserving of human rights has come to light in recent years in Canada and northern U.S. states. But few Americans outside Alaska are aware that the genocide was entrenched in Alaska until the 1970s. Complaints brought from villages around the state to the Alaska Commission for Human Rights were consolidated into a major court case settled in 1976. “There is not one Alaskan Native alive today who has not been directly or indirectly affected by this history. It still walks with us,” observes Native researcher Benjamin Jacuk.

Willie Ratcliff was furious when he heard the testimony. Native children beaten for speaking their language, sexually abused, even hired out as slave labor – it sounded like Black history. He pulled a solution out of his own childhood: a high school built and run by local Alaska Natives in every village.

His demand made front page news. Most whites, amazed at his audacity, were adamantly opposed. High schools in white logging or mining camps had long been the standard, but for Natives, NO! Ratcliff’s HRC and the lawsuit brought by Native students won. High schools were built in more than 100 Native villages.

Ratcliff and the Black-Native alliance formed through the boarding school struggle changed the nation when, through construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Blacks and Natives won over $80 million in construction contracts – nearly $700 million in today’s dollars – the most successful affirmative action project in history.

To force their participation, Ratcliff and Congressman Parren Mitchell of Maryland, who had just founded the Congressional Black Caucus, traveled the country holding hearings to demand that in exchange for crossing federal land, the pipeline would be required to contract 10% of its $8 billion cost to contractors of color. Congress complied.

Next, Ratcliff convinced Alaska’s Black contractors to bid together as prime contractors, not subcontractors, and to partner with Alaska Native corporations formed by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. The workforce that built the pipeline was 19% people of color, nearly all Black and Native.

While these victories created pride and wealth among many Blacks and Natives, the oil companies found ways to lock “trouble-maker” Ratcliff out of the economy. Turning to political organizing, he ran for Alaska Senate in 1982 and 1984, winning large majorities of Blacks and Natives and working class whites but losing to a wealthy career politician. In 1987, he returned to San Francisco and in 1991 became publisher of the SF Bay View National Black Newspaper, now celebrating its 50th anniversary this September, as Dr. Willie Ratcliff turns 94.

The Ratcliff influence still thrives in Alaska through Dr. Ratcliff’s two eldest living sons, Pastor Glenn Ratcliff and Stanley Ratcliff, a teacher, who shepherds his large family with his Alaska Native wife Elsie in Palmer, Alaska. Long live the Black-Native alliance!

Mary Ratcliff and her husband, Dr. Willie Ratcliff, publish the SF Bay View and can be reached at mary@sfbayview.com.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WILLIE! 
- The SF Bay View

The post Bay View Publisher Dr. Willie Ratcliff turns 94 as his Black-Native alliance reunites to elect Alaska Native Mary Peltola to the U.S. Senate appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

by JR Valrey, Editor in Chief

The most famous Oakland/Bay Area Hip Hop song ever made is 1995’s “I Got 5 On It” by the Luniz, which used a sample from the Club Nouveau 1986 hit, “Why You Treat Me So Bad?” The Luniz song was recently remixed by the 2017 film, “Us.” which famously turned the weed anthem into the scary movie soundtrack song of the following decade.

The Luniz, consisting of rappers Numskull and Yukmouth, have taken their music from the streets of Oakland to around the nation and around the world.

This article originates from a conversation Num and I had recently about how much he regularly performs in Europe, specifically in Germany, how he is treated overseas, and his new album that is set to drop New Years Eve.

Now I have dozens of friends who are musicians, but very few, if any, who have taken their careers to the heights that the Luniz have, so his insights, history and knowledge of Hip Hop are invaluable. And yes, Num is gearing up to release his first long awaited solo album, which he’s celebrating by having a huge 3 day event in Belize for New Years Eve. So stay tuned, and hear what the laid back half of the Luniz has to say about the world, traveling and his career. Did I mention he produced almost every track on the album?

JR VALREY: Num, you just did a song for a compilation that was honoring two women. One was Assata Shakur; the other was Pauline Lumumba, the wife of Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated leader of the Congo. What made you do that song? What was in you that said, “I’ll participate in this project”?

NUM: Well, first you came to me with what was going on in Cuba, ’cause I didn’t know. And when you told me about it, I’m like, damn, that’s, some fucked up shit, and shit that needs to be spoken on. And then when you came at me with the compilation that your boy (Obi Egbuna) was doing, it just clicked. And Assata Shakur had been exiled. She was in exile in Cuba. So I’m like, that fits in perfectly. Plus, I know who she is, and I know who Lumumba is. I’m like, yeah, this is some history right here that needs to be spoken on, especially now. So I sat down, I figured out what would be good to talk about

But I couldn’t, I didn’t wanna seem like I was teaching people in the song. I just wanted to just put a little bit out there, about the destruction to these women’s lives. And I started writing, and I think it came out very well. I got great feedback. Not a lot of people thought I could even rap on political shit like that. But, you know, when it’s something that you really feel, it’s gonna come out right, with passion.

JR VALREY: That’s what’s up. When did The Luniz start traveling? When was the first time that you can remember, when y’all left the Bay, and what happened?

NUM: OK, you want a story So the first big tour we went on leaving out of California was the Jodeci tour. Jodeci was the headliners, the whole Bad Boy family was there, Naughty by Nature, Adina Howard, this group called The Basement, which Timbaland was in, and then it was us. So the story is, the first day we were in some super fancy hotel or whatever, and me, I’m from the hood, so I’ma throw a party in my hotel room,

So we’re in there cracking after the show, and my girl had bought me a pistol before I got up out of there, right? So I put my pistol up in the skylight. Police come in, and shit’s too loud. Everybody is out back in the pool. So the police come in, and they find the pistol. They’re like, “Whose pistol is this?” I’m like, “That’s mine. That’s mine.”

They take me down to the police car, put me in the back of the car, right? I see my security come up. His name is Anzazi and this dude was a human terminator. I’m talking about how he looked – way super cut, like a human terminator. So I guess somebody told him I was in the police car. I was like, “Hey, they got me.”

And he went to the police officer, bro. I swear to God, he just whispered in this police officer’s ear. That police officer walked straight to me, opened the door, said, “Get out.” I was like, “That’s incredible”. And I wanted to know what he told that officer. He never told me. But now that I’m grown and I know. He’s the man. Straight up. He knew what to say, for reasons that we’re gonna keep on the under.

JR VALREY: Did your music change once you started traveling, and if so, how?

NUM: Yeah. We grew, I would think. I think it did change because of how we saw the rest of the world. We were able to see what this country is like, what that country is like, what this country is like. We were able to see the cultures in those centers, right? And it kind of changed when we were able to hit different states in the United States.

We grew up. I’ll put it like that. You know what I mean? But when we first made the Luniz album, we were just speaking on what we were going through. That was, that’s what it was, you know what I mean? So yeah.

JR VALREY: But your production was from all over the country?

NUM: It was. We got people from New York. We had gotten people from, Houston and N.O. Joe and a lot of cats. So yeah, absolutely. We were always worldwide. That’s one thing about the Luniz. Our music was always worldwide. They thought we were from New York when we first came out. They, they didn’t know we were from the West Coast.

JR VALREY: Why?

NUM: I think ’cause of the flow style. I think how we talk about things, you know what I mean? If I could describe the Luniz right now, I would say the Luniz is comedic. Definitely … street realist. That’s what I would call it.

JR VALREY:And the Cheech and Chong of rap.

NUM: Yep. That’s probably the comedy.

JR VALREY:That’s true. Where is your favorite place to travel inside the country and outside of the country?

NUM: Inside the country, my favorite place to go is home. I love home. I love California. I love Oakland. Yeah. I love my home, you know what I mean? That’s where I’d rather be. But outside of the country, there’s a lot of different places that I love to go to. I love to go to Brazil. I love to go to Canada. I love to go to Alaska. I love to go to Germany and Switzerland. I mean, these places are beautiful places that I would go back to anytime.

JR VALREY:What is the first thing that you do besides check in and handle your music business? What is the first thing you like to do when you hit a new place, especially that’s out of the country?

NUM: I like to go see what the people are about, you know? So I’m going to the biggest city center where everybody “be at,” and then from there I can meet the people, and then we can go to the more hood type of spots, you know what I’m saying, the under spots. So I can see what the people are like.

I don’t like to go and do a show somewhere where I don’t kind of at least know a little bit about the people. ‘Did y’all win the game that day?’ OK. ‘Yeah, we won.’ ‘Congratulations.’

How does that change the show? It makes them feel like at least I put in a little effort to know who they are.And I think all artists should do that.

You’re gonna just go out there and just perform for them, because they like your song? Nah, man, nah. These people came to your show, you know what I mean? And that’s one thing I gotta tell people. I don’t never, ever say fans, because that’s short for fanatic, you know what I mean? And so I say fam, ’cause that’s short for family. They help me feed my family, so that’s what I call them.

JR VALREY:Straight up. Tell us about the new album.

NUM: So think of it like this. For all these years, I’m the type of person that remembers the things that we do when it comes to music. I remember the type of music we made. I remember what was what, at that time. So to me, everything, every album, every song that we’ve done so far, I put it all into all of my music now, when I write, I write. Everything that we’ve done before came into this album. So this album. To me, it’s a classic because I’m writing every song to be a single and something that everybody is gonna love; that’s gonna relate.

Num’s song on the Kotelemela Bolingo compilation honoring freedom fighters Assata Shakur and Pauline Lumumba

That’s what I attempted to do on this album. I think I did it. I think it’s a great album. I think it’s a classic, bro, and I really want people to hear it so they can know where I’m coming from. Talking about the production.

Production is me 80%. I think two or three songs are produced by someone else, but I produce my own music because nobody knows what I like to write to. I can give a producer an idea of something, but they’re not gonna come up with what I see in my head, so I do it myself.

JR VALREY:When, when can they expect it, and how do they get more information?

NUM: It’ll be out December 31st, New Year, new album, all that. I think they’re gonna be very, very happy about what I did with this album. It’s not an Oakland album. It’s not a California album. Yeah, I rep that for sure. You know, I rep home for sure. But, this album is a worldwide album, man, and that’s the only way that I can write.

You will never hear me rap about something I don’t do. You know what I mean? Yeah, I don’t lie in my raps, man. I can’t do that. I mean, we all got songs, where back in the day when we first started, where we’re talking about this and that and this and that, but I grew out of that a long time ago.

This is about what’s going on right now; about me, about family, my whole life, man. It’s not a boring album. It’s not a teaching album at all, but there’s some shit that I don’t like out here, and I speak on it. That’s what it is.

SF Bay View Editor-in-Chief JR Valrey is a veteran journalist His work can also be heard on www.blockreportradioworld.com. He can be reached at jr@sfbayview.com.

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We Are Balogun: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, by Yafeuh Balogun, is an autobiography about coming up in the Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, and his journey of becoming a freedom fighter. It is a powerful first-person account of a man who really molded a movement out of the mud during one of the most turbulent periods in modern history. Yafeuh tells his story about growing up in a household with a Nation of Islam family structure. He was taught about Black history and developed knowledge of self at an early age at Adelle Turner Elementary School. He highlights the experiences that cultivated his character, from playing sports and running the streets with the Polk Terrace Playas to being mentored by elder Black Panthers and Pan-African pillars of the Dallas community.

Through his own experiences, Yafeuh Balogun shares his story about community organizing in Dallas, including the founding of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club during the national wave of Black Lives Matter protests that followed the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others.

The author describes an upbringing grounded in discipline, self-respect, Black history and the principle of community responsibility. These early influences helped shape his understanding of the world and how it works. They inspired his participation in revolutionary political activism and formed his views on self-determination, economic independence and African communal culture. He tells the story from the perspective of a person who was directly involved in local campaigns against police brutality and racist terrorism.

His memoir argues that the movement was a unified effort from many different organizations, strategies, philosophies and battle fronts. Yafeuh’s portrait of Oak Cliff is hella descriptive. He really paints a picture that gives the reader a visual of what it’s like in the hood where he grew up. He gives you an understanding of a community shaped by resilience, struggle and traditions of resistance. He humanizes himself so you can know the mind of a man behind this militant movement. No matter what your cultural or socioeconomic background is, you can relate to something in this story.

Another strength of this book is its emphasis on putting in work organizing boots on the ground and not “conscious celebrity” clout chasing. Yafeuh describes in detail the coalition building, political education, serving the people and proactive paramilitary patrolling of the streets, instead of only popping up to protest as a reaction to isolated, crisis-oriented outrage. This memoir shows how he learned and studied revolutionary politics, put those teachings into practice and developed his own understanding of what methods move the people forward to freedom. Every encounter he had while engaging with the folks he was surrounded by prepared him for the role he played during this defining period in modern history.

One of the dopest parts of this book is its examination of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, which Yafeuh Balogun co-founded in 2014. The memoir portrays the organization as the armed self-defense component that emerged alongside mass demonstrations and civil disobedience. According to Yafeuh, the gun club drew inspiration from Huey P. Newton, the co-founder and minister of defense of the Black Panther Party. Hence the name Huey P. Newton Gun Club. Its focus was on practicing the teachings of Huey P. Newton’s example, explained in Huey’s works, “In Defense of Self-Defense” and “The Correct Handling of a Revolution.” The operation of community patrols is linked to a historical tradition of armed Black self-defense found in groups such as the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Yafeuh argues that visible, lawful armed patrols were intended to deter violence against Black communities while asserting constitutional rights.

The book also highlights the historic event when the Huey P. Newton Gun Club did an armed march on the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, during the SXSW Music Festival to advocate armed self-defense against police terrorism. This action took place while Texas state legislators were on the Capitol floor debating open-carry rights. They were discussing a bill called HB 910, which removes the requirement that concealed handgun licensees keep their handguns concealed and gives them the option of openly carrying them. This armed maneuver agitated political officials to pass the bill.

This operation was inspired by the Black Panther Party’s armed march on the California State Capitol in Sacramento in 1967 to deliver the statement of BPP Executive Mandate Number 1, which denounced the Mulford Act on a global platform. This demonstration caused the restriction of openly carrying firearms in the state of California. When the Huey P. Newton Gun Club did an armed march on the Texas State Capitol in Austin in 2015, it created the atmosphere for HB 910 to be passed and made it legal to openly carry pistols in the state of Texas.

Whether readers agree with this philosophy or not, the book puts the people up on game about the approach of armed self-defense to counter police terrorism, which has been overshadowed by the nonviolent, civil-disobedience, direct-action protests of the Black Lives Matter era. Yafeuh describes the Huey P. Newton Gun Club as one strategic element of the Black Liberation Struggle, which also includes mutual aid, legal advocacy, community patrols and survival training.

Yafeuh breaks down the story of his experience becoming involved with People’s Lunch Counter before the national spotlight reached Dallas. He talks about how his organizing was rooted in political education and direct service to the community. Rather than viewing programs that addressed immediate needs as charity, he describes them as opportunities to build relationships, raise political consciousness and demonstrate the principle that the people have the potential to empower themselves and push the line against all forms of oppression.

His organizing efforts eventually contributed to the co-founding of Guerrilla Mainframe, a grassroots organization dedicated to political education, holistic wellness, physical fitness and combat training. He portrays Guerrilla Mainframe as more than just a group of activists; it’s a close-knit, family-oriented communal cadre training for survival in the fight for freedom. The organization emphasized disciplined study. They are also really heavy on promoting healthy lifestyles and martial arts.

The REALationship Yafeuh built with the Pan African Connection Bookstore and Resource Center in Dallas was also a key element in the process of his awakening. He describes this place as an intellectual and cultural atmosphere where activists, scholars, artists and community members gathered to exchange ideas, study African and African American history and build a Black Power base. He describes the environment of the Pan African Connection as similar to a living classroom that preserves our history and creates generations of warriors and teachers.

The author reflects on the relationships he built with elder Black Panther veterans and other seasoned movement activists by learning directly from them. Rather than romanticizing the Black Panther Party, he portrays these elders as mentors who shared hard-earned lessons about organization, political discipline, security and the difficulties of sustaining movements over time. Their guidance encouraged younger organizers to learn from both the achievements and shortcomings of previous generations.

These relationships reinforce one of the memoir’s central themes: Every generation inherits both responsibilities and unfinished work from those who came before. Yafeuh describes mentorship as a solid bridge between historical movements for Black liberation and today’s struggles against police brutality, poverty and Black-on-Black violence. Through these intergenerational exchanges, he shows how political traditions are preserved, adapted and carried on rather than simply remembered.

As the corporate mainstream media put the spotlight on the Black Lives Matter protests after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Yafeuh expresses the fact that he and his comrades did not view themselves as creating something entirely new. They saw it as keeping the legacy of Black resistance alive. They knew it was necessary to build on the foundation that our ancestors established from the way back in the Reconstruction period, through the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power era and into the current times.

This modern autobiography is unique because the author is not only telling his story; he puts his city on his shoulders and stands on the principles of his elders. He makes the connection between the Black Power wave of the 1960s and the current wave of Black Liberation Struggle. He shows how it’s bigger than the headline-making events. He sheds light on the behind-the-scenes process of teaching people in the streets by setting an example of selfless service. In this book, he reflects on how social movements are sustained not only by protest but by study, mentorship and constantly confronting racism.

In one chapter, Yafeuh gives a brief rundown on the history of armed self-defense in Dallas. He takes it beyond his personal experience and offers the reader a solid lesson on the roots of Dallas’ often-overlooked tradition of Black community organizing and self-defense. He argues that the Huey P. Newton Gun Club emerged from a culture of resistance stretching back decades. According to the book, that lineage includes the Dallas chapter of the Original Black Panther Party, the African American Men Against Narcotics (AMAN) patrols of the late 1980s and later organizations such as Community Movement Builders.

Yafeuh introduces readers to the history of the Dallas chapter of the Original Black Panther Party, paying homage to Fahim J. Minkah and other local organizers who sought to adapt the Panthers’ philosophy to the conditions facing Black communities in Dallas. The author reminds readers that the original Black Panther Party understood armed patrols as one element of a broader political program that also emphasized education, food programs, health care and community empowerment.

This chapter also introduces many readers to the history of African American Men Against Narcotics (AMAN), a Dallas-based community initiative that organized neighborhood patrols during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic. Yafeuh presents AMAN as an example of community members standing up against predatory capitalist gangsterism. He expresses how these patrols are examples of the neighborhood governing itself instead of relying on the police and politicians.

AMAN patrols even shut down Jamaican Shower Posse trap spots. The Shower Posse was backed by the Jamaican Labor Party (JLP), which was aligned with the U.S. government. They were used to undermine the People’s Nationalist Party (PNP) of Jamaica, which was aligned with socialist Cuba. It’s kind of like how the CIA funded the capitalist Contras in Nicaragua to overthrow socialist Sandinistas. It exposes the reality that many of the dope kingpins who are often glorified in urban Black culture are historically capitalist collaborators with the U.S. government.

I found this chapter to be very informative. It covers history that most people haven’t heard about. Much of the national conversation about Black liberation has mostly centered around places like Oakland, LA, Chicago, New York and other Black Power hotspots. Yafeuh reminds us that Dallas also played a key role in the history of the Black Liberation Struggle. By documenting those local experiences, We Are Balogun expands our understanding of how Black political traditions are still carrying on.

The author stresses that each generation of revolutionaries inherited lessons from those who came before them. The political education of the Black Panther era influenced the actions of AMAN. Those experiences, in turn, influenced the development of Guerrilla Mainframe and eventually the Huey P. Newton Gun Club. This chapter encourages readers to view movements not as isolated moments but as evolving traditions shaped by theory and practice.

I rate this book a 4.5/5. I recommend this book as required reading to teach the youth about history that they are closely connected to so they don’t view Black Liberation Struggle as a distant thing of the past that they can’t identify with. In order to make movement relevant for the next generation, they have to see themselves as a part of the history that they must carry on.

With the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party on the horizon, it’s important to showcase today’s victories of fighting back against racist terrorism the same way they did in the 1960s. These stories must be told! We need to hear about the events that took place in this book, like what happened when the white supremacist militia known as the Bureau of American Islamic Relations (BAIR) threatened to pull up to the Black community of Dallas and was met with the Black Power paramilitary presence of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club. Examples of community control, such as getting streets and parks named after real heroes of the hood like Fahim J. Minkah and Marvin Crenshaw, should not seem distant and less relevant.

We Are Balogun offers readers both an intimate personal narrative and an important historical document. It captures the essence of the environment that molded Black militancy during one of the most transformative periods of the last decade. In order to lead and succeed, we must get the youth to read. The lack of literacy in Black communities is a part of the sickness and menticide that we have to cure in order to free ourselves.

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.5/5)

“To describe We Are Balogun as merely a Black Lives Matter memoir is to underestimate its historical significance. It is, more importantly, a contribution to the literature of the Black Liberation Movement, a work that documents the political development of a revolutionary organizer, preserves the organizing traditions of Dallas’ Black Freedom Struggle, and situates the Black Lives Matter era within the longer lineage of Black resistance, self-determination, and community self-defense.”

Eric “E Da Ref” Hunter is a guest journalist for the San Francisco Bay View

The post Book review of ‘We Are Balogun: A Black Lives Matter Memoir’ appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

A bill temporarily prohibiting law enforcement agencies from using electric shock gloves in California is awaiting action by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Assembly Bill (AB) 2760, authored by Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins (D-San Diego), passed the Senate 29-9 on Aug. 31. The Assembly concurred in Senate amendments the same day on a 55-16 vote.

The bill would prohibit state, local and federal law enforcement agencies from using wearable electroshock devices in California until Jan. 1, 2030. It would also bar agencies from using state funds to purchase the devices and require them to update their use-of-force policies accordingly.

Traditional handheld devices, including tasers and stun guns, are exempt.

Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto the bill. If he takes no action, it will become law without his signature.

Sharp-Collins introduced the measure after reviewing information indicating that the devices could cause serious injury or death if used without adequate safeguards and training.

“AB 2760 draws a line that public safety technology must be proven safe and accountable before it is employed. Not after someone is killed or injured,” said Sharp-Collins, a member of the California Legislative Black Caucus (CLBC).

“Our commitment is to protect our communities, especially the most vulnerable. That is what AB 2760 is about and that is what AB 2760 will do,” Sharp-Collins told her colleagues.

The device at the center of the debate is known as the G.L.O.V.E., an acronym for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded a $16.7 million contract for 6,000 pairs of the gloves, which are designed to deliver an electric shock through an officer’s hand.

For most of the legislative session, AB 2760 addressed an unrelated subject. The original proposal would have authorized county boards of supervisors to establish inspectors general to oversee agencies such as animal control departments and county probation offices.

On Aug. 21, Sharp-Collins used a legislative procedure known as “gut and amend” to replace the bill’s original language with provisions restricting wearable electroshock devices. The revised measure was fast-tracked during the closing days of the session.

The initial version sought a broader prohibition, but it was revised following opposition from law enforcement organizations. The final language establishes a temporary moratorium and directs the California Department of Justice to study the devices’ safety and community effects. The department must report its findings and recommend standards and safeguards to the Legislature by Jan. 1, 2029.

“AB 2760 emerged as a last-minute gut-and-amend prohibiting wearable electroshock devices. PORAC immediately engaged and secured amendments protecting traditional handheld/Taser devices, replacing the prohibition with a three-year moratorium and requiring a DOJ study,” the Peace Officers Research Association of California stated on its website.

During the Assembly debate, Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom (D-Stockton), also a CLBC member, thanked law enforcement representatives for helping negotiate the amendments.

“This is something new to us (and) it’s something that absolutely should be studied,” Ransom said. “I appreciate law enforcement for agreeing to work with the legislature to figure out if this is an appropriate tool to be used.”

Neither the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department nor the Los Angeles Police Department has reported using electric shock gloves. However, the Santa Monica and El Monte police departments have obtained devices for testing.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office purchased 10 shock gloves as part of a $35,000 acquisition that also included 10 remotely activated shock bands. Sheriff’s officials had been developing training and policies for the devices before AB 2760 advanced.

State Sen. Tony Strickland (R-Huntington Beach) opposed the legislation, arguing that it would unnecessarily force agencies to change their use-of-force policies and could compromise public safety.

“I don’t disagree with the author that the electric shocks are not a great option, but at the end of the day, I think it’s important to understand that we need to give law enforcement the tools they need to keep themselves safe and the community safe,” Strickland said.

Supporters countered that wearable electroshock devices have not been sufficiently studied and could pose particular risks to immigrants, children, older adults and other vulnerable groups.

Although AB 2760 expressly includes federal agencies, that provision could face a legal challenge. Under the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause, states generally cannot regulate how federal officers perform their official duties. The bill’s restrictions on state and local agencies would not raise the same federalism question.

Assemblymember Mark González (D-Los Angeles), a member of the Assembly Public Safety Committee, warned that the devices could be used disproportionately against immigrants and people of color.

“People who are Black or Brown could be test subjects for these gloves of torment,” González said. “I appreciate law enforcement for agreeing to work with the legislature.”

Antonio Ray Harvey for California Black Media

The post Assembly-member LaShae Sharp-Collins’s Bill Would Pause Law Enforcement’s Use of Shock Gloves Pending Study appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

by JR Valrey

One of the dopest events of the year in the Bay is the 17th annual Fist Up Film Festival, which runs from Oct. 1 to Oct. 4, profiling international films that deal with themes surrounding struggle, resistance, self-determination, love, art, migration and more.

The Fist Up Film Festival is known for bringing rare international cinematic gems to the Bay that deserve to be seen and pondered upon. Bring your family and friends to the festival because it is a great example of political and cultural edutainment. Check out Eli in his own words.

JR Valrey: When and how did the Fist Up Film Festival begin? How did you choose the name?

Eli: The Fist Up Film Festival began out of my experience as a filmmaker. After our film Inventos: Hip Hop Cubano, we wanted to submit the film to festivals and we quickly discovered that the traditional festival system is expensive and extractive. I also felt that many festivals weren’t sufficiently connected to the communities whose stories were being presented. So we decided to flip it and create a festival for filmmakers like us.

The idea was simple and based on two core ideas: A good film can change your life and some films are made to be discussed.

From the beginning, the Fist Up Film Festival was conceived as a community-based, accessible film festival, with free submissions for filmmakers and free admission for the community (powered by people’s donations). Rather than simply screening films, the festival was designed to create spaces where people could watch, discuss, connect and be inspired to take action.

The programming grew around films that center underrepresented communities, cultural identity, social justice and community empowerment. A key philosophy emerged: Films shouldn’t just tell people about communities — they could help create relationships with communities. That original impulse has remained remarkably consistent. Today, we describe our mission as creating spaces where communities can engage with and learn from one another, connect global stories to local issues and experiences and become inspired to take action. We are blessed to say that this is our 17th annual festival and our community keeps getting bigger and stronger.

Our name comes first from our production company, Clenched Fist Productions. When I wanted to create short-form content, I created FistUpTv. This year, we launched an umbrella organization for all of our non-extractive storytelling work called FistUp. For me, the fist represents something that I believe in deeply, and that’s people power. I have always been inspired by pan-African, anti-colonial, anti-fascist and anti-apartheid movements and, of course, the Black Power movement and every movement fighting for liberation worldwide.

JR Valrey: What films are selected for this year?

Eli: You don’t want to miss the films this year. We have a lineup full of life-changing documentaries.

Oct. 1, Thursday — Culture Keepers (a night of short films)

The man behind the magic is Berkeley-based international filmmaker and cinematic giant Eli Jacobs Fauntauzzi, who, with the support of his brother Khalil, has created inspiring films in culturally rich and politically charged places like Ghana, Cuba, Colombia, Puerto Rico and more.

From the Kingmakers in Oakland to Barrio Chino in Havana to the Amazon in Brazil, these short films remind us of the importance of culture keepers.

Oct. 2, Friday — Let the City Speak — Follows the journey of Quetzal, a Chicano rock band that emerged from East Los Angeles.

Post-screening conversation with Director Akira Boch.

Oct. 3, Saturday — Mujer Mariposa — Follows three first-generation daughters of migrant and refugee women as they navigate the complexities of building a home in the United States.

Post-screening conversation with Director/Producer Diana Cervera and Cinematographer/Editor Magdalena Ramirez.

Oct. 4, Sunday — Honoring Our Ancestors (short films about Caribbean resistance)

Mataron A Pedro, about the revolutionary Pedro Albizu Campos from Puerto Rico; Beach Inna Bondage: The Fight for Jamaica’s Coastline; and Call of the Jab from Granada, with a post-screening conversation with director Fletch Power.

JR Valrey: How and why did you select those films?

Eli: We believe that documentary films don’t need to just show the problems of the world and make us feel helpless. Documentary films can show our power and our creativity, they can share solutions to the problems we face and they can leave people inspired and ready to take action to make this world a better place. That’s how we select our films.

JR Valrey: Do you have any filmmakers coming? Where are they coming from?

Eli: This year, we are proud to welcome filmmakers representing communities from the Bay Area and beyond, including Fletch Power representing Grenada, Akira Boch from Los Angeles, and Diana Cervera and Magdalena Ramirez, two Transborder Chicana artists rooted in the San Diego–Tijuana borderlands.

What makes Fist Up Film Festival unique is that we don’t just bring filmmakers to share their work. We also bring local grassroots organizations and organizers who are actively working on the same issues explored in the films. The conversation doesn’t end when the credits roll. Audiences have the opportunity to connect directly with people doing the work here in our communities, learn how to get involved and turn inspiration into action.

JR Valrey: What do you want people to get out of the film festival?

Eli: I want people to see reflections of themselves, with the possibility of healing, building community, feeling loved and seen. I want people to learn and want to learn more. I want people to feel their own power and beauty. We will experience storytelling that can build relationships, spark dialogue and become a catalyst for community action. Together, we will leave inspired to imagine and create a more just world.

JR Valrey: How can people get more info?

Eli: Web: www.fistup.tv/festival

IG: @FistupFilmFestival

JR Valrey is a veteran journalist and Editor in Chief at the San Francisco Bay View. He can be reached at JR@sfbayview.com

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by Leah Harmony

According to a civilian-made interactive map there have been 48 Black people found hanging from 2018 to 2026 in the United States. Families and communities of the deceased view these deaths as highly suspicious. They have also expressed feelings that the investigations were insufficient or classifications were premature.

Zero cases have been publicly ruled homicides as of September 2026.

This year has seen the public profiling of other race-related incidents. The internet responses to these incidents show a white vitriol that is unprecedented in modern times. They seem emboldened by the current president’s commitment to ignore the history and reality of Black people in America.

Mississippi. July 2026. Nolan Xavier Wells, 18, traveled by boat with white friends to Mississippi’s Horn Island. His companions returned without him. His body was found two days later. Ignoring Mississippi’s violent and racist history, vocal defenders of white America say Black people’s low IQs are making us think racism is involved. They wonder what we expected, since “Blacks can’t swim.”

Frisco, Texas. June 2026. Karmelo Anthony, 18, an excellent student with no criminal record, received a 35-year prison sentence for using a knife in self-defense. He acted after a fellow athlete and others cornered him, attempting to push him from the tent where he sought refuge from the rain. Karmelo was called a “murderous thug” who needs to be “hung in the streets.” They made memes. So many memes.

Columbia, North Carolina. June 2026. Karmelo’s jury selection began the same day Rick Chow was acquitted of all charges after fatally shooting 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton, who was falsely suspected of stealing a water bottle. Because the child was also armed for protection, he was called a thug, a violent predator and a thief. They have said these things to his grieving mother.

Senatobia, Mississippi. That same month, Walmart police shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley. The police claim the driver drove right at them. The independent coroner says the baby was shot in the side. They say the baby’s death is her fault because she should not have been with someone who may have been stealing.

In 2026, this is where we are.

The beast feeds itself

If America and her racism were a metaphor, she’d be a beautiful tree with rotten roots. After she flowered, she’d grow poisonous fruit, unrecognizable as something from nature. The fruit that fell would soak into the earth, and the dark juice would feed her sickly roots, so she could do it over and over and over again.

For just a moment

In the time of Black Lives Matter, there was a moment, before the corporation of the same name took the money and ran, when it felt like there could be a reckoning. When Joe Biden was coming into power he directed his loudest voice toward activated Black youth and enraged white liberals, promising long-overdue equality and equity. His defining campaign pledge was big: He vowed to end white supremacy.

The political right viewed his impossible promise as a threat to the nation’s core values. It was then they began planning how to end his efforts and stop such a thing from ever being possible again.

Biden ran his election campaign almost completely on the infamous “many sides” propaganda and the people’s outrage over the George Floyd travesty. With that as a starting point, the radicals on the political left spent four years gaslighting the masses and overplaying cards that weren’t theirs to play, ironically providing all the kindling MAGA needed for the racist firestorm we feel today.

Reverse racism

In Trump’s second term, the first thing to go was the word “racist,” which activists and their opposition had already effectively gentrified, followed by the term “stay woke.”

Through the most ridiculous demands of over-correction imaginable and the shoving of a broken history down the throats of an under-educated population, Black people became public enemy No. 1 to MAGA — in real life, online and from within our current administration.

Starting in the White House, all anti-discrimination efforts have transitioned into anti-DEI efforts. Lawsuits have been filed and won for white men “negatively affected” by the elimination of the usual preferential hiring practices. It doesn’t matter that DEI and affirmative action disproportionately benefit white women. Or that Black people are the smallest recipients of DEI policies. Black people were made the face of DEI and therefore became the largest recipients of the MAGA backlash.

In response to the “very bad white man” label attached to each anti-racist campaign during Biden’s time in office, “the very bad white man” has come undone. He and his president have decided to exonerate all white men, past and present, from wrongdoing. Luckily for Trump, this includes himself and his friends on the one crime list they can’t say Black people appear on.

The killing of Black people in America, though generally accepted, is not only fine but celebrated in most cases and therefore meme’d ad nauseam. Because of the exorbitant way George Floyd was commemorated, MAGA took it to mean that Black people consider Floyd a hero, up there with Martin and Malcolm.

Their delusions activated fellow conservative whites to raise mediocre men, and even their wives, to royalty status. In retaliation for statues desecrated or relocated by the left, they consider it justifiable to erect statues honoring these basic men and mandate their existence on college campuses.

Using our tax dollars, more than 13,000 white South Africans have been relocated to America through our refugee program and given land to “save” them from discrimination by Black people in Africa. This is real. This is happening..

In the middle of an AI revolution, Elon Musk trained his large language model with the same out-of-context, nonsensical arguments that users of his social media platform regurgitate with authority. Many of those users have loud platforms and millions of followers.

They don’t “believe” in racism. Or they say only white people experience it. This is why, they say, they have “Black fatigue.”

They believe Black people are coddled and that they are forced to walk on eggshells around us. This makes them angry because they also believe Black people are the most violent, most criminal group on the planet.

Black past

They don’t see a lack of resources as a government obligation. It is, of course, the fault of Black people. They raise their children with this as truth.

Ancestral trauma does not exist if the traumatized have dark skin. Nor do remnants of the psychological and physical abuse form the familial foundations of slavery’s descendants.

To them it doesn’t matter that families torn apart in decades past contributed to fatherless children, poverty, rising crime statistics and incarceration. All of that, they say, is just Black people blaming the white man and playing the victim. Always playing the victim.

They believe and teach that the burning of Black towns is a myth and that Black people tear apart beautiful white cities, not in protest, but because we don’t get our way. To racist white people in 2026, there is no exhaustion worthy of protest. The brutality and unequal treatment in question are just more whining.

They joke about not making the Black kids mad because they’ll stab you, then burn the city down if they get in trouble for it.

In 2026, American Black people don’t have a right to resist. These people sincerely think racism is a plot by Democratic presidents of the past to eliminate the almighty white man who created every aspect of our modern existence.

Back to reality

Not in 2020, nor in any year before it, was white supremacy or racism solved. In the end, Black people are the ones left holding the bag. Many, in search of a brighter day, put aside the former president’s indiscretions to save themselves from the current president.

Some never knew Biden proudly declared himself the Last American Dixiecrat while campaigning for segregation. In truth, he was a man who used the word “nigger” on the Senate floor with the kind of comfort and arrogance that, ironically, only an American white supremacist could have.

This is America, where there’s nothing more American than racism. An aging white man set the stage for another aging white man to hand it back to the first aging white man. We have all lost 12 years in the meantime, still trying to explain to the programmed masses why kids like Karmelo Anthony need Black people on their jury and why it’s not OK to make a lynching joke or an “I can’t breathe” joke on Netflix.

This is the poison seeping into the earth, feeding the roots. This doesn’t get better. This kills us all, with Black people on the front line.

Constant arguments about things that should be common knowledge continue to go nowhere. So what’s lacking? How do we end this cycle?

Start somewhere

People on both the left and right need to understand the role of slavery, Jim Crow and the long list of discriminatory, murderous, debilitating and covert actions that followed. They need that history to understand why the monsters America created are “chimpin’ out.” No one can teach empathy, but we can offer tools.

Tools to see racism for what it is.

It is a thing so deeply rooted that there isn’t even another reason to offer for the chaos and karma of America. Racism isn’t a single action or an on-switch to someone’s rage or counter-rage. Racism is a living, breathing, breeding thing.

It is the design of “great men,” philosophers, psychologists, alchemists and doctors. It was written with quill pens by writers who stole libraries and men who knocked noses off statues, burned sacred books and felt righteous doing so.

Their children became the aristocrats and then the high society that ordered racism fashioned. They sewed it onto flags of victory, passed on to explorers who murdered countries, then gave away stolen land for free to create civilizations of desirable people, using altered Indigenous doctrines and structures left standing.

These celebrated men of honor and royalty, these men with family crests, had children with their sisters and their sisters’ children so their bloodline remained pure enough to sit on thrones, then benches, then boards. They are also presidents, world bankers and prime ministers, part of a machine made of hate at least as strong as what we call love.

These people have woven racism through so many timelines that it must be in the DNA of their children’s children. Racism is written into religious doctrines and stays quiet in thoughts that will never see the light of truth.

They must know it is so perfectly crafted that its effects are what these teen takeovers and sideshows are made of, and that those per capita crime statistics would make their buried kings smile, if such a thing were possible.

In the end

Racism is not of our making. It is a thing of white people and so white people must fix it.

Leah Harmony is a journalist and Manager of Production for the Bay View, She can be reached at leah@sfbayview.com.

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by Tabari Morris

After the California Supreme Court ruled that a single use of the N-word can support a workplace-harassment claim, the former District Attorney’s Office investigator now faces a new and extraordinary turn: San Francisco’s entire Superior Court bench has recused itself, and an Alameda County judge will preside over the trial beginning Oct. 5.

“I’m hoping for victory because I think I deserve it,” Twanda Bailey says. “I was the one that was called a racial slur. I didn’t do anything, and they made me feel like I did something wrong.”

Twanda Bailey’s workplace discrimination case is headed back toward trial in San Francisco Superior Court after a unanimous California Supreme Court decision reshaped state law — and after more than a decade in which Bailey says the City and County of San Francisco treated her report of being called the N-word as if she were the problem.

The consequences of this case reach far beyond one office: It establishes that an isolated act of harassment can be unlawful when it is severe enough, including a coworker’s use of the N-word, and it raises a plain question for every employer from San Francisco to the rest of the world: What happens when a Black worker reports racial violence in the workplace and the institution charged with justice refuses to act?

Her hope, she said, is larger than her own remedy. “I’m hoping they won’t go through what I went through. I’m hoping my case would definitely change the way the city deals with African American workers, because we are treated different.”

Bailey worked a little more than 14 years as an investigator in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. Her attorney, Daniel Bacon, said the incident began in January 2015, when a coworker told Bailey that a mouse had run toward her desk. Bailey reacted to the mouse; Bacon said the coworker then walked by and said, “You niggers is so scary.” Bailey, he said, was stunned because the two had worked together for years.

The next day, the incident was discussed with other coworkers at a holiday gathering, and a supervisor said she would report it, Bacon said. Bailey believed the report would lead to action. Instead, she says she encountered a system that did not protect her or even reliably document what she had reported. She later met with administrators in the District Attorney’s Office, and Bacon said a manager’s deposition testimony indicated the coworker did not squarely deny making the statement at the time. “There was no real denial,” Bacon said. “That didn’t happen until the lawyers got involved.”

By March, Bailey asked the office’s human-resources manager for a copy of her complaint. “There is no complaint,” Bacon recalled the manager telling her. He said Bailey was warned that, because she had spoken to other people about what happened, she could be accused of creating a hostile work environment for the coworker who had used the slur. Bailey and the coworker were not immediately separated. “They kept them working together. There was no separation,” Bacon said.

Bailey then filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The San Francisco Police Department later contacted City HR after Bailey told a police-department attorney about the incident and about the treatment she said followed. Yet in a July 22, 2015, letter described by Bacon, City HR informed Bailey that her allegations were insufficient to support an inference of harassment, hostile work environment or retaliation, and that her complaint would not be investigated. “So basically the city takes the position that being called the N-word was not harassment,” Bacon said.

That position is at the heart of Bailey’s long legal fight. Her case was dismissed in trial court and the dismissal was upheld on appeal. In 2024, however, the California Supreme Court unanimously reversed. The court held that “an isolated act of harassment may be actionable if it is sufficiently severe in light of the totality of the circumstances” and that a coworker’s use of “an unambiguous racial epithet such as the N-word may be found to suffice.” Justice Kelli Evans wrote that the slur carries “the stinging barbs of history, which catch and tear the psyche the way thorns tear at skin.”

For workers who had previously heard that one single event was not sufficient for a claim, the decision has turned the tables on their heads. “For years, racial harassment, sexual harassment, a lot of times employers would take the position, ‘Well, it’s not severe and pervasive,’” Bacon said. “The Supreme Court’s decision makes it clear … it’s not a matter of how many times you use the slur.” He said the decision requires employers to examine the totality of the circumstances, not hide behind a numerical threshold while a worker absorbs the harm.

Bacon said the legal question now is also about what the employer did after receiving notice. Where harassment is committed by a coworker rather than a supervisor, he said, an employer’s defense depends on proving it took immediate corrective action. “If they didn’t investigate it, didn’t consider it harassment, how could they have taken action to tell [the coworker], ‘Hey, look, that’s harassment. You can’t use it. And if you use it again, you can be disciplined up to termination’?” Bacon asked. He said the only measure taken was to have the coworker acknowledge receipt of an anti-harassment policy.

The City’s public position after the Supreme Court ruling, as recounted by Bacon from a press statement, was that San Francisco does not condone or tolerate the language at issue and took immediate corrective action. Bacon disputes that account. “Even though they lost, they claimed the city did corrective action when the facts are going to show they did the opposite,” he said. The City’s response to the current allegations and evidence will be tested in court; the claims described here remain allegations Bailey is pursuing against the City.

Bailey says the institutional response changed the course of her life. Bacon said she sought psychiatric care, went on leave in 2018 and tried unsuccessfully to secure a job outside the District Attorney’s Office. He said her psychiatrist later medically separated her from city employment, and that Bailey’s disability-retirement application was delayed for years before a hearing found her disabled. Bailey’s Social Security disability claim was also approved, he said. The City, Bacon said, has continued to contest the extent of harm and liability.

Her case also arrives in a city with a well-documented history of Black municipal workers describing unequal treatment. Bacon recalled three days of San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearings in 2018 where African American city employees came forward with their stories. Bailey testified at those hearings, he said. “Three days of all these stories of African American workers, but nothing changed,” he said. Bailey added that people from other communities spoke in support of Black workers, saying they had witnessed the different treatment.

That is why Bailey’s case matters to SF Bay View readers: It is not only a fight over a word or one employee’s claim. It is a test of whether a public institution that prosecutes wrongdoing will recognize racial harm inside its own walls; whether Black workers can report discrimination without being isolated, threatened or disbelieved; and whether a Supreme Court victory becomes lived protection rather than another principle kept on paper. It is also a warning to employers everywhere that they cannot excuse a slur’s violence by calling it a one-time event.

“I hope that employers take from that, that it creates a working environment, especially for African Americans, where they don’t have to be subjected to that slur,” Bacon said. “And if it happens, they should be disciplined appropriately instead of being protected like the city has done here.” Bailey’s persistence has already set a statewide legal precedent. What happens next in San Francisco can set the stage for whether that precedent reaches every job site where workers are still being asked to endure what should never be tolerated.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated following interviews with Twanda Bailey and her attorney Daniel Bacon, along with an update provided by Brenda McGann with the document which states that the entire San Francisco Superior Court bench stepped down from the case, Judge Rebekah Evenson of the Alameda Superior Court was appointed, and the hearing is scheduled for Oct. 5. The update provided by Ms. McGann does not explain the reason behind this recusal. The City and County of San Francisco had not provided their version of the events by print time.

Tabari Morris is Managing Editor at the San Francisco Bay View as well as an investigative journalist. He can be reached at Tabari@sfbayview.com.

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by JR Valrey

The Indica Auntie aka Lady Namastizzle is one of the more famous Black cannabis authors, educators and entrepreneurs hailing from the Bay Area. This article is the result of a very informative conversation that she and I had around different aspects of the cannabis world, including the scars of the Crack Era, heavy taxation that California state government imposes on cannabis business owners, her own “indicactivites” and more.

JR Valrey: You and I recently had a dope conversation about the stigmatism that crack has left in the minds of Black people when it comes to using cannabis pipes, especially glass pipes. Can you expand on that? How does that stigmatism affect our health in the long run?

Lady Namastizzle: De-stigmatizing glass is about the effect that the Crack Era and the war on drugs had on our community, acutely reflected in the cannabis culture. I have come to witness the trauma of glass, the fear of rosin, hash and torches on the Black and Brown communities. The Crack Era trauma didn’t disappear. It shows up in other ways. While we minimally use glass pipes or rarely participate in the concentrate culture, we are traumatized and uninformed. It’s not about health in this aspect; it’s about healing trauma and proper education on a variety of consumption methods. When you understand the trauma of the Crack Era, the effects of the war on drugs and speak the same language, it allows a release of pain, knowing we are not doing the same thing, and being able to make connections in our reflection of language and culture.

Not to say that dabbing doesn’t have her benefits too, like it’s great for chronic pain, offering fast relief from anxiety and nausea. It is considered to be a cleaner smoke and requires a lot less product with a higher THC content.

JR Valrey: How does that stigmatism affect us in the long run, in reference to business?

Lady Namastizzle: As of this article, I have only heard of two Black-owned concentrate companies located on the East Coast and two Brown-owned concentrate companies located in the Los Angeles area. After asking others in the industry, just to get feedback, I can’t say I wasn’t surprised. Some never thought of it and even asked if there was a market for us in that sector of the industry. When as far as I am concerned there is a market for us in every market, but I was also informed that it’s the equity required in these sectors that isn’t necessarily accessible to us in business, that keeps us out of spaces, markets, education and holding on to generational trauma that we deserve to let go of.

JR Valrey: What is the difference between rosin and resin? Who should use what?

Lady Namastizzle: Concentrates can be complicated enough with all the terms, but it’s important to be informed. Many think they are the same; however, let the spelling be your guide. Rosin, with an O, it takes heat and pressure to create. Resin, with an E, requires chemicals such as propane or butane to create. Think gas tank E, chemicals, and O for organic without chemicals. The sticky brown substance is resin on the back of the papers or cigars when smoked. Hash is another term which many of us have heard of. Hash is kief compressed and treated similar to rosin, with heat and pressure, but also there’s a few other extraction methods.

These terms are important in personal consumption choices, not necessarily just for who should or shouldn’t use them. Being able to make an informed choice on how and what you consume, is the key.

JR Valrey: What have your experiences been like as a Black cannabis women entrepreneur when you attend these different cannabis conventions?

Lady Namastizzle: When I first began going to events, it was for networking connections in the industry. Then too more often than not, I was the only Black woman in the room, and it became about being in these spaces to learn more to bridge the gap for my community. Like Hash Week happened this past July. It was amazing talking to vendors about the trauma of rigs, torches and the reactions to concentrates. They were mostly white males, and being the only Black women in any space can be exhausting sometimes.

JR Valrey: Can you talk about your cannabis yoga classes? When and where are you offering them?

Lady Namastizzle: One on one classes are available, and I am special event focused. Cannabis advocacy and education is the most important highlight now, with laws changing and targeting small businesses, we need to know all we can. Some laws like the “Hemp Ban” can and will affect class offerings. Navigating this helps to make sure there will be classes in the future for me and others. Currently I host “De-stigmatizing Glass Experiences” and a “Ladies Night” at Moe Green’s dispensary in San Francisco, once a month: making glass accessible, having new experiences in safe spaces, and with people that look like us. I am for the culture and the representation of my people.

JR Valrey: Can you talk about your book? What is it about?

Lady Namastizzle: My book “Indica Aunties” duality edition, is about the historical significance of cannabis used by women throughout history, the holistic use of cannabis in aiding with a variety of feminine ailments, as well as endocannabinoid system pairing with herbs, plants and mushrooms including magic mushrooms. I just wanted women to have options in pain, healing and natural remedies passed on, not bought on some shelf with ingredients we can’t pronounce; custom made for you personally for your body’s needs: from sitz baths for postpartum, tinctures for PMS, teas for womb care, infusion for lube, suppositories for menopause to mushrooms for overall health. “Indica Aunties” duality edition has got you covered.

JR Valrey: With the high state taxes and all the required permits needed, is it worth it for Black entrepreneurs to invest in 2026 in cannabis? Why or why not?

Lady Namastizzle: The cannabis market is overflowing with all the fees, rules, regulations and taxes; it’s scary and overwhelming. The market is hard. Many people stick to the same format, such as prerolls, eighth and gummies. What about the other elements of cannabis – pipes, concentrates, edible baked goods, candy etc? Black men hold minimal ownership, and Black women hold even less equity and ownership. With any business, loss can happen but Black ownership is always worth investing in!

JR Valrey: How could people contact you?

Lady Namastizzle: Follow me on IG @ladynamastizzle to contact me for speaking, hosting, or yoga. Email me at ladynamastizzle@gmail.com.

SF Bay View Editor-in-Chief JR Valrey is a veteran journalist. His work can also be heard on www.blockreportradioworld.com. He can be reached at jr@sfbayview.com.

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by Leah Harmony

Hip Hop grew up and the work kept movin’

Twenty-five years ago, Hard Knock Radio entered KPFA’s afternoon drive time as “a talk show for the Hip Hop generation.” On airwaves Hip hop had graduated from background music between “serious” subjects and begun making news of its own. It was now a way into politics, policing, housing, education, war, culture and the communities public radio too often discussed from a distance—or ignored.

The show grew out of a fight over who public radio belongs to. Following massive resistance to the attempted corporate takeover of KPFA and the Pacifica network in 1999, listeners demanded programming that spoke for and to them, especially young people of color. Hard Knock Radio helped answer that demand. It brought the people living the story to the microphone as analysts of their own conditions, not specimens to be studied after think-tanks and scholars decided they had become newsworthy in the moment.

A quarter-century later, co-host and producer Anita Johnson and host, producer, journalist, educator and hip hop historian Davey D are still doing that work. I interviewed them separately, but their answers kept finding one another. That speaks to the overall formula of the duo. It works. The conversations have been edited and interwoven here as a roundtable. Johnson sees an anniversary; Davey D did not even realize it had been 25 years. Together, they explain why Hard Knock Radio has lasted without treating longevity as permission to kick back and enjoy the ride

Leah: Happy 25th anniversary! The show began as “a talk show for the Hip Hop generation.” What happened when that generation — and hip hop itself — grew up?

Anita:: Twenty-five years ago, young people were fighting to be heard and challenging systems from the outside. Now many are parents, educators, organizers, journalists, elected officials, entrepreneurs and cultural leaders.

Hip hop is no longer outside the mainstream. That creates opportunity and tension: Who controls the narrative, who profits and is its political consciousness still being amplified?

Davey D: Hip hop is 50 years old, and at 50 it has a maturity that should come to the forefront. Your peers control levers of power in institutions. We need to discuss how to affect those levers. You went to school with the mayor. Tell us what we need to do — not only who the best rapper is.

We are hip hop, period. But we should not have to lead with being rappers when trying to resolve a missing-persons case.

Leah: In the beginning, did people resist the “talking” part of a hip hop show?

Anita: Yes. Conversations on politics, racism, policing, housing, education and social movements — presented by people of color during afternoon drive time — generated responses rooted in fear and racism. Voicemails called what we played “jungle bunny music” and used other racial epithets.

KPFA’s audience was not accustomed to our voices or communities. But we were intentional: Communities of color and young people would not be subjects somebody else studied. They would bring their own analysis and lead the conversation. But an audience was waiting to hear itself reflected.

Davey D: We brought a hip hop perspective into the burgeoning activist scene. The conversation grew beyond quote-unquote hip hop. It is about what is happening in the community and where we can fill a void as so many things are shut down.

Leah: What makes somebody an expert on Hard Knock Radio?

Anita: We have hosted mainstream figures, grassroots organizers, independent journalists, artists, academics, formerly incarcerated people, young people and people you may never hear nationally. Visibility has never determined whether somebody has something important to say.

The question is: What do you know? What have you experienced? What can you help us understand?

The expert may be a veteran organizer, an artist documenting events or a resident who knows a place better than a reporter parachuting in. We never separated culture from the “serious” conversation.

Davey D: If somebody is a rapper but has spent 10 years collecting files on police, that is what we need to know. Unless the music is germane, I do not need to announce, “By the way, this is a rapper.” If we are talking about Palestine, let us talk about Palestine. People from our extended hip hop community do not have to perform their credentials before offering analysis.

Leah: Anita, how does a producer earn trust from people whose communities have repeatedly been misrepresented?

Anita: Trust starts before the microphone comes on. I am a Black woman, I am queer, and I have a deep commitment to truth and justice. I know what it is like to have your voice dismissed because of who you are. Sometimes I am part of the community we are discussing.

But I cannot assume I understand somebody else’s experience. Class, gender, geography, generation and culture matter. Do your homework and ask better — not necessarily safer — questions. My job is to listen for what we might be missing, not impose a narrative.

You build trust over time by treating people’s stories with seriousness, context, dignity and respect, especially after everybody else has packed up their microphones and moved on.

Leah: What did that look like when the country suddenly turned its attention toward a community?

Anita: After Michael Brown was killed, we examined what happened before the national cameras arrived — the policing, politics, organizing and history — and what would happen after they left. Our coverage of the murder of Oscar Grant III centered affected communities. During COVID, we insisted not everybody was living through the same pandemic.

Media can connect people doing the work and give language to what a community already knows. We talked with people making history while it happened.

Davey D: With Oscar Grant, national shows would ask me to come on. I would say, “OK, I am bringing Uncle Bobby, or I am bringing this person.” If I went on, I called everybody involved and asked for their talking points. It should be about the people doing the work.

When Ferguson happened, I did not go for the first year, though I had invitations. People there could speak to their reality, so we brought them on every day — from Tef Poe on down. Our job is to give people on the ground space, not become the centerpiece.

Leah: Institutions learned to say “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion” and “belonging.” Did the language improve journalism, or become branding?

Anita: Both. A broader vocabulary helped us ask whose voices are missing, who tells the story and what counts as a story. But the language sometimes moved faster than the institution.

You can change what the room looks like without changing who controls it. For us, it was about perspective, power and whether we show up only during a crisis. Hard Knock Radio did not wait for somebody to diversify the table. We built our own.

Leah: What does keeping a daily community show alive require that listeners may never hear?

Davey D: When you care, it takes a mental and physical toll. Before airtime, you may hear somebody crying about what happened to their child but afraid to discuss it publicly. Then comes another police story, another crisis, and you try to give it meaning. I read, watch and watchdog the bullshit people are bombarded with, hoping to leave listeners better.

This is not stuff you take bows for. You fill the voids and carry your communal weight. People opened doors for me, so I open doors for others. People pulled me up, so I pull others up. We are part of a continuum.

Anita: Independent media survives because communities decide their stories and issues are worth supporting. Support KPFA and Hard Knock Radio financially when you can, but also listen, share interviews and send stories. Hold us accountable. Help bring the next generation of journalists, producers, artists, DJs, organizers and storytellers through these doors.

Leah: What has 25 years taught you about community in the age of algorithms, bots and online performance?

Davey D: Nothing beats hand-to-hand, face-to-face conversation. Technology lets me talk to 100 people at once, but I had better pick up the phone. One friend’s pictures online said one thing; when I called, I learned they had stage-three cancer. Another friend’s mother had died, and they were still grieving. I would not have known from what I saw online.

Check in with your people. We must nurture our relationships and commit to people we love and want to fight alongside for collective liberation.

Not everything online needs an answer. Some of it is bots or paid contrarians. If you respond, have a strategy. Some can speak truth to power unimpeded; others hold positions that help the community and should not lose them performing militancy online.

The Bay View can say things a person at a commercial outlet cannot. That does not mean we are not on the same page. I learned to fight smarter, not harder. We do not have all the time in the world.

Leah: Davey, is 25 years a milestone? How are you celebrating?

Davey D: I did not realize it was 25 years. Each day and each show is important. We try to dial in with presence, urgency and commitment.

I do not want to say, “We have been doing this 25 years; let me mail in the show.” No. We wake up, try to do our best and not rest on our laurels. We are part of a larger collective, and our job is to hold up our side of the weight.

Anita: There have been talks, but nothing I can share publicly just yet.

Leah: What does a mature hip hop generation build now?

Davey D: Collectively, the question is: What institutions do we have? What tools have we fashioned for the community to counteract everything going on?

Community is knowing who goes where, what we are doing and how we protect one another. It is strategically putting people in positions where they and we can win.

We have been blessed with platforms. We should use them wisely. We have sat at the feet of people who laid solid groundwork. We are supposed to add to it. I do not look at that as extraordinary. We all do our parts.

__

Hip hop does not have to keep proving it is hip hop. At 50, it should know what it is. At 25, Hard Knock Radio does not need to admire its history either. That history is in the lives of people who found language on the air, organizers whose work was amplified and listeners who got the answers mainstream didn’t bother to seek.

That is worth celebrating. But Davey D’s inability to stop long enough to notice the anniversary is as honest a celebration as any. It’s not a ceremony. It’s a life. Each day brings another story, another voice, another chance to open the door and keep movin’.

Hip hop isn’t arriving. It’s arrived. Now we build and sustain our own institutions — independent enough to tell the truth and rooted so strong in community, they cannot take either away.

Hard Knock Radio airs Monday through Friday from 4 to 5 p.m. Pacific on KPFA 94.1 FM and streams at KPFA.org. Past programs are available through the KPFA archives.

Leah Harmony is Manager of Production at the San Francisco Bay View and can be reached at: leah@sfbayview.com.

The post Hard Knock Radio at 25 appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

by Haiti Action Committee

Haiti Action Committee condemns the wave of massacres in Haiti and demands that the Trump administration stop deporting Haitians back to Haiti.

On Sunday, Aug. 23, the heavily armed paramilitary death squad Viv Ansanm carried out another major massacre in the Kenscoff commune in the hills outside Port-au-Prince. The death squad attacked survivors of previous violence who were sheltering in a church in one of the villages.

Many people in the church were killed, along with people in their homes. Women and young people were targeted in particular. Community sources have provided different estimates of the number of people killed, but they range from 40 to above 70 people. Women were raped and dozens of people were additionally taken hostage; they remain captive with imminent threats to their lives.

According to local officials, this attack was announced by the paramilitary death squad at least two weeks before it occurred. The police and government authorities were made aware of the threat, but once again failed to provide protection, as has been the case in many other massacres. The population is furious over the obvious collusion between the U.S.-installed puppet government and the death squads.

Kenscoff has repeatedly been targeted by Viv Ansanm as it seeks to consolidate its control of the commune and expand control into the adjacent Petionville region of Port-au-Prince.

Other massacres by paramilitaries, armed with weapons from the United States, have likewise continued across Haiti in recent weeks, notably Gresye south of Port-au-Prince, a village in the Akaye region north of Port-au-Prince, and Dessalines and other towns in the agricultural center of the Artibonite region.

There are now 1.5 million people internally displaced by this violence in Haiti and more than 5.8 million people on the brink of starvation.

These are the conditions into which the Trump regime is attempting to deport 350,000 Haitians who have had their TPS in the U.S. revoked.

Contact your senators and demand that they immediately pass Senate Bill S. 4814 to extend TPS for Haitians! The House has already passed a version of this bill, H.R. 1689, and now the Senate must do the same!

Learn more and contact the Haiti Action Committee at https://haitisolidarity.net/.

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by Leah Harmony

With Nola’s first words, my thought is: “This woman knows her shit.” For two decades, Nola Brantley has worked with communities in the Bay Area to transform the response to sex trafficking.

Sex crimes and trafficking haven’t slowed down since the now-famous Epstein files were “released.” These abuses are often married to zero accountability. In August, police arrested San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York in a prostitution sting after he used an alias to arrange paid sex. York is no stranger to red and blue lights as a member of the DeBartolo family, who has been the subject of rumors surrounding organized-crime ties and federal investigations for decades. Yet law enforcement dropped the charges in each case. And, like a footnote in a never-ending saga of prominent offenders being set free, this latest arrest is no exception. The authorities let Jed York go, allowing him to continue living his best life. They all would like us to believe that the buying and selling of sex, and the trafficking of children, happens to no one, by no one.

The message is as clear as the billboards high above The Blade, the Bay Area’s most notorious corridor for sex trafficking. We’ve got to take matters into our own hands. Enter Nola.

In the following conversation, the co-founder of MISSSEY and founder of Nola Brantley Speaks discusses the conditions that make young people vulnerable, the failures of systems charged with protecting them, and what genuine safety, accountability and healing can look like for Black girls in the Bay Area.

Leah Harmony: You began this work in 2001 and later helped build one of Alameda County’s first community case-management models for commercially sexually exploited children. What first made you understand that individual rescue was not enough — that the whole system had to change?

Nola Brantley: When I started this work in 2001, I quickly realized that what we called “rescue” was often happening at the end of a much longer story. Many of the young people I encountered were Black and Brown girls who had experienced abuse, foster-care involvement, family instability, homelessness or generational poverty before an exploiter ever entered the picture. And in Oakland, we can’t separate those conditions from the broader history of racial and economic inequity that has shaped many of the communities we serve. If we only remove a child from the street without changing the conditions that made her vulnerable, we’re not really changing her life — we’re interrupting one moment in a much larger cycle.

Leah Harmony: What exactly did you see that helped you understand exploited young people need support that police, courts, child welfare agencies and existing nonprofits were not providing?

Nola Brantley: I saw young people who had already been failed by multiple systems before they ever encountered an organization like MISSSEY. A girl might have been removed from her family, moved through multiple placements, experienced abuse or neglect, run away, become homeless and then encountered someone who offered her exactly what the systems around her had failed to provide — belonging, protection, money or what felt like family. And when many of those children come from communities that have already experienced generations of institutional inequity, we have to ask whether our systems are actually repairing harm or reproducing it.

Leah Harmony: What are some of the conditions that make Black girls in San Francisco, Oakland, Vallejo and surrounding Bay Area communities especially vulnerable to trafficking — and how do housing and inflation factor in?

Nola Brantley: We have to be careful not to suggest that being Black, Brown, poor or from Oakland somehow makes a child inherently vulnerable. The vulnerability comes from the conditions surrounding the child. Housing instability, inflation, poverty, family disruption, foster-care involvement, inadequate behavioral-health resources, school disengagement and a lack of safe places for young people to go can all increase vulnerability. And when those conditions are concentrated in communities that have historically experienced racial and economic exclusion, the impact becomes even more pronounced.

Leah Harmony: You have said that Black girls are being bought and sold in plain sight in Oakland. Why can the community see this but authorities can’t?

Nola Brantley: I don’t think authorities literally can’t see them. I think we’ve historically failed to see these girls as children deserving protection. Oakland has a large population of Black and Brown communities whose families have experienced generations of racial discrimination, economic exclusion, housing instability and unequal treatment by institutions. So when a Black or Brown girl is standing on International Boulevard, people can see the street and the behavior, but they don’t necessarily see the history, trauma, foster-care involvement, poverty or exploitation that may have brought her there.

Leah Harmony: What have you learned about the ways racism and adultification cause Black girls to be treated as willing participants, “fast,” troublesome or criminal instead of recognized as children experiencing abuse?

Nola Brantley: I’ve learned that Black girls are often denied childhood at exactly the moment they need adults to protect them most. Their survival behaviors can be interpreted as attitude, sexuality, defiance or criminality instead of trauma responses, and when a child also has a foster-care history or comes from poverty, those labels can compound each other.

In communities with a long history of racialized stereotypes and unequal treatment, those assumptions don’t exist in isolation — they can shape decisions made by schools, child welfare, law enforcement, health care providers and the courts. After training more than half a million professionals, I know that changing that lens requires more than diversity training — it requires changing how agencies make decisions about children.

Leah Harmony: In Oakland, International Boulevard is frequently named in conversations about exploitation. What patterns are you seeing elsewhere — in Vallejo, Richmond, San Francisco and online — that the community as a whole should recognize?

Nola Brantley: The geography changes, but the vulnerability doesn’t necessarily change. In Oakland, Vallejo, Richmond, San Francisco and online, young people may be navigating many of the same conditions — housing instability, family disruption, foster-care involvement, poverty, isolation, trauma and unmet needs — and exploiters know how to identify those vulnerabilities.

And we should remember that these communities are not simply “high-risk communities”; they are communities with enormous resilience that have also experienced historical disinvestment and discrimination. The street may look different, but the underlying equation is often the same: a young person needs something desperately, and someone else presents exploitation as the solution.

Leah Harmony: What should young people notice when a relationship begins to turn from affection into grooming?

Nola Brantley: Pay attention when someone starts asking you to keep secrets, isolates you from people who love you, makes you feel indebted, controls where you go or who you see, gives you things and then expects something in return, or tells you that nobody understands you the way they do. Grooming often doesn’t begin with something that feels dangerous — it can begin with attention, affection, validation, gifts or making you feel uniquely special. If a relationship increasingly requires secrecy, control or something in exchange for love, that’s a serious warning sign.

Leah Harmony: How have phones, social media and gaming platforms changed recruitment over the past 10 years — and how can the community combat the negatives?

Nola Brantley: Technology has dramatically expanded the access an exploiter can have to a young person. Grooming can happen privately, continuously and across platforms, sometimes before an adult in the child’s physical environment realizes anything is wrong. We need digital literacy, stronger platform accountability, adults who understand online behavior without simply spying or shaming children, and conversations about healthy relationships that begin before a child encounters a groomer.

Leah Harmony: What universal behavioral changes should parents, teachers and other adults take seriously that could save a child before the threat becomes embedded in the child’s life?

Nola Brantley: Don’t just look for a child suddenly standing on a street. Look much earlier. Chronic running away, placement disruptions, sudden homelessness, unexplained money or gifts, an older romantic partner, withdrawal from family, school disengagement, increased secrecy or a child suddenly becoming dependent on someone outside the family can all be opportunities to intervene before exploitation becomes deeply embedded. And particularly with Black and Brown children, adults have to be careful not to interpret survival behavior as simply defiance or criminality. The question should be, “What is happening to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?”

Leah Harmony: Can you describe a situation from your work that changed your understanding of what a young person needs before they can trust an adult offering help?

Nola Brantley: My own experience taught me that authority and safety are not synonymous. When the adult who is supposed to represent protection is also connected to your exploitation, it fundamentally changes how you understand trust. That’s why I learned that young people don’t owe us immediate trust; we have to earn it through consistency, transparency, respect and showing up when there is nothing in it for us. That is particularly important when working with young people whose families and communities may have legitimate reasons to distrust institutions based on generations of experience.

Leah Harmony: You have worked alongside law enforcement while also witnessing the misuse of authority. Do police interventions often help or hurt exploited youth?

Nola Brantley: They can do either. But when we’re talking about Black and Brown girls who may already have experienced poverty, foster care, trauma and institutional intervention, another authority figure showing up and treating them primarily as a problem can reinforce everything they’ve already learned about systems. My own experience with exploitation by a San Francisco police officer makes this question deeply personal for me: Authority is not automatically synonymous with safety.

Leah Harmony: If you could tell police, as a single entity, what they should not do — what standard practice absolutely does not help?

Nola Brantley: Don’t use the authority of a badge to exploit, intimidate, manipulate, control or silence a vulnerable young person. And don’t assume that because a child is Black, Brown, poor, homeless, in foster care or behaving in a way adults don’t understand, she is somehow less deserving of protection. I say that not only as a professional who has spent decades training systems, but as someone whose own exploitation involved a police officer. If you’re an officer, the power you carry should make a child safer — not make her more vulnerable.

To be continued …

Leah Harmony is manager of production at the San Francisco Bay View and can be reached at leah@sfbayview.com

If you or someone you know needs assistance or if you want more information, contact:

MISSSEY:

(510) 999-6884/510-99-YOUTH

or Direct Support: directservices@misssey.org

Housing: housing@misssey.org

For more information on Nola Brantley Speaks, please visit nolabrantleyspeaks.org.

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With District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton nearing the end of his term on the Board of Supervisors, his seat, which covers Sunnydale, Visitacion Valley, Dogpatch, India Basin, Potrero Hill, Bayview Hunters Point and more, is up for grabs in the November election. Nearly a dozen serious contenders have joined the electoral fight.

One of the top names being mentioned as a major competitor for the D10 seat is Jamo Muhammad, a man who is literally a son of Hunters Point. Many have known him for decades as the community brotha who is always in the streets with a smile and some good, wise words and is ready to help. As election season begins to go into overdrive, I wanted to bring you a sincere community voice for your electoral consideration.

JR Valrey: How will you deal with the issue of public safety in District 10 if elected? On one hand, everyone wants and deserves to be safe, but on the other hand, SFPD is notorious for killing Black young people like Gus Rugley, Kenneth Harding, Mario Woods and others.

Jamo Muhammad: I believe public safety is probably a bigger issue for us Blacks remaining in the district and throughout the city. Public safety is a primary reason some decide to leave. Studies show our numbers have been decreasing at alarming rates.

We as a group no longer speak from that power position we used to enjoy years ago. Our voices aren’t as loud. Many times, such voices even go unheard. Our public safety is being infringed upon daily. One would think there would be more energy to protect a fragile population, as they do with wildlife. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case.

First and foremost, when we talk “public safety,” who do we really believe is supposed to make that happen for us? Is it the responsibility of the mayor? Is it the responsibility of the Board of Supervisors or a supervisor? Is it the job of the police or others? Or do we, as an affected community and an affected population, give more attention to solving some of the issues that make our communities unsafe?

As some know, for many years I’ve been in these San Francisco streets, lending myself to the various communities in the way of decreasing some of the violence. For years, I’ve been instrumental in bringing together some of those who have had issues that put our safety in question. Such an effort was and is being done without any public or private funding.

So when the police come before us at the end of the year, taking credit for decreases in crimes, they actually slight the many who also lend themselves as such. In relation to the police killings, we as a community can’t allow the solutions of others to become the solution. We need a solution to our problems. We can’t throw our hands up, encouraging these types of entities to assist us and remove ourselves from the equation. We open up the door for such misbehavior.

As some know, I was involved in the aftermath of some of these instances of police brutality. Unfortunately, we as a community still haven’t recovered. As a district, we, as those of us in these various communities, have to be a part of the solution to such safety concerns. I believe I have the potential to encourage that kind of participation from our communities.

JR Valrey: How would you address the environmental degradation and environmental racism in District 10 such as the Navy refusing to clean up the radioactive waste at the shipyard, Lennar corporation spreading hazardous asbestos illegally, PG&E spreading pollution, as well as data centers scheduled to be built in District 10?

Jamo Muhammad: I believe this is a good question. I would address such an issue as a victim. I would address such an issue as someone who has been affected by such an issue. I’m a longtime resident, so I’ve come to know many who call some of those places that border such parcels home. We know this has been an ongoing issue. The thing is, do the new construction efforts make the situation better or worse? I believe they make it worse.

I had a friend, Chris Carpenter, with whom I went to high school. He and his family were District 10 residents. He passed. Some of you know him to be one of the first whistleblowers, as it related to the many violations of public safety from this developer, subdevelopers and the City. When we found out about some of these issues, we began mobilizing in the community. We sought to inform the surrounding communities of the possible exposure. Many had symptoms showing they’ve been exposed. The energy of such an effort put our community voices on the floor of the Board of Supervisors at City Hall. We were there to inform them of the exposure. We were there to ask of them to halt the project, to test the people. Again, many of the residents were showing symptoms of being exposed.

There were district supervisors that voted on behalf of our cries for justice. Would you believe our own district supervisor at that time cast the final and deciding vote against the work stoppage? She ignored the hurt, the pain of her own people. They recently put her name on a development in District 10. Was that part of her reward? What did she really accomplish that earns her such an honor? Seeing such an episode play out is part of my motivation for running for this District Supervisor seat, on behalf of a friend and those of our community that have been affected.

Another thing, since the City knows this to be an issue, what are its health recommendations as it relates to those taxpaying citizens that live in that area? Is there any type of programs available to those who may be running around affected? Several violators were mentioned in one of the many class action lawsuits, one blaming the other. All need to be held responsible! I believe the data centers will be more of the same.

JR Valrey: What are your ideas around retaining Black residency in San Francisco, a city that was once 22% Black but is now 3%?

Jamo Muhammad: As Black people in such a city, we have a beautiful opportunity before us. It’s a very pivotal moment in our history in this city. The moment has the potential to become something good and inspirational. Yet, there also exists the potential to be something other than good. Let me ask this: How inviting is this city to Black people? We just spoke on environmental exposure. We have to really look at reasons why we believe people leave. Of the reasons they leave, how many are legitimate reasons?

We can’t make people stay here. There are people I know who have moved. Someone said to me, “Brother, when I’m in the City, I find myself being overcome by addiction.” He then shares how productive of a citizen he has become elsewhere. Can you blame him for leaving? Some of these mothers move out of fear something may happen to their children. Can they be blamed for such a thought? In a city like this, they have said low income is six figures. How many of us are making six figures? When someone inherits that family home, what do they really know about holding on to that home? Most of us aren’t being taught such financial lessons. If someone decides to sell, can you blame them?

If the average home in San Francisco goes for $700K-$800K and someone finds a better deal outside of San Francisco, can you blame them? Mind you, you could have spent a million dollars on a home, yet can’t park in your own driveway. In other places they could gain more bang for their buck. They may be able to have space between homes. They may get a larger front and back yard. They may get a larger garage and a driveway. These decisions are logical decisions that we make all the time.

JR Valrey: What other issues are extremely important to District 10?

Jamo Muhammad: I believe an important issue for District 10 is our children, especially the children of our fragile Black population. We are not really knowing how our young people are being affected by what they are seeing and experiencing in our communities and throughout this city. It’s said any community’s greatest natural resource is its children. As elected officials, I believe we really have to be mindful of the decisions we make. We may be making a decision that may negatively affect them.

JR Valrey: How could people stay up on what you are doing?

Jamo Muhammad: I’m quickly putting some things together. Some things aren’t coming together as I would like, yet it’s all part of the training, the experience. I’ve done things in the community in an attempt to allow people to know me in more of a real way. I’m on Facebook, under my name, Jamo Muhammad. I have offered and accepted new friend requests from so many new people, many based on them hearing I’m running for office and attempting to learn more of me. Soon, I will have a social media platform dedicated to the various things I’m doing in the community. May God grow our many voices, that we may become more mindful of our choices. Thanks again, Brother. Be sure to send our love to the Ratcliffs, the contributing staff and, of course, the many readers! For more information, you could email Jamo Muhammad’s campaign at dxweupnext49@gmail.com.

JR Valrey is editor in chief of the San Francisco Bay View and can be reached at jr@sfbayview.com

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Festival organizer David Roach says the program is designed to make room for independent filmmakers, connect audiences with artists and invite people to see Oakland beyond the narratives that too often define it.

by Tabari Morris

The Oakland International Film Festival will launch its season on Sept. 9 at the Grand Lake Theater, presenting a program of more than 50 films that its organizers claim have emerged from the community testimony of those dealing with issues of environmental destruction, violence, exile, censorship and imprisonment.

The festival is set to run through Oakland venues, such as Informal Spaces and the Oakland campus of Northeastern University, formerly Mills College, among others. Screenings will be combined with workshops, panel discussions and Q&A sessions with filmmakers. Festival Founder and Director David Roach told the SF Bay View that about 90% of the filmmakers would attend the event, providing audiences with a special chance to talk to the creators of the films themselves.

“Independent filmmakers are taking a stab at these kinds of stories that often times mainstream media do not touch. That’s why we’re really trying to create space for them — conversations.”

Among the films Roach highlighted is “The Right to Fight to Breathe,” a short documentary connected to the long environmental justice fight in West Oakland. He described how truck traffic serving the Port of Oakland moves through nearby neighborhoods, where residents have observed soot on windows and endured the health consequences of pollution, including asthma.

The film’s local framing points toward a broader question that runs through the festival: Who bears the cost when commerce, development and resource extraction move forward without communities having an equal say? Roach connected that question to oil spills, data centers and the increasing demands placed on water and energy systems.

“Commerce is made, but the people who don’t get the commerce suffer the most.”

The program also turns to immigration, free expression and young people navigating pressures that should not be ordinary. Roach cited “Unidos 26” about young soccer players in the Los Angeles area, and “Free Speech Costs Plenty,” a film by comedian and radio personality Donald Lacy that examines censorship and the exposure artists can face when their work draws hostile reactions.

Opening night will feature short films including “This Is Private” and “Waiting for Afra’s Ivy.” Roach declined to spoil their central turns, but said the works reflect how short films can establish a filmmaker’s storytelling vision and become a bridge toward a feature-length project.

The festival’s cultural reach includes “Brewing Stew,” about the late guitarist Calvin Keys; “Breaking the Cycle,” which follows an intergenerational break-dancing program in Colombia; and “A Salty Frontalia,” a documentary that Roach described as tracing the global imprint of Black radical culture. “Soul Searching” explores Chicano collectors and DJs preserving slow soul records, with a related music-centered event planned at Geoffrey’s Inner Circle.

“We’re always trying to figure out how can we highlight culture. We see culture as history — oftentimes history is a big part of our culture — and music.”

Indigenous history is another focus. In partnership with Humboldt County education partners, the festival plans to screen “People of the West, Episode Eight” and “Native California,” films that Roach said offer accounts often omitted from conventional school curriculum — including the Red Power movement, the occupation of Alcatraz, tribal stewardship and relationships with the land.

The program will also make room for stories about women’s survival and the criminal legal system. At Northeastern University, the festival’s “Preventing Violence, Healing Our City” screening will pair “Set Her Free,” about women who faced severe sentences after defending themselves from domestic violence, with “Liberty and Limits: Guns in California.” Roach said the latter examines gun law history as well as violence prevention workers whose program reduced violence before funding was cut.

Films about housing and home will follow: “What We Dreamed of Then,” about a man in Seattle trying to survive homelessness while working, and “Home,” a short film about family bonds, a grandmother and the meaning of a shared home. For a city facing entrenched displacement, the pairing places personal struggle alongside the question of what stability requires.

“We’re hoping that we can just learn how to support each other. We know we need each other.”

Oakland itself is not merely a backdrop. “Guardians of Oakland Chinatown” follows community members who organized to protect Chinatown during the hardships of the COVID era. “Oakland Strong” traces a youth weightlifting initiative that sought recognition and support by staging a demonstration outside City Hall. “The Blackumentary” follows people connected to Oakland’s Black Cultural Zone and their efforts to sustain Black community amid development pressures.

Roach said the festival is also deliberately sending audiences into the city’s restaurants and neighborhood spaces, including Talibah’s, Sabri and other venues still being finalized. The aim is to counter a narrow, fear-driven picture of Oakland with lived experience: food, art, history and people gathering in places that deserve investment.

“Instead of preaching about it, we’re hoping that we can introduce folks to a side of Oakland that keeps them returning back to Oakland.”

The closing program is expected to include “Earthseed: A People’s Journey of Radical Hospitality,” about people connecting with communities practicing sustainable ways of living, and “Native Son,” centered on Oakland chef Nelson German and the challenges behind his work at the city’s restaurants. Other films Roach mentioned include “Prison in Time,” an animated account of barriers to education while incarcerated; “After 24 Years,” about reentry after a long prison sentence; and “More Than Santa Baby,” about songwriter Philip Springer and a lifetime in music publishing.

“A screening can introduce a story; a discussion can help a community carry it forward.”

Tickets, schedules and film information are available through the festival’s websites, oiff.org and oaklandfilmfestival.org.

Tabari Morris is Managing Editor at the San Francisco Bay View as well as an investigative journalist. He can be reached at Tabari@sfbayview.com.

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Amapiano, Afrobeat and Reggaeton are the predominant forms of music thumping through speakers and electrifying many dance floors and festivals from the Bay Area to Bogota to Accra. As streaming charts reflect, hip-hop is no longer the unchallenged king of urban music.

Zanzi, in downtown Oakland, is the most popular place in the Bay to dance and listen to Caribbean and African tunes. I had to ask Mek, the owner of Zanzi, a few questions so that those who don’t know about the hottest Caribbean and Amapiano club in the Bay, can get the info.

JR Valrey: How, why and when did you start Zanzi?

Mek: Zanzi opened in 2021, coming out of probably one of the most uncertain periods the nightlife and hospitality industry had ever experienced.

I had already been in the Oakland nightlife business for years through Au Lounge and GFP, so Zanzi wasn’t my first experience operating a venue. But I wanted Zanzi to be something different. I wanted a larger space where we could be more ambitious with the music, the artists, the production and the overall experience.

Over time, Zanzi has evolved quite a bit. What it is today wasn’t created overnight. We paid attention to what worked, what Oakland responded to and where we felt there was a gap. That evolution is really what created the Zanzi people know today.

JR Valrey: What made you want to put Zanzi in Oakland?

Mek: Oakland is home for me. I came here directly from Africa as a young kid and have lived here for 38 years. As an adult, I had already spent years operating businesses here before opening Zanzi. So choosing Oakland wasn’t really a difficult decision.

But more importantly, I’ve always believed Oakland deserves world-class nightlife without people feeling like they have to cross the bridge to San Francisco for it.

The Bay Area is incredibly diverse, and Oakland in particular has always been a place where different cultures, backgrounds and communities come together. There was an opportunity to build something that genuinely reflected that diversity through music and nightlife.

One thing I’m particularly proud of is looking around Zanzi and seeing people from completely different backgrounds in the same room, enjoying the same music. That’s Oakland to me.

JR Valrey: For those who don’t know, Zanzi is definitely the home to some of the dopest Afro-Beat parties, as well as Cuban rumba parties. What other kinds of music do you feature?

Mek: We’re probably best known today for Afrobeats and Amapiano, but Zanzi has never been intended to be a one-genre club.

We do Afrohouse, reggae and dancehall, Latin music, hip-hop, R&B and open-format nights, depending on the event. We’ve also experimented with different sounds and concepts over the years.

Afrobeats and Amapiano have obviously become a major part of our identity, but for us, the common denominator isn’t necessarily the genre. It’s the experience. If the music is good, the energy is right and we believe we can create a great night around it, it can have a home at Zanzi.

JR Valrey: Can you tell the readers about some of the big artists from overseas that have been featured at Zanzi?

Mek: This is probably one of the things I’m most proud of.

We’ve had the opportunity to bring some incredible international artists to Oakland, particularly from Africa. We’ve hosted artists and DJs such as Uncle Waffles, DJ Maphorisa, Tyler ICU, Daliwonga, Major League Djz, Musa Keys, Kelvin Momo, DJ Moma, E-Cool, Lij Mic and Skyla Tylaa, among others.

What makes it meaningful to me isn’t just putting a recognizable name on a flyer. In several cases, we’ve been able to give artists their first Oakland appearance and bring experiences to the Bay Area that people previously might have had to travel to Los Angeles, New York or Miami to see.

We’re making Oakland a legitimate stop for this music.

JR Valrey: What has been one of the highlights and one of the major obstacles of operating a club in downtown Oakland that caters to a Black audience?

Mek: The biggest highlight has been seeing Zanzi grow into one of the places helping define what nightlife in Oakland looks like today. We opened during a very uncertain time for downtown, and to see the business not only survive but continue to grow, evolve and create its own identity has been incredibly rewarding. I’m also proud that we’ve been able to do it while staying independent and doing things our own way.

As far as obstacles, operating nightlife in downtown Oakland is challenging in general. There are economic pressures, public-safety perceptions, regulatory requirements, rising operating costs and all of the broader issues downtown has faced since the pandemic and even before.

I also want to say that venues catering primarily to Black and Brown audiences sometimes operate under a different level of scrutiny and perception. Things that may simply be viewed as nightlife somewhere else can sometimes be interpreted differently when the crowd or neighborhood changes. That’s a reality, and I think it’s important to acknowledge it rather than pretend it doesn’t exist.

At the end of the day, I want Zanzi judged by how we actually operate, not by assumptions about who we are or who our customers are.

JR Valrey: How has the mass closing down of businesses and the current economic downturn in the once-bustling downtown Oakland, since the pandemic, affected business?

Mek: It’s absolutely affected us. A nightlife venue doesn’t operate in isolation. A healthy downtown needs restaurants, bars, retail, offices, hotels, residents, transportation and other entertainment businesses. When storefronts close and office workers disappear, there are simply fewer people walking around and fewer reasons for people to come to downtown.

There’s also a perception issue. Negative headlines about Oakland affect people’s decisions about whether they want to come out or not, even when their actual experience once they’re here can be completely different.

At the same time, I think businesses like Zanzi demonstrate why nightlife is an important part of downtown’s recovery. We’re bringing hundreds of people to downtown on certain nights, and those customers don’t only spend money inside Zanzi. They park here, use rideshares, eat at nearby restaurants and support other businesses.

A small example is Melt Burger nearby. Their original plan was to close around 11 or midnight. As the late-night traffic in the area grew, particularly when Zanzi is busy, they began staying open until after we close. I love seeing that because that’s exactly how a healthy entertainment district is supposed to work. One successful business creates customers for another business.

So yes, downtown’s downturn has affected us. But I also think businesses that continue investing and bringing people to downtown are part of the solution. Oakland doesn’t rebuild its downtown by having fewer reasons for people to come here. We rebuild it by creating more.

JR Valrey: What does the name Zanzi mean?

Mek: Zanzi actually started very simply. It’s short for Zanzibar, which I consider one of the most beautiful places on earth. I loved the name, the place and what it represented to me, so I shortened Zanzibar to Zanzi.

What became fascinating was what we discovered afterward. The word itself has different meanings and historical uses in different parts of Africa. But probably the most interesting discovery was that the name Zanzibar already had a history right here in Oakland.

In the 1940s, there was a Zanzibar Club inside the historic California Hotel in West Oakland. It became an important destination for Black entertainment and hosted some incredible artists. As Afro-Cuban music became popular, the club also became known for mambo parties and Latin performers.

I knew absolutely none of that when I named Zanzi.

That’s what makes the connection so special to me. Decades later, Zanzi is again in Oakland bringing together African, African American, Caribbean and Latin music and cultures under essentially the same name.

It wasn’t intentional, and I wouldn’t try to claim that history as ours. But discovering afterward that the name already had roots in Oakland felt strangely full-circle.

JR Valrey: Can you tell people what Zanzi has going in September and October?

Mek: September is a big month for us.

On Sept. 11, we have DBN Gogo; and on Sept. 29, we have a party called One Night In Jozi. We’re currently finalizing contracts with a couple of major artists for October and November. All of these events represent exactly what we’ve been trying to do — bring major international talent directly to Oakland and continue establishing the city as a destination for African electronic music.

We also have our regular programming and concepts continuing throughout the month.

JR Valrey: How can people keep up with you online?

Mek: The best way is through Zanzi’s Instagram. That’s where we announce events, artists, tickets and most of what we’re doing week to week.

IG: @zanzioakland

SF Bay View Editor-in-Chief JR Valrey is a veteran journalist. His work can also be heard on www.blockreportradioworld.com. He can be reached at jr@sfbayview.com.

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by JR Valrey

One of the people that Black Panther political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal asks me about regularly, on the rare occasion that I get to converse with him, is Chicago-based political prisoner Aaron Patterson, who did two stints in prison totaling almost four decades for offenses that evidence proved he was innocent of. He is due to be unleashed on Sept. 15, and he needs the community nationally to help him get on his feet.

He was responsible for getting the death penalty overturned in Illinois after it was exposed that he was put on death row under false pretenses, after being tortured by former Chicago Police Lieutenant Jon Burge with electricity, inside the infamous House of Screams, and forced into confessing to crimes that he was innocent of. He won a lawsuit after the torture was exposed, and he immediately took a loan out to bail out another prisoner, who had been falsely accused. In the early 2000s, his story was everywhere on television, from “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to numerous appearances on “Democracy Now!” We urge people around the nation and the world to know about this freedom fighter who has never folded or stopped fighting on behalf of the people. Here’s a piece of his story in his own words, as well as his future plans.

JR Valrey: Can you talk about the circumstances surrounding your political imprisonment in this most recent case that had you locked in the concentration camps for 22 years?

Aaron Patterson: Well, I can’t go into details on how and why I was targeted for this case and why so much time, and life supervision!

All I can say is I pissed off the powers that be, and they blitzed me from all sides and took me down. I don’t know if it was for one thing or a few things I was doing then, but I’m back! The revolution continues, it don’t stop.

I do know they accused me of traveling to Africa unauthorized and wondering why I was there without going through customs and use of a passport! That bothered them enough for Homeland Security to arrest a comrade of mine, demanding that he reveal what I was doing there!

Or it could be my investigation into former Chicago Police Lieutenant Jon Burge’s silent partnership in a security firm that had a contract to provide security at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

Maybe because I kept disrupting then-U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, then-Mayor Daley and State’s Attorney Dick Devine at events, at their homes and offices also.

JR Valrey: After you were unleashed from death row and the concentration camps, can you talk about the kind of community work that you engaged in between the two cases?

Aaron Patterson: The things I did when I was released were many. I addressed issues that went on too long, not addressed fully until checked.

My main focus was never to be a sound bite or armchair revolutionary; heard but with no effective results.

1) We bonded people out of prison and jails with funds we had or didn’t have, by getting high-interest “juice” loans that I later paid back twofold.

2) We ran for political office for state representative to challenge, at the very least, those that put me on death row, as well as the ongoing cover-ups of police terrorism and corruption.

We lost that election in 2004, but we also filed a complaint on Pat Bailey for not living in the district, and we were successful in getting her indicted, charged and convicted of voter fraud, and got her kicked out of the state representative position.

We registered and empowered poor and oppressed people in the hood to vote.

We chased Mayor Daley and the U.S. attorney out of the hood in Englewood during a press conference they had in a fieldhouse in a park, and shut down their press conference.

We protested war numerous times in downtown Chicago and shut down traffic on my street, Lake Shore Drive, and various other streets.

We shut down a few police stations around the city of Chicago because of police terrorism and wrongful detention.

We helped get rid of the crack law in New York, and contributed to the 100/1 ratio to get the law repealed.

We got rid of the death penalty in Illinois by lobbying politicians in Springfield, Illinois, to abolish the death penalty.

JR Valrey: What are your plans for when you finally reach outside of the gates of the concentration camp system on Sept. 15?

Aaron Patterson: Well, I don’t know exactly what will be done first, but it will be all hands on and it will be done in a timely fashion.

We’re going to start a third political party outside of the Democrats and Republican Party. We need a complete overhaul of both parties because they don’t serve the people’s needs, wants and desires.

We definitely will be doing community gardening and farming on the outskirts of Chicago, and in other cities on the West Coast, down South and the East Coast. We need to grow and raise our veggies and fruit trees pesticide-free in fertile organic soils. We will raise chicken for eggs and meat on natural corn and alfalfa feeds, and the cows and cattle beef will be raised on natural grass and alfalfa.

We will have ponds to raise fish in the same way, as well as use bees to get honey naturally.

We will have our own grow houses and dispensaries to grow marijuana and things related to marijuana and hemp, etc.

You can support by donating to: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-aaron-pattersons-return-home

The post Welcome Home Aaron Patterson! appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

by JR Valrey

As I was scrolling through social media a week ago, I saw a missing poster featuring a young Black woman from Fillmore named Chantel Brooks. Black people, especially Black women, go missing at alarming rates locally and around the country without the media blitzes that are given to missing dogs in the mainstream media. We cannot expect the government to put up a real search for the missing people in our community. We have to do it.

Here is an interview that I did with Hunters Point rapper Footz from Live Wire Records, talking about his sister’s case.

JR Valrey: Who is your sister, and where is she from?

Footz: My sister is Chantel Brooks. She’s 37 years old and from the Bay Area. She’s a loving person and a very important part of our family. Right now, our main focus is bringing Chantel home safely and finding answers about what happened to her. She grew up in the Fillmore neighborhood in San Francisco.

JR Valrey: When and how did you realize your sister was missing?

Footz: We realized Chantel was missing when we could no longer reach her and didn’t know where she was. She was last seen on July 17, 2026, in Fairfield, California. We became very concerned and immediately started trying to find out what had happened. A missing-person report was filed, and our family has continued searching and sharing information that might help locate her.

JR Valrey: How has this affected you?

Footz: This has been incredibly difficult for me and my family. Not knowing where Chantel is or what happened to her has been heartbreaking. Every day, we hope we’ll get answers and be able to bring her home. We’re doing everything we can to keep her name and photo in the public eye because we don’t want her case to be forgotten.

JR Valrey: What has the community response been like?

Footz: The community has been very supportive. People have shared her flyers, spread the word and helped with the search. We’re truly grateful to everyone who has supported our family. We’re asking people to stay involved because one person remembering something or seeing something could make all the difference in finding Chantel.

JR Valrey: What can people do to help?

Footz: People can help by sharing Chantel’s missing-person information and keeping her photo in circulation. If anyone was in the Fairfield area around the time she disappeared or has any information about Chantel or her whereabouts, we ask them to come forward. Even information that may seem small or unimportant could help the investigation.

Most importantly, please don’t assume someone else has already reported what you know. If you have information, please report it to law enforcement.

JR Valrey: Where can people go to get more information?

Footz: People can follow our family’s efforts to bring Chantel home through her missing-person flyers, community updates and social media. They can also contact the Fairfield Police Department with any information related to her disappearance. We’re asking everyone to continue sharing her information until she is found.

I want to thank everyone who’s offered support, hugs, prayers, money, shared the flyer or helped us get the word out in any way, because it truly takes a village and me and my family is truly grateful.

JR Valrey is Editor and Chief of the San Francisco Bay View and can be reached at JR@sfbayview.com

The post Chantel Brooks is missing! appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

by JR Valrey

Strategically, the system has conditioned us to believe that ICE kidnappings and the indefinite detentions of immigrants are not issues that the Black community should be concerned with.

First off, the conscious mind would recognize that the local police, the FBI and ICE are all different fingers of the same law enforcement infrastructure that can and has been used interchangeably between Black and Brown communities. There are many Black immigrants who are Haitian, Cuban, Colombian, Panamanian, Jamaican and more. There are also many Kenyans, Ethiopians, South Africans, Ghanaians, Ivoreans, Tanzanians and more from Africa.

Black people who are native to the United States have a responsibility to be welcoming to our brothers and sisters who are coming to the U.S. to escape the extreme poverty brought along by the U.S. having an imperialist grip on their home countries, which allows everyone living here to live in the luxury of what academia and the media call The First World, aka Babylon, aka The imperialist monster/master of the world.

Leo Oliveira Xavier is a Black man who immigrated to Oakland from his home in Brazil. He has spent some of his time in the Bay as a drummer with the internationally known, Oakland-based Samba Funk dance group. A year after his arrival, he was detained at a routine immigration check-in at the ICE office at 630 Sansome St. in San Francisco on Dec. 4 last year. We must fight to free Leo Xavier and all other immigrants, political prisoners and prisoners of war being held unjustly in U.S. concentration camps. We need to organize to stop ICE and the police in our neighborhoods. Here is Leo Xavier’s story.

JR Valrey: Who is Leo Oliveira Xavier? When did he come to the U.S.?

Colin Logan: Leo is a 33-year-old Afro-Brazilian and much beloved father, brother, son, friend and partner. His Bay Area community and chosen family can attest that he is a kind, gentle and caring person with a huge heart. Leo is a world-class drummer and music teacher. His contributions have profoundly enriched our communities in Oakland and in the Bay, where he has found home.

Leo is also a respected practitioner in Candomblé — a feminist, syncretic Afro-Brazilian religious tradition. As a ceremonial leader and cultural educator, Leo brings people of all backgrounds together to honor the ancestors and the divinity within the elements of nature, cultivating sacred spaces rooted in a collective ethic of care.

JR Valrey: How and when did you meet him?

Colin Logan: I met Leo in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, in his home neighborhood and community of Candeal, when I was an exchange student in high school. I became a volunteer violin teacher for kids in Candeal — and Leo was among my first students. We have stayed friends for the last 24 years, and he has become like a little brother to me.

As a former Quilombo of Afro-Brazilians who had liberated themselves from slavery, Candeal is known for its cultural legacy as a neighborhood of musicians — particularly drummers. Leo was raised in this musical milieu and, with mentorship from world-renowned singer-songwriter and percussionist Carlinhos Brown, has now brought this deeply rooted musical and cultural expression to his home in the Bay Area.

JR Valrey: What does it mean to sponsor somebody? How long have you been his sponsor?

Colin Logan: Being an asylum sponsor means ensuring that all of Leo’s needs are met and ensuring his well-being to the best of my abilities. As Leo’s sponsor and older brother, I am committed to fighting for his immediate release from ICE detention and back home to his community in Oakland and the Bay Area, where he has found safety and home.

JR Valrey: Can you talk about Leo’s work with Samba Funk?

Colin Logan: I introduced Leo to Theo Aytchan Williams with SambaFunk! at the beginning of 2025, and Leo quickly became the cultural arts organization’s lead drumming teacher. He has become integral to the group and is deeply missed by the entire group. He has also stepped in as lead percussionist for NDL, or Namorados da Lua (Moon Lovers in Brazilian Portuguese), another Bay Area Afro-Brazilian band, as well as Batuki and Samba da Terra.

JR Valrey: Can you tell the story of how, when and where Leo was confronted by ICE?

Colin Logan: Leo went to a routine immigration check-in requested by ICE at their San Francisco office at 630 Sansome St. on the morning of Dec. 4, 2025. ICE officers had already completed paperwork justifying his kidnapping. He was taken to Mesa Verde ICE Detention Center in Bakersfield, California, where he has now been held for over eight months.

JR Valrey: What kind of living conditions has Leo been living in while in the immigration concentration camps for the last eight months?

Colin Logan: He has been deprived of due process and has been denied bond hearings on multiple occasions. He has had an hour a day of outside time and very little access to a phone to be able to contact his loved ones and family members. The food is barely edible — sometimes containing bugs or larvae, other times being frozen or undercooked. The best food that Leo has had access to has been a cup of noodles, for which he is charged $5 at the commissary.

JR Valrey: How did you become aware of his living conditions?

Colin Logan: We have heard from Leo during our in-person visitations and over phone calls that the living conditions at Mesa Verde have been atrocious. Visitations are limited to only up to three people at a time for up to one hour, only during two possible short windows of time on Mondays and Saturdays. We have made the 12-hour round trip between Oakland and Bakersfield to visit Leo countless times.

JR Valrey: Has Leo’s family in Brazil been made aware of his current situation?

Colin Logan: Yes, his mother, his siblings, his cousins and his family are all praying and asking for his release.

JR Valrey: How can people reading this help?

Colin Logan: People can contribute to Leo’s GoFundMe campaign at https://www.gofundme.com/f/free-leo-from-ice-detention

JR Valrey: How can people stay in touch with the community to free Leo?

Colin Logan: People can sign up for the Action Network sponsored by ACUDIR – Alameda County United in Defense of Immigrant Rights — whose Anti-Deportation Organizing Committee has anchored the “Free Leo, Free Them All” Campaign, at bit.ly/freeleonow.

People can also follow ACUDIR and Community Movement Builders’ Oakland Organizing Committee on Instagram at @cmb_oakland and @acudir_alamedacountty

JR Valrey is editor in chief at the San Francisco Bay View and can be reached at JR@sfbayview.com

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by Leah Harmony

BLACK AUGUST 2026.The San Francisco Bayview hosted the First and Second Secretaries of the Cuban Embassy, Sulia Paez and Gabriela Castillo, for four packed days. We had ambitious aims, but our bottom-line goals were, as in revolutions past, to help Cuba and her people build lasting support, as they have shown us. And, most importantly, to bolster solidarity through the strengths our communities have shared down a long path of resistance.

This remains contrary to our government and their boot-licking corporate pets, as has been proven through a never ending saga of crippling actions over 67 years. And now, the wanna-be king pretending to run the current administration has added a very not-pretend layer of violence to the debilitating general blockade already in place.

Donald Trump made the careless decision to order an oil blockade when Cuba had the audacity to not relinquish control of her resources and her people upon his demand. This has been in effect for eight months already. The numerous outcomes are purposefully devastating. Hospitals lack essential resources, children do not have food to eat, and many communities have no power at all, bringing more chaos and fear every day they wake.

Secretaries Paez and Castillo expressed the devastation of the historic and recent attacks in community discussions with people who understand and will rise to meet the occasion, as well as younger people who are still learning the truth of what our tax dollars are funding, to build leadership as a new generation joins the regenerative circuit of reinforcement. They spoke at several community panels throughout downtown Oakland, even got involved in East Oakland’s community activism at Feed the Hood 38 (this was the sixth annual event honoring the legacy of Gregory “Shock G” Jacobs in partnership with Digital Underground) at the East Oakland Collective, and covered ground to and through West Oakland, with numerous stops in between.

After speaking at a town hall meeting in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, they were gifted an artist-led tour of the iconic, revolutionary art of the Black Panther Party’s own Minister of Culture and revolutionary artist Emory Douglas at the African American Art and Culture Complex.

Our connected and collective activists have always used art as a driving force of messaging and solidarity. We introduced and reintroduced the women to the powerful murals, textures and art of the revolution across the Bay cities in between meetings.

They also met with legendary actor Danny Glover, a longtime activist in support of Cuba, who starred in “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” Or to put it more accurately, he is a supporter of the Cuban people, who are always being tested for their strength and resilience. The meeting took place off Highway 1, with only a road separating the restaurant from the vast Pacific Ocean.

As we were speeding down the highway, both diplomats said, “We want to put our feet in the ocean,” nodding in unison.

Water surrounds them when they are at home in Cuba with their families. Water brings clarity. Water makes home feel closer. It represents a connection to the land they must visit, to the land they have to fight for. They love water. We love water. That felt like another connection our homelands can share: a commonality we recognize while driving in a country that feeds off the fear of being different.

Where they live now, in Washington, they feel landlocked. They hope to be back in Cuba soon. They take a small break once every year, and they hope that in the near future, they will be home for good.

For now, all of us must work.

Leah Harmony is manager of production and a journalist for the San Francisco Bay View. She can be reached at leah@sfbayview.com.

You can donate to SF Bayview’s general fund to support our efforts in Cuba:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/sfbayview50for50

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