As the nation recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, we must define what economic justice and racial justice look like for Black workers in the 21st century. Join EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy Feb. 24, for a discussion that identifies essential policies for achieving recovery, as well as necessary structural and systemic changes that are key to remedying long standing racial disparities in the labor market.
Featured speakers:
Marc Bayard, Director, Institute for Policy Studies Black Worker Initiative
Rebecca Dixon, Executive Director, National Employment Law Project
Kyle Moore, PREE Economist, Economic Policy Institute
Moderator: Valerie Wilson, PREE Director, Economic Policy Institute
After the summer 2020 uprisings — gathering people of all races stirred deeply by the May 25 murder of George Floyd at the hands of police — this society experienced the hope that greater awareness and empathy towards Black people worldwide finally manifested. Fast forward seven months, amid Black History Month, the Pan African Film Festival evinces this manifestation in the breadth of poignant, creative narratives and documentaries, showcasing Black universal stories.
PAFF has the distinction of being the largest Black History Month event in the United States. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 29th annual PAFF will run Feb. 28 to March 14 online and on-demand only.
Between PAFF’s virtual component this year and its collaboration with other festivals from around the world, the festival will host an audience that is truly worldwide. RLN has highlighted PAFF’s award winning films including, Best Narrative Feature, Documentary and First Feature – Director competitions. We also highlighted honorable mentions featuring historic pieces, local stories and a threshold of wilderness for your entertainment edification.
Honorable Mentions
41st And Central: The Untold Story of the L.A. Black Panthers
Director Gregory Everett
The first part in a documentary series from filmmaker Gregory Everett follows the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense from its glorious Black Power beginnings through to its tragic demise. The film explores the Black Panther ethos, its conflict with the L.A.P.D. and the US Organization, as well as the events that shaped the complicated and often contradictory legacy of the LA chapter.
Cycles
Director Jonathan Barenbalm
Doc short. Two young Black men, Rell and EJ, are motorcycle stunt riders from Compton and Watts, California. At its core it’s an intimate story about two unlikely friends and the prevalent cycle that incarceration plays within their lives.
That’s Wild
Directed by Michiel Thomas
The award-winning feature documentary That’s Wild tells the inspiring journey of three underserved teenage boys from Atlanta. When they sign up for the after-school program, Wilderness Works, they quickly begin to unpack the negative pressures that dominate their day-to-day lives. A backpacking trip in the Colorado wilderness takes the teenagers through rapid rivers, high-altitudes and 12,000 ft snow capped peaks.
Director’s note: The average American spends 93% of their time inside, resulting in a wide range of increasing mental and physical problems. As the U.S. becomes more diverse, some demographic and socioeconomic groups are still underrepresented in outdoor recreation and education. That’s Wild is a bold statement meant to inspire a new generation of all races to travel out into the natural world, adventuring and discovering the mental and physical benefits that the outdoors offer.
Best Narrative Feature Competition
Both features below are noted for their beautiful cinematography.
Poppie Nongena (South Africa)
Director: Christiaan Olwagen
Consisting of an all-South African creative team and cast, this legacy film intended to honor and bring tribute to the Elsa Joubert story that touched many people across the world. Poppie Nongena is an Afrikaans/Xhosa South African, whose life revolves around her family and finding stability in a period of immense upheaval in South Africa when African women were forced — by arrests, fines and forced removal — to leave their homes and resettle in remote areas designated as Black homelands. When her husband becomes too ill to maintain work, Poppie is deemed by the law to be an “illegal” resident in her own country.
The focus of the film is not Apartheid, colonialism, capitalism or oppression. It’s a character study told from the personal viewpoint and daily life of a Black South African woman.
The Milkmaid (Nigeria)
Director: Desmond Ovbiagele
Aisha, a Fulani milkmaid, is searching for her younger sister, Zainab after a forced separation. Dire personal circumstances force her to approach the extremists who were responsible for their predicament in the first instance, but she is determined to find her despite the compromises she must make to do so.
The film juxtaposes the color and elegance of rural Hausa/Fulani culture against a graphic portrayal of conflict victims and the implications of the resulting psychological trauma.
Best Documentary Competition
City On the Hill (US)
Director: Xavier Underwood.
A perceptive film examining the realities of gentrification in San Francisco, home to the highest housing costs in the country and the third largest homeless population in the U.S. at more than 28,000 people. Tech giant Google has pledged $1 billion to build more housing in the Bay Area. This exploration of a current day urban landscape exposes the residual effects of the tech boom, what made San Francisco into the great city it is, and what can be done to save its increasingly displaced population, interviewing civil rights leaders, politicians, Bay-Area natives and small business owners.
Firestarter – The Story of Bangarra (Australia)
Director: Wayne Blair, Nel Minchin.This beautifully executed film evidences why Bangarra Dance Theater developed from a little-known Indigenous dance group into one the nation’s most powerful cultural institutions. Historically important, Firestarter explores the loss and reclaiming of culture, intergenerational trauma and the extraordinary power of art as a messenger for social change and healing. Firestarter tells the story of how three young Aboriginal brothers turned the newly born dance group into one of Australia’s leading performing arts companies.
Best First Feature – Director Competition
African America (South Africa, US)
Director: Muzi Mthembu. Upon discovering her acceptance into Juilliard, Nompumelelo, a cynical South African, embezzles funds from her workplace and abandons her fiancé to live out her Broadway dream in New York City, only to discover that the U.S. is not as welcoming as she had dreamed. But there, in a twist, she learns about true love, true happiness, and true citizenship.
Feature Documentaries:
Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story (US)
Director: Royal Kennedy Rodgers, Kathy McCampbell Vance
Nicknamed “Architect to the Stars,” African-American architect Paul R. Williams’ life could be a Hollywood story. Orphaned at the age of four, Williams grew up to build mansions for movie stars and millionaires in Southern California. From the early 1920s until his retirement 50 years later, Williams was one of the most successful architects in the country. His name is associated with architectural icons like the Beverly Hills Hotel, the original MCA Headquarters Building and LAX Airport. Last summer USC and the Getty Research Institute announced their joint acquisition of Williams’ archive, for the first time, allowing public access to the breadth of the architect’s work.
The Letter (Kenya)
Director: Maia Lekow, Christopher King. A 94-year-old grandmother with a fearless spirit must overcome dangerous accusations of witchcraft that are coming from within her own family. Her grandson Karisa travels home from the city to investigate, where he finds a frenzied mixture of consumerism and Christianity is turning hundreds of families against their elders, branding them as witches as a means to steal their ancestral land. The understated power of women and resilience of family and community shines above all else. Kenya’s submission for the Best International Feature Film Oscar 2021.
“Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.” — Neal Cassidy
In the middle of the night, partway through a cross-country drive, I unfolded myself from the driver’s seat at another random gas station. Someone special was waiting at the east end of Interstate 90, but the rig and I both needed fuel.
As sure as diesel hum at a truck stop, there is a chocolate muffin in the store. It’s wrapped in clear cellophane and called “Double Chocolate Muffin,” or “Chocolate-Chocolate-Chunk Muffin,” or something along those lines, depending on which semi-local bakery made it.
A gas station chocolate muffin can be hard to find. There is no one place where you can count on it being. But like love, you can find it if you look hard enough, or if you lower the bar enough, all the way down to Hostess if necessary. Not the cream-filled cupcakes; the chocolate muffin.
Anywhere else, the gas station chocolate muffin might be as forgettable as one highway mile after the last. But our expectations are low at the gas station, and our needs are specific. Enjoyed with a steaming cup of gas station coffee, that dark, chemically moist and shiny chocolate muffin keeps us truckin all the way to the next pit stop. And the muffin, in turn, elevates that mediocre coffee into something like an artisan cup brewed by a beard in a flannel shirt.
The gas station chocolate muffin and coffee don’t just improve one another’s flavor. They combine their pharmacological forces in turning you into a well-oiled driving machine. Both bittersweet delicacies contain caffeine, of which only coffee contains grown-up levels, while cocoa is rich in a similar molecule, also a stimulant, called theobromine, which translates from Latin to “food of God.”
Not as powerful a stimulant as caffeine, it lasts longer, and eases the jittery feelings that caffeine alone can give. There is evidence theobromine improves cognitive function, while reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular diseases.
Cacao famously contains high levels of phenylalanine, which releases dopamine and norepinephrine, the endorphins responsible for the ecstasy of falling in love, and the energy that allows new lovers to talk for hours. Studies have shown most phenylalanine in chocolate gets broken down by enzymes before it has a chance to release those endorphins, but true Cupids know some of those biochemical arrows will hit their marks.
Chocolate also contains endocannabinoids, which human brain cells have special receptors to receive. And what discussion of euphoria would be complete without good old sugar, which triggers the release of yet more endorphins, plus giving you a sugar high, while dulling the bitter flavors of both chocolate and coffee. Luckily, theobromine also protects against tooth decay.
I got off I90 in Newton, Mass., and drove through the outskirts of Boston to my mom’s apartment. A few days later we headed for Montana, cup holders full of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, and Dunkin’ chocolate muffins in the console, which I incorrectly presumed would be our last best road muffins.
At the Clifton Springs travel plaza in Upstate New York, I got a Starbucks muffin and a double Americano, and figured I’d hit peak crunk. Then came Chicago, in broad daylight. I needed a coffee and chocolate muffin IV, because I could not let go of the steering wheel with even one hand. And both feet were on the gas.
In LaCrosse, Wis., I discovered the gas station chocolate muffin of my dreams, at a gas station chain called Kwik Trip. The Kwik Trip muffins are baked in the LaCrosse-based Kwikery and distributed throughout stations in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Instead of being hard to find, their muffins are displayed in well-lit cases, and you can also buy 4-packs. I was in love, but alas, I was also in a hurry. I hit as many Kwik Trips as possible before I crossed the South Dakota line.
In Murdo, S.D., sometime after midnight, the mask-free convenience store attendant insisted there wasn’t a chocolate muffin. I checked by the coffee, and then the refrigerated case where the sandwiches are, and then over by the doughnuts, in front of the corn dogs, and kept going until I finally found that elusive, theobromine-laced asset on the Hostess rack. Not the creme-filled cupcake. The chocolate muffin. When you’re in limbo, you don’t worry about lowering the bar a little.
She managed to ring me up and take my money without acknowledging me or my chocolate muffin, most likely annoyed that I’d raided her stash. No matter. I had what I needed to plow through another tank of gas, all the way through that COVID-laced wasteland and into the world’s greatest state, while my Valentine slept safely in the passenger seat.
When I got back to Montana, I reached out to the good folks at Kwik Trip. It’s quite the operation, vertically integrated to the point of having its own dairy, the fresh milk of which is sold at every Kwik Trip. And they were kind enough to provide their muffin recipe. With this muffin, and a cup of coffee, anything is possible.
Double Chocolate Chip Muffins
When I got back to Montana, I reached out to Kwik Trip. I explained that their chocolate chocolate chip muffins are the best, and asked for the recipe. They kindly provided a scaled-down version of their muffin recipe for the home kitchen.
I’ve been making these by the dozens, and have discovered that, at home as on the road, I can live a long time on a diet of chocolate muffins, and coffee.
The recipe below is faithfully reprinted as I received it. In private, I double the vanilla, and slip in tablespoon of mayo, for a tad extra moistness.
Servings: 24 muffins
A chocolate muffin, made with Kwik Trip’s recipe. Photo by Ari LeVaux
Ingredients:
¾ cup vegetable oil
1 ¼ cup granulated sugar
½ cup milk
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
2/3 cup sour cream
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ cup cocoa powder
1 ½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 375°F and line muffin cups with liners (or lightly grease and flour).
In a large bowl, whisk together oil, sugar, and milk. Stir in eggs and vanilla until well-combined.
Gently fold in sour cream until just-combined.
In a separate, medium-sized bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt.
Fold flour mixture gently into wet mixture, folding until just barely combined. Stir in 1 ½ cups chocolate chips.
Scoop chocolate muffin batter into prepared muffin tin, filling 2/3-3/4 of the way full.
Sprinkle tops of muffins with remaining chocolate chips.
Bake at 375°F for 18 minutes (toothpick inserted in center should come out with few slightly fudgy crumbs).
We are deeply concerned by yesterday’s news that you intend to take steps to sue our local school district to reopen school campuses. As educators, parents, and community members, we want to express our disappointment that you would disregard the health and safety of your constituents and our children at this time.
Los Angeles Unified School District is one of the poorest in the nation, with over 80% of our students receiving free or reduced lunch — a measurement of poverty that doesn’t even take the economic impact of COVID-19 into account. Over 70% of our LAUSD students come from Latinx backgrounds. Due to a variety of systemic factors, these families and communities have experienced a 1000% increase in deaths due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our state consistently ranks in the bottom for per pupil spending, which voters chose not to rectify with the defeat of Prop 15 this past November. Our superintendent, our parents, and our union all agree that reopening LAUSD campuses is not safe.
We want you to know we are working longer hours and harder than ever before. We pivoted in a matter of days to completely adapt an entire institution to a new situation. Tens of thousands of educators and hundreds of thousands of students log on to platforms daily — despite systemic gaps in funding for devices, internet access, and even electricity. We have provided meals, instruction, extracurricular activities, parent and family workshops, and grief counseling to those who have lost loved ones to the virus — while struggling to bring our own families through this crisis. Suggesting that we return to campuses in the current circumstances demonstrates a lack of empathy, compassion, and understanding for your constituents.
The hybrid plans to return to campus are insufficient to guarantee health and safety. We can see examples of this in surrounding school districts and other cities and states — which have opened and closed without consistent messaging or support — leaving students, teachers, and families scrambling to plan and find consistent routines during an already stressful time.
Calling for a safe reopening of schools should include a comprehensive plan to vaccinate educators and the families of our most vulnerable students. A safe reopening should include discussions with our labor unions, district leaders, and low-income Black and brown families whose children attend our schools. A safe reopening should include advocating for more funding and resources for your community, not shifting our already-limited resources to a legal battle over our health and safety.
Editor’s note: More than 800 teachers from schools through the 15th Council District signed on to this letter.
The Enemy is Within
Is the pro-pandemic, genocidal GOP still the party of the defeated, deranged racist traitor Donald Trump? Or is the Republican Party now following the fanatical footsteps of that other infamous homicidal American politician Dan White, the crazy ex-cop who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk?
Actually, FOX News’ favorite fresh fascist face Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) appears to conveniently enough be the political combination of Donald Trump and Dan White — a pathologically dishonest, crackpot QAnon conspiracy theorist whose hatred is clearly putting her on the path of political assassination and domestic terrorism. Marjorie is a violent psycho!
But the tangerine tyrant Trump says Greene is “a future Republican Star.” Here’s a suggestion for you neo-Nazi Republicans: next time you attempt a domestic terrorist takeover, hijacking the federal government with hateful hillbillies is probably not the most effective approach. No “Twinkie defense” for Trump.
The founder of the 1960s iconic music venue The Ash Grove, Ed Pearl died on Feb. 7 from complications of COVID-19 and pneumonia. He had been living in an assisted living facility for about a year. Ed Pearl was 88.
The Ash Grove was the focal point in Los Angeles for folk, blues, and ethnic music through the ‘60s into the early ‘70s. This unique venue located on Melrose (now a comedy club) was the home in Southern California for many traveling bluesmen and folk artists as well as more popular musicians. Among those who graced the boards of The Ash Grove were artists such as Johnny Cash, Jim Croce, The Byrds, Zydeco star Clifton Chenier, bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins and the Chamber Brothers.
The Ash Grove was the place where young people would go and literally sit at the feet of this incredible array of artists. Actress/singer Katy Segal would climb out her window of her parents’ home to go to The Ash Grove. Brothers Phil and Dave Alvin would hitchhike from Downey to the Melrose night club. Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and Ry Cooder would be among many soon to become famous musicians who would frequent the venue.
The seeds for The Ash Grove began when Pearl, a student at UCLA, and his fraternity were denied the ability to present a folk concert featuring Pete Seeger on campus. This was at the tail end of the House Un-American Activities, where Seeger had been branded a Communist threat. The university would have none of that influence on school grounds so Ed went next door to the large Presbyterian church just off campus and filled the huge church in Westwood. In that move, he saved Pete’s career and set him on his path as a music producer, promoter and venue operator.
Ed was a soft-spoken man, of strong convictions. He was a political activist who was involved in the Civil Rights struggle by organizing locally the Freedom Riders trip to the South. He continued to be very involved in politics and the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
Ed is survived by his daughter Jolie Pearl, granddaughter Ari Pearl Butler as well as brothers Bernie, Stanley and Sherman.
My mother and father both made what they considered wills and no one could tell them otherwise. What they did was print out simple statements on their home computers, signed the papers and that was all they bothered to do about their hard-earned property. My father never stopped his profane tirades about lawyers and money and how he didn’t have to do all that. At least his signed and dated printout listed his accounts and such.
My mother, a lifelong procrastinator, simply evaded the subject until her mind was incapable of handling it. Only after her death did I find she’d made a printout, too, dated 2013. She never shared or discussed it, not with me anyway — maybe it went down her mind’s memory hole. The first sentence said she’d leave everything to me, provided I take care of — she named her cats, without explaining they were her cats.
“If she does not wish to do this the estate should be held in trustee to pay for their care” was the second and last sentence. Who would hold the “trustee” and disburse the money and care for the cats wasn’t explained.
You can’t set up a “trustee” that way. Under California law, if you want to write, sign and date what you call a will and stash it away, to be valid it has to be handwritten entirely by you, not even marked by a witness and not altered by so much as a staple pull. My parents couldn’t even get their acts together that basically.
If my father had written his so-called will in his own hand, I might have been able to stop some women from plundering his property while he lay dying. When I tried to recover the property after his death, I learned that, lacking any valid will, I had no case.
My father left perhaps $35,000, counting up every car, every item of value, most of it in two credit union accounts, minus what those women took. I just had to deal with the credit unions and dispose of his personal property.
My mother left a house real estate agents beg for, its rooms crammed with valuables (and/or junk). She also left a number of accounts — banks, credit unions, common stocks, dividend stocks and I’m not sure if that exhausts the inventory. There could be bonds or insurance — somewhere. I’m still discovering various financial accounts, each of which has to be dealt with separately, all because she didn’t write out by hand and sign what she wanted for me — and her cats.
Judas and the Black Messiah film changes a false narrative
By Robert Lee Johnson, Contributor
The American media has attempted to define the Black Panther Party as a terrorist Black racist organization hell-bent on killing police officers and “Getting Whitey!” Judas and the Black Messiah destroys that intentional distortion created by the status quo that ignored the assassination, the false imprisonment and the show trials brought about by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTELPRO program. This is all embodied in the tragic murder of Fred Hampton, brilliantly portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya in this film under the nuanced direction of Shaka King.
The movie opens with a 1989 Interview from the documentary Eyes On The Prize of an obviously deluded William O’Neal, former Security Captain of the Illinois State chapter of the Black Panther Party and a paid FBI Informant. It seemed like he was coming to grips for the first time with his role in the murder of Deputy Chairman of the Illinois State Chapter of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton. This was his first television interview on the subject after entering the FBI’s witness protection program. He appeared conflicted when asked how he would explain to his young son his activities on behalf of the federal government that led to Hampton’s assassination. Actor LaKeith Stanfield brilliantly captures O’Neal’s inner turmoil.
The film flashes further back in time to the late 1960s, when William O’Neal is a petty car thief posing as an FBI agent, until he is actually caught by real FBI agents and is offered a deal he could not refuse. Law enforcement’s usage of such strong arm tactics was common in the Black community, and was intended to cultivate confidential informants with the threat of prison time.
It has been reported that FBI Special Agent Roy Mitchell, O’Neal’s handler, had also cultivated nine other informants inside of the Chicago office of the Black Panther Party. But this movie only focuses on O’Neal’s activities and how he helped the federal government assassinate a 21-year-old charismatic community leader just a year and eight months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; less than a year after the UCLA murders of two charismatic and effective Southern California chapter Black Panther Party leaders, Al Prentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Jerome Huggins.
In 1969, there was a huge leap in the number of confrontations between the Black Panther Party and local police agencies and their surrogates. These confrontations resulted in the death, imprisonment, or exile of party members across the United States, most notably in Los Angeles and Chicago.
The movie makes the direct link between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his counterintelligence program COINTELPRO, whose mission was to “disrupt, discredit and destroy” progressive organizations including the Black Panther Party. Out of 295 COINTELPRO operations as revealed by the 1975 Sen. Frank Church committee hearings, 233 were directed at the Black Panther Party. Jesse Premons, who depicts Special Agent Roy Mitchell, effectively illustrates the FBI tactic of using informants to cast suspicion on innocent party members as informants. In one scene, Mitchell is disturbed to find the FBI turning a blind eye to the fact that their own informant, George Sams, tortured and killed Black Panther Party member Alex Rackley, after accusing him of being an informant. Sams was the FBI’s key witness against Bobby Seale when he went on trial with Ericka Huggins in New Haven, Connecticut for the murder of Alex Rackley.
Black Messiah makes clear that Fred Hampton was a victim of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and that his assassination was ordered by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself. At the time of the making of this film, Hoover’s involvement in Fred Hampton’s murder was not proven. But recently released documents have directly linked Director Hoover in Hampton’s assassination.
While watching this film, it’s easy to forget that the average age of a typical Black Panther Party member was 19 years old. Many were as young as 16. Fred Hampton was only 21 years old. How did a 21-year-old become a first-rate orator, community organizer and effective leader of the Illinois State Chapter of the Black Panther Party? We know that he had been a NAACP youth leader in nearby Maywood, Ill. But what got him involved in politics? The radicalizing event for a whole generation of Black youth took place in 1955 with the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi.
The murderers, two white racists, were found not guilty by an all-white jury with the excuse that they did not believe that the body that Mrs. Till buried was the body of her son, but a corpse that she had dug up and that her son was alive in Detroit. It’s hard to imagine people can be so brazen. But then again, there are people today who believe Donald Trump is secretly fighting a criminal network of Hollywood elitists and Democratic Party members who are pedophiles and Satan worshipers who kidnap children and drink their blood and eat them to gain immortality.
A few weeks after their acquittal, the two white racists, sold their story about how they killed Emmett Till to a national magazine where they all but boasted about their role in his murder. This murder not only shocked the nation but devastated the Black community in Chicago. Fred Hampton’s mother had babysat Emmett Till. This might explain Fred Hampton’s early involvement with the NAACP in Maywood, which acted as a training ground for his activities with the Black Panther Party. As Dr. Huey P. Newton once said, “Without the NAACP there would have never been a Black Panther Party.”
But Hampton does not do this all by himself. The personalities of Bobby Rush and Ronald “Doc” Satchel should have been developed more. After Hampton’s assassination, Rush led the chapter for many years. The People’s Free Breakfast Program, The Jake Winters People’s Free Medical Clinic, the formation of the Rainbow Coalition that eventually led to the election of President Barack Obama, are all legacies of not only Fred Hampton’s leadership, but of the many people who worked, sacrificed and risked their lives as members of the Black Panther Party.
Party members became servants of the people in order to fight for a better life in unity against a white supremacist status quo that keeps us fighting each other over scraps and viciously attacks us when we move toward unity. Black Messiah accurately depicts Fred Hampton as a visionary who saw something better for all people and worked in unity for a better place in this world. The film gives a more realistic understanding of the Black Panther Party’s ideology, rather than the myths and hearsay that’s out there. And certainly more realistic than the “police version” of events.
Black Messiah was well acted and well-written. Some of the interior shots were too dark for my taste, but I guess they were trying to set the mood. The tight editing and the music score created a stylized depiction that seemed to catch the feel of the community that Hampton was trying to build as he reached out to other communities to show them that we have a common struggle and that we can win if we fight together.
The movie also showed love and respect for the party’s work in our Black community — organizing and uniting us to work together to feed our children, to provide access to medical clinics and to realize the power of the people in unity. The party believed that people learn from example. That theory came with practice — not talk. We didn’t talk about hungry children in our community. We organized a breakfast program to feed hungry children in our community and showed the community that they could do this themselves.
This fact about the Black Panther Party was beautifully depicted in the scenes in which Bobby Rush rallies party members to rebuild their office that had been destroyed by the Chicago Police Department and community members come out to help. The movie tears apart the myth of the Black Panther Party as merely a Black nationalist-hate-white-people group. Or as Special Agent Mitchell says of the Panthers in the film, “they’re just like the Klan” — a false equivalency used by right-wingers and police to demonize the Black Panther Party and sow mistrust and confusion. Former members of the Black Panther Party that I’ve talked to enjoyed these points of authenticity, as did I.
At the end of the film, we return to William O’Neal’s interview with Eyes On the Prize as he tries to avoid the obvious. His role in the Black Liberation Movement was that of a “rat” working for the FBI as its instrument to assassinate Fred Hampton. When Eyes On the Prize aired nationally on Martin Luther King’s birthday, William O’Neal committed suicide. I imagine that that was the first time he actually saw himself. It appears he couldn’t stand what he saw and what his son was going to see — a personal myth destroyed.
Robert Lee Johnson is the author of Notable Southern Californians in Black History. He was formerly a leading member of the Compton branch of the Black Panther Party, a founding member of the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) in the 1970s. Johnson was a named plaintiff in CAPA v. Gates, a lawsuit filed against the LAPD on First Amendment grounds, exposing unlawful harassment, surveillance and infiltration of the progressive movement by LAPD agents.
As far back as I can recall, Republicans have branded their party as “anti-communist” and a party “for law and order.” This was President Richard M. Nixon’s first “dirty trick” when he ran against Congressman Jerry Voorhees in 1947. Nixon won that race by inferring that his opponent had been ineffective as a representative and suggested that a Voorhees’s endorsement by a group linked to Communists meant that Voorhees himself had “radical views.” Nixon later sat on the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, which promoted the “Red Scare” and went on a “witch hunt” for commies in every level of our nation. He later became the U.S. Senator from California. This of course was the beginning of the post-World War II, Cold War era. Nixon subsequently became Vice President under Dwight Eisenhower and later ran for president three times, losing the first one to John F. Kennedy in 1960. None of this somewhat ancient history would matter except that Nixon ran on the old “law and order/anti-communism” platform, the same as Donald Trump did in 2020. Nixon got elected the first time by violating the federal law known as the Logan Act to stop President Lyndon B. Johnson from ending the Vietnam War with a peace treaty before the 1968 elections. The Logan Act is the 1799 United States federal law that criminalizes negotiations by unauthorized American citizens with foreign governments having a dispute with the United States. The intent behind the Act is to prevent unauthorized negotiations from undermining the government’s position.
In 1973, Spiro T. Agnew, Nixon’s vice president was investigated by the United States attorney for the District of Maryland on suspicion of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion and tax fraud. Agnew took kickbacks from contractors during his time as Baltimore County executive and governor of Maryland. This had nothing to do with the Watergate scandal, in which he was not implicated. After months of maintaining his innocence, Agnew pleaded no contest to a single felony charge of tax evasion and resigned from office. Most of Nixon’s diehard supporters will point to his creating the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act and his opening up trade with China before admitting to his high crime of the Watergate scandal that nearly got him impeached. He resigned instead and was pardoned by his successor Gerald Ford.
Along the way he instituted the War on Drugs and allowed for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI COINTELPRO political suppression program to continue unabated. Both of these programs broke fundamental laws in the name of keeping America safe from “radicals and communists” while violating people’s civil rights. Some of these issues of injustice are only now being reconsidered and reversed. Read more of this in our article this issue on Judas and the Black Messiah. So much for being the party of law and order.
But don’t stop there, another of the “Great” GOP leaders President (and former California Gov.] Ronald Reagan came to power during the Iranian hostage crisis. And how exactly did that crisis end you might well ask? By Reagan sending an envoy before he was elected to negotiate with the Iranians not to release the hostages before he got elected! This became known as the October Surprise in an article by Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus in the Nov. 29, 1986 edition of the Washington Post that said U.S. officials tied to Reagan, well before the Iran Contra affair, considered an initiative to sell U.S.-made military parts to Iran in exchange for the hostages held there. A clear violation of the Logan Act.
By extension, what became known later was that without the consent of Congress the Reagan administration sold anti-tank missiles through a third party to Iran breaking the arms embargo and transferring the proceeds to purchase weapons for the Contras who were attempting to overthrow the elected leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Some of those weapons ended up on the streets of South Los Angeles in the 1980’s as protection for the cocaine trade that fueled money back to the Contra effort and gave rise to gang warfare in LA. Journalist Gary Webb in his 1998 book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, exposed these crimes.
In March 1987, Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Tx) introduced articles of impeachment against President Reagan, leading to the joint hearings that dominated the summer. A long line of Reagan’s administration were indicted, including Col. Oliver North, some convicted but later pardoned by his successor and former vice president George Bush Sr., the 41st president.
Republicans will always refer to President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary when arguing about corruption in government. Indeed, Bill Clinton was impeached but not convicted for lying under oath about getting a blowjob from a White House intern. Hardly a high crime.
However, this pales in comparison to what we all just witnessed on Jan. 6 with President Donald J. Trump inspired an insurrection to invade the U.S. Capitol building, disrupting the certification of votes for the peaceful transfer of power. His “stop the steal” campaign appears now to be more about Republicans attempting to steal the election by whatever means necessary and Trump breaking multiple state and federal laws along the way. This was the cause for his impeachment and justifiably so. All of this while he campaigned over the last year that he is the most “law and order president ever” and that once again the “Democrats are all socialists.”
Now I don’t know about you, but all of this law and order, anti-communist rhetoric is wearing mighty thin at this point. And clearly, the Grand Ol’ Party of Lincoln has a very loose grasp of American laws and even less of an understanding of history since they still seem to be fighting the Cold War against enemies who long ago exchanged their communist ideology for capitalist economics. China, after Nixon opened trade relations, may still call itself communist, but it is now beating us at our own game while violating the human rights of its own citizens. As for Russia, it has become one of the most corrupt totalitarian nations and still an adversarial threat to our national security.
There have been at least four Republican presidents who should have been impeached and convicted, then removed from office. Yet, here we are again with a guy who clearly is a criminal that the “law and order” GOP can’t convict or remove. This makes me question what exactly conservatives actually mean by the very term they so often speak but then ignore.
Progenitor of fake news delivers to local doorsteps
Last month, many local residents were amongst the thousands of Southern Californians who received a copy of The Epoch Times in their mail boxes — the newspaper “freedom loving people wanting news without spin prefer to read.” What The Epoch Times doesn’t tell you is that it’s connected to and has the same function as the long-running Chinese performing arts show, Shen Yun. You probably recognize the show from the ubiquitous billboards promoting the show. Shen Yun is the public relations — some say propaganda — arm of Falun Gong, a controversial spiritual movement which has been banned in China.
Online, at least up until recently, if you had the misfortune of forgetting to hit the commercial skip button after four seconds while watching a YouTube video, you probably would have seen part of the long Epoch Times’ commercial featuring Roman Balmakov peering out from behind a copy of the newspaper. While some journalists have described Balmakov as a Peter Parker/Spider-Man casting reject, he is in fact the online visage of The Epoch Times.
“Hey, I just read an unbelievable article in The Epoch Times,” he says. Then he splays the paper on a table, showcasing a news story headlined “The Mysterious Origins of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] Virus,” a variation of former President Donald Trump’s term: the “China virus.”
The headline suggested that the pathogen could have emerged, maybe purposefully, from a lab in Wuhan, China. This has become a common right-wing claim. It’s important to keep in mind that most scientists believe that the virus jumped naturally from animals to humans but the most recent report from the World Health Organization is inconclusive. Alternatively, the outlet was suggesting that the virus was a divine instrument designed to punish the CCP and its supposed allies.
Falun Gong practitioners aspire to ascend spiritually through moral rectitude and the practice of a set of exercises and meditation.
Balmakov was born, raised and educated in Ohio. Both he and his wife are Falun Gong adherents.
“It’s not just that,” Balmakov said, turning the page. “Look: an investigation into how the countries that have been most affected are the same ones that have been the most deeply infiltrated by the Chinese Communist Party.” According to the investigation, Washington State’s early COVID-19 outbreak can be partly explained by the fact that Seattle was the first U.S. port to welcome Communist Chinese cargo ships, in the 1970s.
In April 2020, the Canadian postal union filed a special request to stop postal workers from delivering the newspaper, that called COVID-19 the “CCP virus” on its cover — arguing that it promoted Sinophobia and could put Asian letter carriers at risk. The Canadian government declined to take action. In May 2020, Balmakov appeared in a new ad again accusing the Chinese government of being responsible for COVID-19. No one has been ballsy enough to try this yet in the United States.
Despite the locally disseminated paper being printed in El Monte, CA, The Epoch Times is not a local newspaper. It doesn’t even pretend to be. Its content is largely supplied by writers in every other part of the country but California. And despite its claims that its content has “no spin,” the world it depicts in its pages is upside down, emblematic of a Trumpian-worldview.
Random Lengths News signed up for its daily newsletters to get the gist of the kind of headlines that would cross our newsfeed if the paper existed in the same media universe.
On Feb. 13, there was “Hypocrisy: Trump Team Shows Videos of Democrat Lawmakers During Impeachment Trial.” This story is referring to former President Donald Trump’s defense team attempting to make the case that Trump was engaging in “constitutionally protected speech” when he spoke at a rally that immediately preceded the Jan. 6 violence. Five people died as a result of events that day.
The Trump defense team called the impeachment trial a “witch hunt” and railed at Democrats for elevating “cancel culture” to the halls of Congress. In a case of false equivalence, they even suggested Democrats were hypocrites for impeaching Trump after some had previously voiced support for racial justice marches and criminal justice reform this past summer, none of which were aimed at overthrowing the government.
On Feb. 12, there was “White House Reassures Gun Control Groups It Will Fulfill ‘Ambitious’ Gun Control Agenda.” This is referring to President Joe Biden’s call for common sense gun control that includes background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets in a released statement. All these measures enjoy broad popular support.
Other headlines are either from opinion pieces reiterating pro-Trump talking points or more “news” stories that misrepresent factual reporting.
The one thing The Epoch Times does well is marketing itself. The Epoch Media Group spent $11 million on Facebook ads in 2019. In August 2019, Facebook banned The Epoch Times from advertising on its platform after finding that the newspaper broke Facebook’s political transparency rules. As Facebook banned it from advertising, the newspaper shifted its spending to YouTube, where it has spent more than $1.8 million on ads, some promoting conspiracy theories, since May 2018.
The news organization was founded with the aim of attacking China’s Communist government in support of the Falun Gong movement. As the government ramped up its repressive efforts against the movement, the movement started looking for allies wherever it could find them — perhaps thinking the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This led to the movement linking arms with far-right groups around the world particularly in Europe and the United States and participating in the manufacture and dissemination of the kind of fake news you’re likely to see in online forums and fake-news websites, except it’s putting it in print. The publication is funded by several non-profit organizations that are not transparent as to who is supporting them.
Random Lengths News reached out to Nolen Higdon, one of the authors of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education, to gain insight to organizations like The Epoch Times and the One America Network. These are by far not the only progenitors of fake news nor are they all rooted in the far right ideological spectrum, which Higdon makes abundantly clear.
One of the fascinating things that kind of contextualizes the reach of something like The Epoch Times, Higdon explained, is the fact that so many people are turning against legacy media. And I don’t just mean they’re choosing other options. There are a lot of studies that clearly show people no longer trust legacy media. By legacy media, Higdon is referring to news outlets that were once family owned companies going back several generations like the Times Mirror Company [owner of the Los Angeles Times], which was gobbled up by even bigger and older company, the Tribune Company.
“On the one hand, you know [fake news] is pretty poisonous for democracy. But on the other hand, a lot of the legacy media, through their fixation on profit models and garnering audiences through hyperpolarized content have actually done a disservice to themselves as journalists,” Higdon explained.
Higdon asked us to consider the cataclysmic failures like the allegations that weapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq in 2003, the financial reporting around the Great Recession in 2009, or political reporting around the election in 2016.
“When things like Russia-gate [Higdon is referring to the mainstream media’s rush to assign blame for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Russian interference instead of the true culprit of vote suppression in key states] and things like that, a lot of people lost a lot of faith in legacy media,” Higdon said. “So that part is somewhat understandable. But … people are looking for something new, something different. The statistics are pretty clear that people have turned to online spaces, but not online news media.”
Higdon noted that social media platforms and search engines have added another layer of complexity because their business model is predicated on keeping you glued to the screen on your phone so they can keep collecting and selling your data. The way this model keeps you on your screen is by confirming your views. As a result, search engines and social media platforms reinforce the beliefs or perspectives a user already has regardless of whether these beliefs are false or true. Higdon argues that an environment like this is ripe for an organization like The Epoch Times to succeed because they’re different from legacy media.
“With the right type of sensationalistic, clickbaity headlines, [outlets like The Epoch Times] could build quite a vast global audience for relatively cheap compared to legacy media 20 or 30 years ago,” Higdon said. “I think in The Epoch Times example makes perfect sense in this environment for why they’re resonating the way they are.”
The real interesting thing here is that in this particular moment The Epoch Times is able to portray itself as a victim of censorship and standard bearer of free speech.
Higdon said anybody who is censored or has content removed is a victim at that point, so The Epoch Times may be one of many. But making The Epoch Times the sole issue, or right-leaning victims more broadly, is a real distortion of reality, Higdon argues.
It should be noted here that Higdon does not believe publications like The Epoch Times should be censored, nor do the journalists and researchers affiliated with Project Censored. The solution, they argue, lies in educating the American public in media literacy.
Higdon thinks it’s really important to take a step back.
“As bad as The Epoch Times is and as dangerous as their intentions are, if we don’t look at structural changes, then we’re just going to be playing whack-a-mole for the rest of our lives,” Higdon said.
“We can’t keep going after The Epoch Times and Fox news, then OAN and then this party or that party. Fake news has and always will exist,” Higdon said.
Higdon noted that one of the attributes humanity has acquired via evolution is that we’re able to believe falsehoods, citing Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. In it, Harari talks about how you could never convince a monkey to give you all of its bananas with the promise of more bananas in the afterlife. But humans have the ability to believe in myth. So you’re never going to get rid of that out of the society.
“Our best hope is to really train people to be able to discern fact from fiction,” Higdon said. “So when they see something like an ad from The Epoch Times or one of their sensationalistic headlines, rather than react they try and investigate.
“The thing that concerns me about a lot of these conversations about these media outlets is that we fixate on how disgusting their false content is,” Higdon said. “We don’t look at the larger environment, which is the social media companies that are amplifying these messages and then there’s a citizenry that’s not trained with critical thinking skills to discern fact from fiction.”
“It would take a lot more time and a lot more effort,” Higdon said. “But I think it’s worth it because the other options on the table include censorship. So, yes. It’s going to take a lot of effort but the short-sighted fixes that we’re attempting now, [are]going to create way more damage.”
Higdon’s solution sounds like a process that would require a great deal of education, time and political uplift in order to make that happen. But also, I can’t help but be reminded of Ron Suskinds’ 2004 New York Times piece about the Bush presidency in which he quotes a senior advisor saying:
People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Protecting American democracy and ensuring that reality is moored by facts and science won’t wait for the exposure of every bit of fake news or until every American achieves media literacy. The world in which we live today is vastly different from the one inherited by the Trump administration.
A debate: Should schools re-open before teacher vaccinations?
LOS ANGELES — On Feb. 10, Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer rejected District 15 Councilman Joe Buscaino and District 1 Councilman Gil Cedillo’s motion to sue the Los Angeles Unified School District to force the unsafe reopening of school campuses (“in-person instruction immediately”) even as more variants are found spreading in the community that are far more contagious than the original coronavirus.
In a released statement, the United Teachers of Los Angeles saluted Feuer’s action, calling the motion “political theater that opportunistically feeds off of people’s frustrations.” UTLA went onto accuse the councilman of pandering to the business community’s desire to accelerate employees’ return to work even as COVID-19 outbreaks at workplaces have soared dramatically.
“This push for unsafe reopenings is harmful to all of Los Angeles, but particularly the Black and brown communities these two (Buscaino and Cedillo) are supposed to represent.”
In a letter signed by more than 800 educators, parents, students and community members in Buscaino’s district, his motion was condemned for political grandstanding. In the letter, Buscaino was called to focus his efforts instead on reinvesting in schools to make them genuinely safe.
“Calling for a safe reopening of schools should include a comprehensive plan to vaccinate educators and the families of our most vulnerable students,” the letter (https://tinyurl.com/3swcfd33) read in part. “A safe reopening should include discussions with our labor unions, district leaders, and low-income Black and brown families whose children attend our schools. A safe reopening should include advocating for more funding and resources for your community, not shifting our already-limited resources to a legal battle over our health and safety.”
On Feb. 8, Buscaino asked his colleagues on the Los Angeles City Council to request the city attorney to file suit against the LAUSD.
“Join me and Councilmember Gil Cedillo on behalf of the nearly 600,000 LAUSD students who have gone nearly a year without classroom learning to work together with the teacher’s union, the county and the state to reopen LAUSD campuses safely,” Buscaino said.
To bolster their argument, they cited Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and 1,500 pediatricians from the Southern California Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics who support opening schools as long as “safety protocols are followed, using social distancing, masks, hand-washing and facilities modifications.”
In response to the motion, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health presented to the council their requisites for school reopenings, explaining:
• Once adjusted case rate is below 25 per 100,000 for five consecutive days, all elementary schools can reopen if compliant with state and county directives.
• If a school has not been approved for a waiver, it cannot reopen until the county case rate is below 25 per 100,000 for five consecutive days.
UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz’s Feb. 5 weekly Facebook Live update explained teacher’s concerns in a presentation entitled, “We must take politics out of the pandemic. Let’s listen to scientists.”
Myart-Cruz blasted Buscaino and Cedillo’s call to immediately reopen schools for in-person instruction as being motivated by politics rather than science.
“When Gov. Gavin Newsom says schools are safe to reopen without vaccines, he should also tell us what he believes a safe number of deaths associated with that would be,” Myart-Cruz said.
“People are willfully ignoring the science and facts to score political points or, let’s be honest, to try to knock educators and unions down a peg. We will not allow this.”
Myart-Cruz noted that at no point since school buildings were closed this past March has Los Angeles County been out of the purple tier — purple tiers means there’s still widespread COVID-19 transmission in the county and that nearly all businesses have to keep indoor operations closed or severely limited.
This past November, Newsom said it was unsafe to reopen schools and that all teachers should be vaccinated. Now, in February, infection rates are six times higher than they were in November but Newsom has changed his tune and now says schools are safe to reopen without vaccines for educators.
Studies show that schools are safe if community transmission is under control and mitigation measures are in place. That’s not the case in Los Angeles County.
Myart-Cruz noted that children have a higher rate of asymptomatic infection. In LAUSD (the only school district in the state to offer widespread COVID testing) 1 in 3 children have tested positive for COVID-19.
The teacher’s union leader went on to blast politicians and those who minimize the impact of COVID-19 on working class families.
“Saying the temporary trauma from Crisis Distance Learning is greater than the illness and death of family members minimizes the reality that COVID-19 disproportionately impacts poor, Black, Latino, and Pacific Islander families in Los Angeles,” Myart-Cruz said. “It is the working-class families of LA who suffer the most, our elected county and state officials have made the decision to let this disease run rampant.”
Myart-Cruz called on Buscaino to stop the divisive rhetoric.
“Instead, we want to know what will he and other local and state officials do in these next crucial weeks to get the virus under control in order to save lives and reopen schools?” Myart-Cruz said.
The leader of UTLA called for, “Vaccines for school educators and staff, in addition to mitigation strategies, such as vaccination, physical distancing, use of masks, hand hygiene, and isolation and quarantine and low community transmission rates. That is the path based on science and the path that puts the health and safety of our school staff, our students, and their families before politics.”
Long Beach is already vaccinating teachers to speed up school openings. At the same time, within LA County, private schools such as Wesley in North Hollywood are open after having received vaccines for their teachers and staff.
