Movies! Art! Shady Cops!
Here are your antiracism action steps for October 6.
Workers on strike outside the Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center in Oakland on Wednesday. Loren Elliott for The New York Times
I really pushed my word limit with my "quick and easy" little action steps below, so I will keep it short and tight up front. We still have labor top of mind, art and books will save the world, and cops are still doing dirty. There is a lot going on, and a lot you can do to keep the good work going.
Here are your 5 Things.
SUPPORT THIS. Labor, baby. This week, more than 75,000 workers at the Kaiser Permanente health care system have walked off the job, in what union leaders say could be the largest health care strike in U.S. history. Similar to Hollywood writers and actors and the United Automobile Workers, the striking Kaiser workers are demanding better pay and benefits. But many of their greatest demands can’t be met with money alone. The changes they want require a major overhaul of how healthcare is delivered. And that's at the heart of all these striking workers—it't not just about the pay, it's about burnout and understaffing and the harm it causes to the people they should be serving—the students and the patients....all of us. (83% of health care workers in California surveyed in 2022 reported that “their departments are either severely understaffed or somewhat understaffed.”) This year alone, housekeepers, Los Angeles city workers, McDonald’s employees, dockworkers, autoworkers, and Hollywood writers and actors all went on strike this year. And now healthcare workers. Pay attention and have their backs—these workers are all making this bold sacrifice for the rest of us.
READ THIS. We love Alta's deep, long profiles, and this week they dedicated one to the extraordinary Lava Thomas, a multidisciplinary Berkeley-based artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Thomas is known for addressing issues of race, gender, representation, and memorialization. Journalist Faith Adiele writes beautifully about the artist, her personal histories and her powerful works of art — including the soon-to-be unveiled Maya Angelou sculpture outside the SF Main Library, Thomas’s first public art project.
WATCH THIS. The San Quentin Prison Marathon has an unconventional route: 105 dizzying laps around a crowded prison yard. 26.2 TO LIFE is a new documentary that tells the story of incarcerated men who are members of the 1000 Mile Club, the prison’s long distance running club. They train all year for this 26.2 mile race. For the men who take their places at the starting line on a cool, sunny November morning, completing the marathon means more than entrée into an elite group of athletes. It’s a chance to be defined by more than their crimes. Cheering them on are a small staff of volunteer coaches, veteran marathoners who train with the runners throughout the year. The bonds they forge on the track create a community that transcends prison politics and extends beyond the prison walls as members are released. The film made its Bay Area debut a couple weeks back, and wraps up this weekend with multiple showings at the New Parkway Theater in Oakland.
KNOW THIS. It was just uncovered that a San Francisco police officer has allegedly been misidentifying the races of people he stops in an attempt to dodge racial profiling accusations. The officer allegedly misidentified the races of people he stopped in nearly half of the 50 encounters reviewed by the Department of Police Accountability, which investigates citizen complaints against officers. The investigation was spawned by a complaint alleging that the officer stopped and cited a person because of his race. These revelations come as a law enforcement scandal unfolds in Connecticut, where an audit found that more than 100 Connecticut state troopers may have inflated the percentage of white drivers they pulled over while logging “ghost stops” that never happened. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating.
GO TO THIS. Whether it's Toni Morrison's Beloved that opened your heart in high school English class or Michelle Alexander's New Jim Crow that powered a generation of people to fight against mass incarceration, most of us have been transformed by a book that's currently on a banned book list. But it's more than books.These bans represent a larger swath of chilling authoritarian-style policies that are affecting communities across the country, seeking to divide us along lines of difference. We not only need to fight to protect the stories we love, but fight to put our people at the tables where these policies are decided. Join Showing Up for Racial Justice and For the People Leftist Library Project for a community conversation, “Beyond Book Bans: building power in public schools and libraries” to hear stories about how regular folks are building people power to make decisions about how the libraries and schools in their communities are run. Opening remarks by abolitionist organizer (and co-founder of For the People Leftist Library Project) Mariame Kaba. Sign up right here!