Today Berkeley learned that Margy Wilkinson, a fierce and kind advocate for justice, died last night in her sleep. She was 76 years old. She and her husband and partner in action Tony Wilkinson were going to celebrate their 50th anniversary in April, but the party was postponed because of the pandemic shut-down.

Tributes have been pouring in to the Planet all day. We would like to reprint them here in her honor in the next days. Please send yours to news@berkeleydailyplanet.com.

It is with a heavy heart we share with you that Margy Wilkinson, our beloved colleague and friend, passed away in her sleep on Saturday, June 27 at her home in South Berkeley.

Margy grew up in South Berkeley/North Oakland and was a labor activist while working at Cal. She was a mom and grandmother, community activist, and profound friend. She fought for the rights of working people her entire life and together with her husband Tony (of 50 years) became powerful role models of love, life, and the highest potential of what people can be. The home she shared with Tony has always been and continues to be a hub for organizing in South Berkeley. Their home became a second home to many people in need of a meal, a home, an ally or friend.

Margy didn’t ask for permission to speak the truth. She organized every single day—on the phone, on the computer, at the dinner table, at meetings, etc. But she was not seeking to be a leader or a martyr. She simply saw and did not tolerate injustice; and together with Tony she built community to fight for justice in South Berkeley and beyond. She was particularly passionate about fighting the racism and displacement so implicit to the gentrification of South Berkeley. 

Margy was someone you could count on. She loved to cook for guests and feed people. She and Tony took in people who needed a home and If she heard about a need in the community, she reached out to the right people and made sure the need was met. She was trusted for her fearlessness, her clear thinking, and because she was extremely loving. She accepted people where they were at, while at the same time supporting them to evolve in whichever direction they wanted to grow 

We are devastated and It is hard to know how to be or what to do in a world without Margy. She was our rock. The one thing we know to do is to fight—against greed and racism—and to hold elected officials accountable. We will never stop fighting for all the things she believed in. 

You can remember Margy by coming to and/or bringing a remembrance to the mural on Ashby at Ellis Street. Flowers and messages are being placed under her image on the muralIf you have a story about Margy that you think her family would want to have, you can email us the story. We plan to compile them into a book for her family. 

We will keep you abreast of other events or opportunities to remember Margy. 

Rest in power Margy Wilkinson. 

We love you.

I didn't know Margy Williamson well, but I saw her everywhere in the last half-dozen years, always committed and ready to take on the insult of the day. Her name should grace an appropriate place or structure ..

—Phil Allen, Landmark Preservation Commissioner

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Margy was an outstanding and incredibly fair-minded friend and activist. There is no one like her; no one will fill her place.

Our hearts go out to Tony and their children and grandchildren, and to their many circles of relatives and friends whose lives she enriched day after day and year after year.

Margy was endowed with crystal-clear insight and extraordinary patience - qualities that enabled her to forge ahead on myriad issues touching the lives of town-and-gown folks in Berkeley.

Her wisdom and compassion were deep and far-reaching. Hers was a life well-lived.

The Berkeley community must now suffer her loss.

With Sympathy and Embraces—

—Rita Maran

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The news of Margy Wilkinson's sudden and unexpected death has left me stunned. It's like reading that the solar system has just lost a planet.

—Gar Smith

Margy Wilkinson passed away last night. Berkeley has lost a 21st Century saint. She was a "collective" person. She knew who to contact for anyone in need of help and she immediately implemented the communication between people so the knots in the social fabric would be eased out. She spoke her heart and took no prisoners, yet was so compassionate and helpful that she had an open door policy to anyone, anywhere and relieved suffering.

She was a great protector of the Here/There encampment started by First They Came For The Homeless. When she saw that the residents there were without proper methods for maintaining health and hygiene, she had a porta potty put up adjacent to the camp and the Friends of Adeline paid for the installation and maintenance. They added a hand washing station to it.

She could be called when no one could provide a solution to a crisis and contact and immediate connections were made and help was given to those suffering. She was known city wide as the provider of instant reprieve for those who were catastrophically suffering. Over and over again, when the city administration closed its heart and mind to the people in need in Berkeley, Margy would remedy the solution in a matter of minutes and have relief brought to them.

As a 21st Century saint, she didn't mince words. She spoke truth to power and implemented organized structures that would serve all categories of need. Her husband, Tony, was her co-saint. They took on the very hard and the lighter tasks. People knew that there was no dead end when they had her as a resource.

I loved her and everyone who got to know her loved her. She was our Mary, Goddess of Mercy.

Disrupting Berkeley City Council Meetings—

Support 100% Affordable Housing at Ashby BART ...

And Back to Jac--about Urban Shield

Open Letter to the Berkeley City Council Re:Prof Hatem Bazian

Helen Lima, Presente!

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A Berkeley neighborhood group won a sweeping legal victory that gives them the right to sue UC Berkeley over the impacts of enrollment increases of more than 8,000 students from 2007- 2017 that the University undertook with no notice to the city and neighbors. 

Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods won an appeals court ruling June 25. UC Berkeley contended that it only has a legal obligation to evaluate and mitigate the impacts of enrollment increases on surrounding communities when it engages in physical construction of new buildings. The First District Court of Appeal court rejected this argument. 

“The Legislature has recognized that both enrollment levels and physical development are related features of campus growth that must be mitigated” under environmental law, Justice Gordon Burns said in the 3-0 ruling. In addition, Justice Burns pointed out that environmental law doesn’t limit enrollment, but simply requires that UC Berkeley “mitigate the impacts of (its) growth and development.” 

“The appeals court vindicated our efforts to hold UC Berkeley accountable for the severe impacts on our community from their massive enrollment increases which they made without public notice or comments. UC Berkeley will now be required to study the environmental impacts and implement mitigation for enrollment increases,” said Phil Bokovoy, President of Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods. Major impacts of the extra students include displacement of many low-income renters, increased homelessness, additional burden on police, fire and emergency services, and growth in trash and noise throughout neighborhoods surrounding campus. 

“It’s unfortunate that UC Berkeley has wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs to fight against the efforts of citizens to have them comply with the environmental laws, money that could have been used to educate our young people. The Regents, the Legislature and alumni need to hold the UC Berkeley administration accountable,” Bokovoy added. 

UC’s Board of Regents approved a development plan in 2005 that projected an enrollment increase of 1,650 students at Berkeley through 2020, bringing the total to 33,450. But UC Berkeley approved enrollment increases in every two-semester period since 2007, without public notice or environmental review, adding 8,300 students by April 2018, a five-fold increase over the 2005 projection. Last year’s enrollment was over 43,000, an increase of nearly 12,000 above 2005 enrollment. The 2005 plan also committed UC Berkeley to add 2,500 beds for students, but as of April 2018, it had added only 700 beds, making the local housing crisis worse.

One person was arrested for having a loaded gun and drug-related offenses in Berkeley on Wednesday evening, police said.  

Officers responded at 7:52 p.m. to Oregon Street in South Berkeley after numerous people called to say there was gunfire in the area. 

On the way, police received reports that there was a hit-and-run collision in the area of Oregon and California streets.  

Officers arrived to find two vehicles had been hit by another vehicle and there was also evidence of gunshots in the area, police said.  

After a search of the area, officers detained and arrested one person for the gun and drug offenses. Police are not releasing the suspect's name because officers are still investigating the suspect's involvement in the case, Officer Byron White said. 

No one has told police that they were wounded by the gunfire, White said.

They don’t know how to stop. They just don’t know how. It doesn’t matter how many people march in how many cities calling for the police to stop killing people, they don’t stop. 

If a private affair is in progress, and someone says, “don’t go in there,” common decency would dictate that one not enter that domain. It is a question of respect for human being. Which is really a respect for human life. 

But that is not something one can assume for the police. Massive numbers of people say, "Stop, don’t do that any more." But they don’t know how. They don’t even know how to stop other cops from killing people. Is it a form of denial? Or an outright refusal? Or an actual desire to kill? 

The present massive uprising against police brutality begins with George Floyd. George Floyd was killed on May 25. Chauvin the cop had his knee on Floyd’s neck in full knowledge that, even without that, Floyd couldn’t get up because two other cops were kneeling on him as well. But he had Floyd’s neck where he wanted it, and he bore down. People watched from the sidewalk, yelling to stop. “Let the man up.” A fourth cop was standing there facing the public, protecting this act of killing. Nonchalantly, he had his hand in his pocket, as if just waiting for a bus, a simple presence assisting his “fellow officer” in taking this black man’s life. That assistance, as an obstacle against the public, made this act of killing a premeditated murder. “Premeditated murder” is the official metaphor for the “desire to kill.” 

Thus began four weeks of outraged crowds in the streets of cities, and four weeks of more killings, more police torture, more brutality. A dozen have been killed or injured around the country by police in that time. Lets look at a few incidents. 

Four days after George Floyd’s death, Derrick Sanderlin was shot by a rubber bullet at an anti-brutality demonstration in San Jose (CA), which put him in the hospital. In broad daylight, on a wide avenue, thousands of people marched toward city hall, to say to city government and to the world, stop killing black people. The cops couldn’t stop them (neither physically nor constitutionally). So they formed a line behind the demonstration and started shooting rubber bullets into the crowd. This is the third day of massive demonstration against doing precisely that. More brutality has been the response to outrage at brutality. 

A young woman turned around, and is hit in the chest by a rubber bullet. Sanderlin sees this happen, and for some reason, thinks he can talk to these uniforms pulling triggers. He steps into the space between the police and the crowd, shouting “please stop doing this.” He is black, and has led classes for the cops on addressing or recognizing police racial bias. He says he hoped some would recognize him. A cop sees him, aims at his balls, shoots, and puts him in the hospital for surgery. Sanderlin sees him aim from 20 feet away. The cop’s intention was to maim, if not to kill. Is Sanderlin crazy, thinking he can actually stop cops in the midst of their target practice on real people? Or is it the cop who is sick, uninhibited in his desire to kill, his weird homosexual jag, and his taking the opportunity to torture a black man? 

On the same day, thousands showed up in Brooklyn, on the other side of the continent, to demand an end to police brutality. The cops decide this is an unlawful gathering. A young woman, named Dounya Zayer, light colored and taking photographs, videos some cops trying to clear the street. One comes at her, knocks the camera aside, and pushes her so hard she falls and cracks her head on the concrete. Not a single cop stops to help her as she lies there. They walk by. Thus, they participate in her injury. The same thing happens to Martin Gugino in Buffalo at a similar demo. He lies bleeding from a fractured skull on the sidewalk. Somehow, he survives. Sayer is hospitalized with a concussion. She knows how close to death she came. The Nuremberg Decision, written by the US at the end of the most destructive war ever, would define the desire by government military forces to injure or kill civilians as a crime against humanity. 

Three days later, on June 2, a young man was shot and killed by police in Vallejo, CA. His name was Sean Monterrosa. He was in the parking lot of a big store mall when police show up. They don’t see him looting or breaking windows. They see him get on his knees in the parking lot with his hands in the air. It is a gesture that means, “I surrender.” A cop driving up sees Monterrosa’s face, and shoots him five times. He was in such a hurry to shoot this man that he couldn’t even take the time to open his door. He shot him through his windshield. He ignores both his windshield and the political storm going on in the world agasint his doing precisely that. Does he live in a fantasy world, in which hammer handles are guns and surrenders are threats? Or does his obsessive desire take precedence over all else? 

On June 12, two weeks after Floyd was killed, Rayshard Brooks got shot in the back by a cop because he had fallen asleep in his car in a Wendy’s drive-thru line in Atlanta. It is late at night. Someone calls the cops. They knock on his window. He wakes up, opens the door, and steps out when asked to do so. He is cooperative. Just a groggy black man. They do a breathalyzer test, and he fails it. Okay. That just means they can’t let him drive. He says his sister lives a few blocks away. He can walk it. The two cops could have said, okay, we’ll drive you, to make sure you get home safely. Nah. That would be too civilized. One wants to handcuff him. For falling asleep in his car? He was compliant with the police, but not to the point of being handcuffed. George Floyd had been handcuffed already and compliant when they threw him down and killed him. 

One cop tases Brooks for refusing the cuffs. The other cop draws his taser. Brooks takes it away and runs. The cop pulls his gun and shoots him in the back. Totally unnecessary. The cops have Brooks’ car. They can just wait for him to finish running and come back for it. They even know where he lives. That is not the purpose of shooting him. Their cowardly purpose is to kill – cowardly because it doesn’t take any courage to shoot someone in the back. 

Tasers are simply instruments of torture. You torture first to induce obedience. Then kill to make obedience irrelevant. 

The cop walks over to Brooks, lying on the ground and dying, and kicks him a few times, as if to get those kicks in before he dies. It is a psychotic need for vengeance that accompanies the desire to kill. 

Forget about that silly little “bad apples” idea. Forget about that “most dangerous job” excuse. There is an unspoken desire in all these incidents, a desire that is most greatly fulfilled by shooting in the back. The number of people of color shot in the back is enormous. If I name Walter Scott, Oscar Grant, Gary King, Michael Brown, I have already named too many. The list should never have been even that long. But it streches into the hundreds. The other thousands of deaths, like that of Breoona Taylor, were not shot in the back. 

Indeed, shooting in the back is so cowardly that it could only represent the killer’s relation to himself, rather than to his victim. The victim exists only for the cop’s self-aggrandizement. He does it to impress other cops. The police are an insular culture, speaking to themselves. That is why other Atlanta cops have protested the charges against the one who killed Brooks. (They have been calling in "sick." Got that one right.) 

When Berkeley City Council voted to ban police use of tear gas for crowd control purposes, they did so because, as a cause of respiratory distress, tear gas increases vulnerability to Covid-19. But someone asked Chief Greenwood what the cops will use instead, and he glibly answered “live ammunition” (a paraphrase). He wasn’t speaking to the councilmember. He was playing to the other cops in the department. It was beyond him to imagine using respect for justice, respect for human beings, or constitutionality as an alternative to tear gas. Those are foreign words for that culture that desires to kill or torture people of color. It has now become the background for how the police are seen. 

Insidiously, the behavior of the police in killing black people has provided a role model for others. Hence, the spate of lynchings. Real ones. On June 1, as the killing and the protests against police brutality proceeded, a black man named Malcolm Harsch was hung in the southern California town of Victorville. If it were not suicide, then it was a lynching in the old style. As a lynching, it would express the intentional hatred, and the intention to kill, that characterized and empowered such killings from the Reconstruction period all the way to the murder of Emmet Till, and Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. But it would just be a chip off the old block of police killing people of color now. The police originally said it was suicide. But nobody believes that, certainly not Harsch’s family. Let there be an independent post-mortem examination. We need truth-telling here. 

And it happened again, a week later. On June 10, Robert Fuller, another young black man, was hung from a tree in Palmdale, California, just 60 miles away. Again the cops assumed suicide. Again the family complained. Again, there was no evidentiary answer to the family. Another lynching. Another step back toward enslavement. 

And during that same week, 4 other young black men were hung from trees. They are all listed as suicides. Six suicides of black people in all? In the midst of black people standing up and saying "stop," young black men are suddenly killing themselves? Forget it. This is a moment when people are arriving at a voice loud enough for even white supremacy to hear. They were lynched. Why would the police lie? For the same reason they will say that shooting a man in the back is self-defense. For the police to proclaim them all suicides is to be complicit. Lets have independent coroners do the post-mortems. 

The next week, half a dozen nooses showed up in the trees of Oakland, California. They are symbols of murdering black people. Black people didn’t put them there as a form of proxy suicide. They are there as a form of proxy murder. What is a lynching but a desire to kill. In other words, the police desire to kill has opened a door for presumably white people to do likewise. 

In addition, there have been murders of transgender black people during this same period. For them, there is no suicide excuse. In their invention of new genders for themselves, they are showing that “real men” are not the end all and by all of existence. So they get killed. The police will be looking for suspects until 2027. 

To think about reforming the police is to play with daydreams using a language from a different century. The culture of the police (different from the culture of policing) has silenced that ancient language with the cacophony of brutality and racial terrorism. The desire to kill is a cultural construct that goes all the way back to the beginning and the English raids in 1610 on the Chickahominy. Jim Crow is a latter day cultural mindset; it is not an ideology. It can’t be rooted out by training. And to call it "racism" is just a way of individuating what is a cultural structure of racialization. 

Do all cops feel this desire to kill? Who knows? Maybe they don’t. But maybe they do. How deep in the culture of the police does this desire lie? A cop can stand idle, as if waiting for a bus, while his buddy finishes killing someone. It is too late to ask if they all do it. In every team effort, when one cop has killed, all others in the team have been accepting of it. 

The cops who protested charging Brooks murderer have said, through spokespersons, that by shooting the wrong-doer, society was saved from danger. Are we supposed to respect that statement? That society will be endangered by a man who falls asleep in a Wendy’s drive-thru? 

If you don’t know how to stop killing, reform is not an option. Rules, or regulations, or sensitivity training will not work. The culture that obviates listening to the people must be dismantled. There is no other way to deal with it. 

 

The Black Lives Matter movement, in my perception, is equivalent to human lives matter. The concept that we need to create a black lives movement is indicative of how infantile and improperly developed people's and police officers' minds are. It should be considered a remedial step, and not an advanced step forward for the human species. 

I wrote an email to President Obama when he was elected--there are infinitesimal chances that it made its way to his eyes, because of how many letters and emails must have come his way. I said, "We don't need a black President, we need a great President." By this I meant that President Obama in my perception is not a black President, he is a President. And, to me, Obama's performance as our leader was better than any I have seen in my lifetime. I believe Obama did a better job than Bill Clinton, who was also excellent. Mr. Clinton was President during a time of fewer challenges and difficulties. Thus, less was demanded of him. 

Additionally, the Republicans could not find any basis on which to impeach Obama, or to assault his reputation. This, by itself is an accomplishment. The worst thing I've seen Obama do was to smoke at Disneyland. And he was out of public office by then. 

A point that should be remembered is this: dark skin color is a genetic trait, it indicates that your ancestry is not European, and it does not say anything else about a person. Skin color doesn't mean anything. 

Thus, when we say "Black Lives Matter" it means human life matters. If we can't disband hate groups and fix people's attitudes of hate, we are doomed as a species. When we see a "black person" we are seeing a person. There should be no distinction. 

There are differences in culture based on people's ancestry and on their upbringing. But when we see a black, Latino, Asian, or other person on the street whom we have never seen before, we cannot assume anything about that person. We cannot assume that a person is nice or mean, good or bad, intelligent, or unintelligent, based on skin color. 

I've been taken for an idiot based on appearance. I don't know where this comes from. I am Caucasian with Jewish ancestry. I'm big in the upper body and I have a gut. I frequently sport facial hair. I don't dress spectacularly. Does that make me the stupid person many assume I am? I have difficulty expressing myself verbally in some pressured situations, especially in putting my best foot forward. It is a lot easier to tell you how I feel and what I think when I am writing, because I am not being pressured by anything. 

As a mentally ill person and as a person people mistakenly take for a fool, I might to a small extent understand what black people must face. But I might not understand. I think we people of European descent should try to educate ourselves more about the difficulties that many black people experience. 

I've gone to two different black churches. The first was in the late 1980's in the Antioch area and it was during an event where Jews from either a temple or from the Jewish Community Center were doing an exchange with that black church. (I recognized, sitting in a row in front of me, the psychiatrist who first branded me with my schizophrenic diagnosis.) In another instance, I had a friend who lived in Oakland, and I went with her to a church there during a commemoration for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And I do know that it is important to show respect. 

I do know also that I've heard too many white racists expressing uninformed opinions, and I would rather see white people recover from this dumb sickness. 

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Jack Bragen is author of "Schizophrenia: My 35-Year Battle: Vignettes of Hardship and Persistence."  

 

 

In June 1971 President Richard delivered a special message to Congress to declare drug abuse as "public enemy number one". What he did not reveal to Congress was the motive for his message. Nixon didn’t really care about the drug issue. However, the president along with one of his top advisors, John Ehrlichman, were committed to getting rid of the civil rights movement.  

Many years later Ehrlichman apparently had misgivings about the role he played. In an interview with a writer, Dan Baum, Erlichman’s comments were published in Harper’s Magazine. He acknowledged that the plan was to associate blacks with the use and distribution of dangerous drugs, such as heroin. The idea was to facilitate the ability to “disrupt their communities, arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and villlify them night after night on the evening news”’. Alderman then added “Did we know that we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did”. 

This so called war on drugs for the purpose of undermining black activism is politically and economically very much alive. This battle against African Americans is ongoing. The business community views blacks as a source of low wage labor and as a barrier to uinon organizing. So encouraging both drug consumption and the arrests of African Americans continue to be major business strategies to keep blacks in their place. 

Take, for example the observatons made in the Chronicle by a San Franciso Supervisor who lives in the Tenderloin (Matt Haney). Haney noticed that while some dealers were being arrested, dozens of drug transactions were taken place right in front of the police. He described police behavior as brazen, that is, bold and without shame.. 

According to the Federal Bureau of Justice, which is a federal agency, although only 16 percent of those who sold drugs were blacks, they made up 48 percent of those arrested. And rather than providing treatment for drug addicts 74 percent went to prison just for possessing drugs. Moreoer, blacks receive longer sentences than whites even when committing a similar crime -- almost 20 percent longer. 

Arresting blacks by the police followed by heavy jail sentences can appreciably injure the lives of African Americans as well as members of their families. Wouldn’t it be appropriate for the Black Life Matters Movement to expand its focus to address these concerns? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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It’s been 57 years since Martin Luther King, Junior, gave his “I have a dream speech.” And, 56 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Over this period, too little has changed. The United States has a persistent systemic racism problem that must be fixed.

In the most recent Gallup Poll (https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/312875/race-relations-nation-important-problem.aspx) respondents indicated that race relations were the most pressing national problem: "Gallup's long-standing 'most important problem' question provides important context for measuring the impact of the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis... Some 19% of Americans named race relations as the nation's top problem in our May 28-June 4 survey. This is, by one point, the highest percentage since July 1968."

I'm a privileged white man. Therefore, I broach the subject of racism with trepidation. Nonetheless, here are five suggested actions that white folks can take to improve race relations. These are actions you can take at home or in your community. 

1.Inquire within. Start your personal work on racism by having a serious talk about race within your family, or circle of friends, or church. In other words, have a meaningful discussion about race with people that you care about but who, perhaps, you've avoided having this discussion with. (Rather than talk about race in the abstract, talk about specific situations that affect your family members.) This will take time; be prepared to go slow, listen a lot, and (possibly) have your feelings hurt when non-white family or friends tell you of their experiences with racism. 

My multiracial family has started this discussion. It's hard. What helps is that we all love each other and want to have a totally honest talk about race. 

Caution: If you are a white person, GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD. Racism is best understood on a visceral level. LISTEN more than talk. 

2. Provide financial support for the "Black Lives Matter" movement. To be sustainable, the movement needs money. 

I'm a member of Indivisible and I trust them. Recently the leaders of Indivisible provided a list of BLM-related organizations to support (https://secure.actblue.com/donate/indivisible-blm? ): "One of many ways that we can show up is by funneling resources directly to Black-led organizations doing the work on the ground to support the uprising and developing strategies and campaigns to advance racial justice." These organizations include: Black Lives Matter Global Network, Color of Change, Movement for Black Lives, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, National Bail Out, National Police Accountability Project, and Unicorn Riot. (To this I would add my perennial favorite, The American Civil Liberties Union.) 

White folks need to do more than talk. We need to act. Start by writing a check. 

3. Hold Police Departments accountable: Take a long look at your local police department. Compare how your non-white friends are treated by the police with how you are treated. Be prepared to be shocked. 

Americans must "reimagine" policing; local citizens need to reassert control over their police departments and not leave control in the hands of police unions and the white elite. Reimagining policing will, not doubt, result in reducing the funds that most cities spend on their police departments. 

A fair criminal justice system requires national policy changes. For example, on June 8th, the House of Representatives passed the "Justice in Policing Act:" (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/politics/democrats-police-misconduct-bill-protests.html ) Among other things, this bill outlaws chokeholds and limits police-officer immunity. All of us should support this initiative. 

4. Provide Equitable Healthcare: The middle of a pandemic is a good time to be aware of how race affects the delivery of health services. 

African-Americans, and other people of color, are more likely than whites to succumb to COVID-19. A recent Guardian study (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/04/coronavirus-black-minority-americans-house-subcommittee) noted: "Black and minority Americans are more likely to be infected and die from COVID-19, because structural racism has left those populations with inferior health, housing and economic conditions." 

The Public Policy Institute of California (https://www.ppic.org/blog/racial-disparities-in-covid-19-mortality/? ) found: "Even after adjusting for age, sex, comorbidity, and income, African Americans appear to be much more likely to be hospitalized for COVID-19 than whites are. Most ominously, though, African Americans who contract the virus are dying at disproportionately high rates— their share of COVID-19 deaths is about 1.5 times greater than their share of the state population." 

The obvious solution is an equitable healthcare system, such as "Medicare for all." But that's a way off. Start by helping your family and friends get adequate healthcare. 

5. Protect Voting Rights: The Civil Rights Act was intended to safeguard the votes of African-Americans, and other people of color. Nonetheless, for the last 56 years, there have been well-organized white initiatives to nullify the votes of non-whites -- and women. We've seen this recently in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Kentucky. 

No one denies this is a problem. See for example, this USA Today story: (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/02/03/black-voting-rights-15th-amendment-still-challenged-after-150-years/4587160002/) In May the House of Representatives passed the "Heroes Act" which includes funds for voter protection (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/heroes-act-includes-funding-election-officials-need-run-safe-secure); this bill should be passed by the Senate. 

Summary: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended to end segregation in public places and ban employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. While it succeeded in the first objective, it failed to effectively ban employment discrimination and did not achieve the objective of ending segregation. In 2020, the United States is a segregated society. 

Segregation continues to impact the life chances of African-Americans. It affects their education, healthcare, housing, employment, and access to capital. For example, a recent Time Magazine article (https://time.com/5855900/segregation-wealth-gap/ ) noted: "Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment among Black people in the U.S. was far higher than among white people (6.0% versus 3.1% in January), and median household incomes were substantially lower ($40,258 versus$68,145 as of 2017). As the COVID-19 outbreak exploded across the U.S., the unemployment disparity continued: unemployment among Black workers rose to 16.8% in May, from 16.7% in April, as white unemployment fell to 12.4% from 14.2%." 

The United States has a persistent systemic racism problem that must be fixed. It's up to white folks to make the changes required so that the United States can actually become a functioning Democracy, "one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." 

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Bob Burnett is a Bay Area writer and activist. He can be reached at bburnett@sonic.net