Black Agenda Radio - 04.13.20

Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Margaret Kimberley, along with my co-host Glen Ford. Coming up: The coronavirus had caused people in authority to take measures they’ve never even considered before, like letting lots of folks out of prison. We’ll hear from a district attorney whose allowing 40 percent of his city’s prisoners to ride out the epidemic at home. A Black scholar says Black kids are kicked out of class in obscene numbers because slavery and Jim Crow are alive and well in the nation’s schools. And, we’ll hear how racism was behind the coup that ousted Bolivia’s first Native American president.

llinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has promised not to bring any more inmates into his state’s prison system due to the coronavirus epidemic. But Alan Mills, executive director of the Uptown People’s Law Center, says the prisons are already infected, and the state needs to free many more inmates from being trapped in a cage with the disease.

Chesa Boudine, the leftish District Attorney for San Francisco, has a personal interest in dramatically reducing the US prison population. His father is a 75 year old prison inmate serving time for his role in the 1981 Brinks armored car robbery – a political heist by white radicals and members of the Black Liberation Army. District Attorney Boudine told National Public Radio’s Terry Gross that he’s reduced the San Francisco jail’s population by 40 percent -- both to fight the Covid-19 epidemic, and because this country puts too many people in jail.

Dr. Justin Coles is a professor at the Fordham University Graduate School of Education with an emphasis on Urban Education and Critical Race Studies. Dr. Coles co-authored an article on mass suspensions of Black students, a long standing phenomenon that Cole says is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

Race was the main force behind last year’s coup that overthrew Evo Morales, the elected president of Bolivia, South America’s most heavily indigenous nation. That’s the assessment of Dr. TaTHAgatan RaVINdran, a professor of anthropology and sociology in Colombia who has done extensive research on Bolivia’s Native American majority. Dr. RaVINdran says the United States and multinational corporations also had it in for Morales, but racism is what brought Bolivia’s first Native president down.