Black Agenda Radio - 04.20.20

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: Public housing tenants have long suffered from poor services and ceaseless attempts to demolish their homes and scatter them to the winds. But the Coronavirus epidemic presents public housing dwellers with a whole new set of challenges. And, a South African journalist is doing what he can to make scientific concepts accessible in the languages spoken by Black Africans.

But first – the Black Is Back Coaliion held a national ZOOM conference on the COVID-19 epidemic, and how Black people can fight back. We’ll present two of the conference presenters. First up, Betty Davis, of New York City. Whether the challenge is public health, police violence or education, Black Power is the answer.

Philip McHarris is a PhD candidate at Yale Unversity who published an article in Essence Magazine titled “Public Housing Residents May Be Some Of The Hardest Hit by the COVID-19 Outbreak.” McHarris says life in the projects was hard enough, before the epidemic.

Centuries of colonization and white rule in South Africa left the Black majority behind in all areas of education. Today, under Black governments, the country’s African language groups remain largely shut out of discussions of science. SEE-boo-SI-so Bee-YAY-la is a South African communicator and journalist. He recently wrote article on decolonizing science so that it is accessible in the many language spoken by Black South Africans. Bee-YAY-la told of being assigned to write in the Zulu language about the discovery of a new species of dinosaur. The problem was, the vocabulary necessary didn’t exist in Zulu.