KPFA - Hard Knock Radio

Composer, pianist, and vocalist Samora Pinderhughes tells us about The Healing Project. The Healing Project, a fundamentally abolitionist project, explores the structures of systemic racism and the prison industrial complex.

Long Description: Composer, pianist, and vocalist Samora Pinderhughes tells us about The Healing Project. The Healing Project, a fundamentally abolitionist project, explores the structures of systemic racism and the prison industrial complex.

The Healing Project takes action towards abolition with forms such as musical songs, films, an exhibition, community gatherings, live performances, and a digital library of audio interviews. At the center of the project are the intergenerational voices of people across the country, including folks incarcerated in prisons and detention centers. Their stories, experiences, and ideas serve as the foundation for The Healing Projects vision for societal transformation.

And later Poor News Magazine explores America’s war on disenfranchised communities.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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On this episode of Hard Knock Radio, we continue with part two of the discussion with historian and professor Gerald Horne about the political status of Somaliland and the broader regional and global implications of recent developments in the Horn of Africa. The conversation is informed in part by Horne’s recent piece published in Responsible Statecraft, which raises urgent questions about recognition, sovereignty, and geopolitical maneuvering amid growing international interest and strategic realignments.

Kalonji Jama Changa and Gerald Horne examine how Somaliland’s long-running quest for international recognition intersects with U.S. and Israeli strategic interests, shifting regional power dynamics, and the deep history of Western intervention in Somalia and the Horn of Africa. Horne situates the current moment within a broader historical and political framework, challenging simplified or transactional narratives often presented in mainstream coverage. The discussion also widens to address U.S. imperialism, including the ongoing aggression against Venezuela, drawing connections between global militarism, economic coercion, and struggles for self-determination across the Global South.

Later, we bring you a story of urban planning and how race has shaped American cities. In a new book, Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption, Author Mitchell Schwarzer explores the origins and the lasting impacts of transportation improvements, systemic racism, and regional competition on Oakland’s built environment. Schwarzer, an architectural and urban historian, pulls from his experience as a city planner, and educator to tell the story of a divided city.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

Get involved with the FTP here  https://www.thepeoplesarmy.org/ftp-movement

Follow us on socials @Hard Knock Radio

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On this episode of Hard Knock Radio, guest host Kalonji Jama Changa speaks with historian and professor Gerald Horne about the political status of Somaliland and the broader regional and global implications of recent developments in the Horn of Africa. The conversation is informed in part by Horne’s recent piece published in Responsible Statecraft, which raises urgent questions about recognition, sovereignty, and geopolitical maneuvering amid growing international interest and strategic realignments.

Together, they examine how Somaliland’s long-running quest for international recognition intersects with U.S. and Israeli strategic interests, shifting regional power dynamics, and the deep history of Western intervention in Somalia and the Horn of Africa. Horne situates the current moment within a broader historical and political framework, challenging simplified or transactional narratives often presented in mainstream coverage. The discussion also widens to address U.S. imperialism, including the ongoing aggression against Venezuela, drawing connections between global militarism, economic coercion, and struggles for self-determination across the Global South.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

https://actionnetwork.org/ticketed_events/stay-ready-training-series-kalonji-jama-changa?source=direct_link&

Get involved with the FTP here  https://www.thepeoplesarmy.org/ftp-movement

Follow us on socials @Hard Knock Radio

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In this episode, we’re joined by Samer Araabi of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC). Samer Araabi is a member of AROC and serves as Research Director at Accountability Counsel, a human and environmental rights organization that supports communities harmed by corporate and state abuse.

Together, we examine the latest news and headlines coming out of Palestine, including recent reports of Israeli attacks on Gaza and the ongoing humanitarian crisis shaped by military violence and bureaucratic blockade.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

The post Gaza Under Siege in Conversation with Samer Araabi from the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) appeared first on KPFA.

Host Davey D talks with writer and geographer Alex Werth about his new book On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland and how sound, race, and power collide in the town’s history. Werth explains that although he was trained by anthropologists, his grounding in geography helps him track how Oakland as a place has been made and remade through Black migration, music, and struggle. They open with Lake Merritt and the drum circles, digging into how increased patrols, ticketing, and “no cruising” zones function as coded ways to tell Black Oaklanders they are not welcome, even while officials claim the issue is noise or public order.

From there, Werth walks through the longer arc starting with the Second Great Migration, when Black Southerners brought blues and other rural sounds to West Oakland. Those sounds sparked moral panic among white residents and segments of the Black middle class, feeding nuisance laws and heavy regulation of Black nightlife along Seventh Street. Davey notes how the rhetoric from the nineteen forties and fifties sounds almost identical to current complaints about sideshows, scraper bikes, and drum circles. Werth frames this as history on loop: the repetition of anti Black policing alongside the equally persistent creativity and resilience of Black Oaklanders, from funk and Boogaloo to hip hop.

They spend a big chunk on the war on nuisance, broken windows policing, and the role of Oakland Police Department under Black political leadership in the post civil rights era. Werth shows how vague, race neutral language about “nuisance” lets the city target Black spaces like cruising zones without saying race out loud. The conversation then zeroes in on clubs, especially Geoffrey’s Inner Circle and Sweet Jimmy’s, as case studies of how Black owned venues were over policed, buried in fees, and squeezed through a special events permit regime that in practice focused on rap and Black crowds. Meanwhile the city markets Oakland as the home of jazz, funk, and now Tupac, profiting from Black culture it once criminalized. Werth closes by saying he wants readers to tune their ears to how sound itself is political, and to see that Black music and Black freedom struggles in Oakland are inseparable.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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Today on Hard Knock Radio, we explore incarceration, survival, and the role of art as a pathway home. Across the country, millions are trapped inside systems designed to punish and disappear. What often goes unseen are the stories, creativity, and humanity that endure”and the steep terrain of returning to a society that rarely makes room for reentry, healing, or accountability.

This conversation centers the Formerly Incarcerated Peoples Performance Project (FIPPP), a groundbreaking collective that creates space for formerly incarcerated people to tell their own stories”on their own terms. Through performance, storytelling, and community care, FIPPP challenges dominant narratives about crime, punishment, and who is deemed worthy of redemption.

Joining us are two FIPPP performers whose lives and work embody the intersection of truth, resilience, and artistic reclamation. Anthony Michael Jefferson”AJ”spent 23 years incarcerated in California. Since his release, he has become a chef, actor, and writer whose work centers discipline, freedom, and the reclamation of narrative through art. AJ reflects on how the ocean taught him about freedom long before prison, what it took to survive decades inside CDCR, and why theater became the language he needed to finally tell his story.

We are also joined by Pharaoh Brooks”an artist, writer, musician, and reentry leader who returned home in November 2023. Pharaoh now serves as Director of the Alcohol and Drug Treatment Project at Dream Center Transitional Home, grounding his leadership in lived experience, accountability, and community care. He speaks to the challenges of reentry, living his amends, protecting ones spirit while revisiting trauma through art, and why music and poetry are essential tools for telling the truth about incarceration.

Together, AJ and Pharaoh reflect on why it is essential that formerly incarcerated people tell their own stories, what art offers that policy reform alone cannot, how accountability and healing can coexist, and what the public fundamentally misunderstands about reentry. This is not just a conversation about performance”it is about dignity, responsibility, and how systems of incarceration ultimately touch us all.

The Formerly Incarcerated Peoples Performance Project (FIPPP) Performance Festival runs January 15th through January 18th at Berkeley Rep. The festival features five unique shows over four days, with multiple solo performances, short films by documentary filmmaker Jim Granato, and post-show panel discussions moderated by Bay Area theatre luminaries Dan Hoyle, Wayne Harris, and Mark McGoldrick. Twelve formerly incarcerated performers”stand-up comedians, TEDx speakers, Moth winners, Shakespeare actors, Marsh performers, and SF Fringe Festival artists”share powerful stories of incarceration and reinvention.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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Guest host Kalonji Changa leads a powerful and urgent edition of Hard Knock Radio, examining the killing of Renee Nicole Good and the broader systems of state violence, media distortion, and unaccountable power that shape immigration enforcement in the United States.

In the first half of the show, Kalonji speaks with Emmy Award–winning journalist Georgia Fort, founder and independent reporter whose work focuses on social justice, media equity, and narrative accountability. Fort provides critical reporting and context on the January 7 killing of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old widow and mother who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis while serving as a legal observer monitoring ICE operations.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has publicly defended the agent, claiming Ms. Good attempted to use her vehicle as a weapon. However, state and local officials—including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey—have disputed that account, with Frey calling the use of deadly force reckless and unjustified. Independent video footage contradicts early mainstream media framing, showing the agent firing into Ms. Good’s vehicle while not in imminent danger. Fort breaks down how media narratives were shaped in real time, whose voices were amplified or silenced, and what the video evidence reveals.

In the second half of the program, Kalonji is joined by Nana Gyamfi, human rights and criminal defense attorney, Executive Director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)—the nation’s largest Black-led immigrant justice organization—professor of Pan African Studies at Cal State LA, radio host, and President of the National Conference of Black Lawyers.

Drawing on more than three decades of movement and legal experience, Gyamfi situates the killing of Renee Nicole Good within a broader legal and political framework, challenging the notion that ICE operates differently from other U.S. law enforcement agencies. She interrogates ICE as an institution wielding expansive power with limited accountability, and exposes how routine contact with police—often for non-criminal matters—can place individuals on a direct path toward detention and deportation.

The conversation examines systemic issues including ICE detentions carried out without due process, family separation, and the racialized impact of immigration enforcement. While Black immigrants make up approximately 8 percent of the U.S. immigrant population, they account for nearly 20 percent of those facing deportation. Gyamfi emphasizes that these harms are not limited to one administration, but are embedded in long-standing U.S. immigration policy that treats deportation as a civil—not criminal—process, allowing the state to detain and remove people without the protections afforded in the criminal legal system.

Gyamfi further explains how immigration enforcement disproportionately targets Black immigrants—particularly African and Caribbean nationals—as well as Black Americans and Latinx communities, while largely avoiding aggressive operations in cities with sizable European immigrant populations. She notes the lack of media scrutiny or visible ICE crackdowns in places like Sacramento, California, and other regions with historically significant Ukrainian communities, underscoring how immigration enforcement is selective, racially skewed, and fundamentally unjust, despite being framed as neutral or universally applied.

She points to the federal indictment of Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (D–NJ) in June 2025, who was charged with interfering with federal officers during an oversight visit to a Newark immigration detention facility. The incident occurred amid heightened tensions as Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was being arrested. While the Department of Justice claims McIver “forcibly” impeded officers during the chaotic May 2025 encounter, McIver maintains that the charges are politically motivated retaliation for her advocacy and oversight work.

Gyamfi examines how anti-Blackness manifests behind the walls of ICE detention facilities, which she characterizes as sites of torture due to their lack of meaningful oversight and accountability. She emphasizes that Black detainees—including U.S. citizens—are routinely denied adequate medical care, with some dying in custody as a result. She cites the case of Rodney Taylor, a Liberian-born man who is a double amputee and missing three fingers on one hand, whose health has severely deteriorated since being detained by ICE at Georgia’s Stewart Immigration Detention Center.

Ultimately, Gyamfi situates immigration enforcement within broader systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and empire, arguing that fear-based political rhetoric and dehumanizing narratives are deliberately deployed to justify extraction, dispossession, and state violence.

This episode challenges listeners to look beyond official statements and media spin, and to confront the deadly realities of domestic enforcement policies that continue to cost lives.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

The post Homeland Security or State Violence? ICE, Empire, and Unchecked Power in Minneapolis with the Murder of Renee Nicole Good appeared first on KPFA.

This episode of Hard Knock Radio examines recent U.S. airstrikes in Nigeria within the broader context of shifting power dynamics across West Africa and the African continent as a whole. These military actions are unfolding amid a historic rupture between ECOWAS and the Alliance of Sahel States, signaling a profound realignment of regional alliances and challenging long-standing Western influence in the region.

The conversation digs into the systemic political and financial corruption in Nigeria, including the role of entrenched elites and central banking structures that enable the extraction and siphoning of national wealth, deepening instability and inequality. We also interrogate how global conflicts are often framed through manufactured narratives of religious warfare—pitting Christians against Muslims—while obscuring the deeper economic, geopolitical, and resource-driven motivations at play.

While oil production is frequently cited as the central issue, many analysts, argue that U.S. military interventions are more directly linked to African nations asserting greater control over their resources and reclaiming sovereignty over economic decision-making. At the heart of this discussion is the struggle for African self-determination and autonomy in the face of external pressure.

Kalanji speaks with Ajamu Baraka to unpack the political, regional, and global implications of the U.S. airstrikes on Nigeria, including how U.S. foreign policy intersects with evolving African alliances.

In the second half of the show, Kalanji is joined by Minister King X and Bomani for a critical conversation about aging political prisoners, the urgency of securing their release, and the broader implications for human rights, justice, and political repression in the United States.

Together, these conversations help listeners better understand the forces shaping military intervention, economic control, and liberation struggles—both abroad and at home.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

The post From West Africa to U.S. Prisons: U.S. Militarism, and Political Prisoners appeared first on KPFA.

Today on Hard Knock Radio, guest host Thandisizwe Chimurenga leads a critical conversation marking 17 years since the police killing of Oscar Grant III on the Fruitvale BART platform.

Oscar Grant’s murder became a catalyst for a generation of organizers, journalists, artists, and community members—igniting national conversations about police violence and accountability years before hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter entered the mainstream. Seventeen years later, we reflect on what has changed—and what has remained stubbornly the same—when it comes to policing, justice, and state violence in the United States.

In this conversation, Thandisizwe speaks with Cat Brooks, a community organizer and the founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP) to examine the legacy of Oscar Grant’s killing and the ongoing struggle for justice.

Together, they ask urgent questions:

Where are we now in the fight against police brutality?

What forms of accountability exist—and where do they fall short?

Have reforms meaningfully reduced harm, or merely rebranded policing?

The discussion explores the evolution of police reform efforts, landmark cases, and new laws, alongside the growing tension between reformist strategies and abolitionist frameworks. It also interrogates how surveillance, police union power, qualified immunity, and political backlash continue to shield law enforcement from meaningful consequences—while families and communities continue to grieve, organize, and resist.

Seventeen years after Oscar Grant’s death, the demand for accountability remains unresolved—and the questions raised by his killing are as urgent as ever.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

The post Oscar Grant, 17 Years Later: Police Violence, Accountability, and the Unfinished Struggle appeared first on KPFA.

Guest host Kalonji Changa sits down with Leonardo Flores, a Venezuelan political analyst, activist, and founding member of the Venezuela Solidarity Network, for an in-depth conversation on the escalating U.S. intervention in Venezuela. Flores, who has appeared on Democracy Now! and also serves as a Latin America campaign coordinator with CODEPINK, brings critical context to the rapidly unfolding political and humanitarian crisis.

The discussion examines recent U.S. airstrikes, reports surrounding the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, and U.S. government statements asserting interim authority over Venezuela’s governance. These developments mark a sharp escalation in the Trump administration’s framing of its actions as a “war” on so-called narco-terrorism.

Since September 2025, U.S. forces have carried out dozens of lethal strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. While U.S. officials claim the operations targeted drug-smuggling networks, families and regional authorities report that many of those killed were fishermen, low-wage workers, or civilians driven into dangerous labor by economic collapse. At least 105 people have reportedly been killed in 29 known strikes, raising urgent concerns among human rights advocates about extrajudicial killings, lack of due process, and the absence of transparent evidence.

Flores analyzes the political and economic motivations behind the escalation, the legality of the airstrikes and detention of a sitting head of state, and what U.S. claims of interim governance mean under international law. The conversation also interrogates how media narratives around “narco-terrorism” obscure civilian harm, regional destabilization, and the normalization of regime change by force—and what accountability and international solidarity should look like at this critical moment.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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