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L E T T E R F R OM T HE E D I T OR
Critical Path for Biden & Harris
Former Vice President Joe Biden and California Senator Kamala Harris in their fi rst joint appearance as a ticket
on August 12.
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
The wait is over, and we now
have the team we’re all going
into the fi nal do-or-die
round with this fall.
Joe Biden has made history by
choosing a woman of color — for the
REUTERS/ CARLOS BARRIA
fi rst time — to be a major political
party’s vice presidential candidate.
Kamala Harris rode to the US Senate
in 2016 based on generally favorable
notices on her two terms as California
attorney general. And in her focused
and pointed questioning of numerous
unqualifi ed Trump administration
appointees and offi cials, she quickly
captured the attention of Democrats
nationwide.
Still, like Biden, Harris is not without
her critics — especially regarding
some prosecutorial and criminal
justice decisions she made as attorney
general and, before that, as
San Francisco district attorney. Her
presidential campaign fl oundered
both in its lack of clear themes and
in some notable fl ip-fl ops, especially
in her retreat from her early support
for Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All
proposal.
With both the presidential and the
vice presidential candidates, what’s
past is past. We must defeat Donald
Trump in November. The summer
polling has been uniformly promising
for Biden, but he and Harris are
going to need to be on their A game
to defeat a Trump campaign that will
do everything it can to confuse the issues,
stir up hate, suppress the vote,
and even prevent a fair election.
Two issues, of course, are of urgent
concern to voters. The fi rst is the ongoing
COVID pandemic that the US
has handled worse — by far — than
F E AT UR E
Strangers Out There Rallying for You
BY SUSIE DAY
Long before the COVID-19
pandemic forced New York
State’s Department of Corrections
and Community
Supervision DOCCS to bar ordinary
people like us from visiting incarcerated
loved ones, Release Aging People in
Prison RAPP was working tirelessly
to get loved ones out. Wait. That’s not
quite right: by now, nearly everyone at
RAPP is extremelytired. Exhausted,
really. They know that prisons — unsanitary,
with inept healthcare and
virtually no social distancing — cultivate
lethal coronavirus clusters. Yet,
from a prison population of about
50,000, New York State has seen fi t to
release only 1,404 — “nonviolent offenders”
— leaving thousands of vulnerable
people inside.
Donna Robinson, 65, from Buffalo,
is a typical RAPP member: exhausted,
but not giving up. One of
her daughters, Missy, is serving time
at New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional
Facility. As at any prison, people
at Bedford sometimes die. But
among the deaths there in the past
year, two made the news. This April
28, Darlene “Lulu” Benson-Seay became
the fi rst woman incarcerated
by the state to die of COVID-19. And
last August, Valerie Gaiter died at 61
of esophageal cancer, which medical
staff had insisted was acid refl ux.
Valerie — who had served 41 years
but wasn’t eligible for parole for another
decade — was loved and respected
at Bedford, and Missy was
one of the many younger women Val
had mentored.
Early this month, slowly, unsurely,
DOCCS began to reopen New York
prisons to visitors. But, much as she
misses her daughter, Donna doesn’t
feel it’s safe going back to Bedford.
➤ BIDEN & HARRIS, continued on p.19
Neither does Missy. I ask Donna to
tell me more about her daughter.
DONNA ROBINSON:We call her
Missy because her fi rst name is Al-
Shariyfa. It means the gift of Allah.
You know what the ‘70s were like –
Black Power; her father wanted to be
Muslim. He brought home a book of
Arabic names and said, “Pick one.”
And me, in my infi nite wisdom, it had
to mean something. It turned out to
be prophetic, ‘cause she’s my gift.
She’ll be 45 in September. She’s a
mother of four, a grandmother of two.
Missy worked ever since she was 14
years old. She was always good with
numbers, her little fi ngers worked
so well, she picked up data entry in
high school. She was so good that
they found her work at the bank. Up
to her incarceration, that’s the only
place she’s ever worked.
➤ DONNA ROBINSON, continued on p.19
August 13 - August 26, 2 18 020 | GayCityNews.com
/GayCityNews.com
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