Author Archives: OUR COMMON GROUND

OCG SALUTE : BOB LAW: A VOICE THAT MATTERED

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BOB LAW: A VOICE THAT MATTERED

May be an image of one or more peopleAn OUR COMMON GROUND Salute

I learned only recently that Bob Law, pioneering Black talk host and activist, had made his transition. He died on Monday, March 30, 2026, at age 86.

That news stopped me.

Bob was more than a broadcasting colleague. He was my mentor, my friend, my brother in the work, and for years one of the voices with whom I shared the responsibility of trying to make Black America hear itself clearly.
During the WPOM years of OUR COMMON GROUND, Bob joined me every Wednesday. Those were not simply guest appearances. They were continuing conversations between two Black talkers trying to understand what was happening to our people, what forces were moving around us, and what we needed to know in order to respond.
Bob understood the power of Black radio.

He understood that owning the microphone was important—but owning the means by which our voices reached our people was even more important.

For nearly two years, Bob and I worked on a plan to acquire small Black radio stations around the country and bring them together into a network of Black talk radio—stations through which independent Black voices could speak nationally and locally, with programming that included NightTalk, OUR COMMON GROUND, and other powerful Black talk voices of that era.

We did not succeed in bringing that vision to fruition. But the vision mattered.
We understood that Black people needed more than occasional access to somebody else’s microphone. We needed infrastructure. We needed ownership. We needed a communications system capable of carrying Black thought, Black analysis, and Black political conversation from community to community.
Bob Law understood that perhaps better than anyone I knew. He was brave. He was smart. He was serious.
And he was a warrior for Black people. At a time when much of mainstream corporate media was unwilling—or unable—to speak plainly about what was happening in America, Bob did.

He amplified the issues confronting Black America when those issues were inconvenient, unpopular, or simply invisible to those who controlled the larger media platforms. That is what Black talk radio did.

We sounded alarms.
We talked about power. We talked about race. We talked about politics and economics. We talked about what was happening inside our communities and what was being done to them. And we talked with each other so that we could understand what we were seeing, trust what we knew, and become confident about what we needed to do.
Talk That Matters.
Looking at America today, I am reminded how much those voices mattered—and how much America might have learned had it listened more carefully to Black talk radio. Bob was one of those voices.
As I prepare to bring OUR COMMON GROUND back to the microphone, it means something very different to know that my friend will not be there for another Wednesday conversation or a quick review or sage advice. But his voice is part of the ground upon which we return. His work is part of the history we must preserve. And his insistence that Black people must have the means to speak to one another, for ourselves and in our own interests remains unfinished business. NY listeners and activists were so fortunate to have him.

So before OUR COMMON GROUND moves another step forward, I want to stop and say his name.

Bob Law.

My mentor.

My colleague.

My friend.

My brother in the work.

A brave and consequential Black voice.

Well done, Bob.

We are still talking.

And we are still listening.

OUR COMMON GROUND

Speaking Truth to Power and OURselves

I’m Janice Graham, and I’ll be Listening for YOU.

‘Birthing Justice’ highlights the Black American maternal health crisis

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Black pregnant Americans are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white pregnant Americans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. And according to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, Black infants are nearly four times as likely as white infants to die during birth. “I had no idea how much this problem was hiding in plain sight,” the co-writer and director of the film, Monique Matthews, told the American Independent Foundation. “Prior to coming on board, I had a cousin that I reconnected with and I asked him about his little sister, who was my younger cousin. And he told me that she passed away and she was like, 28, and I was like, ‘How did she pass away in the hospital?’ And he was like, ‘She gave birth. And then, you know, I was excited and I called back and I got a call that my sister passed away.’ And I was devastated.”Matthews said many of the women she spoke with at screenings of the film told her their heartbreaking pregnancy and delivery stories.

“I had no idea how much this problem was hiding in plain sight,” the co-writer and director of the film, Monique Matthews, told the American Independent Foundation. “Prior to coming on board, I had a cousin that I reconnected with and I asked him about his little sister, who was my younger cousin. And he told me that she passed away and she was like, 28, and I was like, ‘How did she pass away in the hospital?’ And he was like, ‘She gave birth. And then, you know, I was excited and I called back and I got a call that my sister passed away.’ And I was devastated.”

Matthews said many of the women she spoke with at screenings of the film told her their heartbreaking pregnancy and delivery stories.

 

Source: ‘Birthing Justice’ highlights the Black American maternal health crisis

Shaky Ground: How the United States Uses the Law to Steal Indigenous Land – In These Times

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A review of Peter d’Errico’s Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, an indictment of a legal system with the unflinching goal of stealing as much land as possible.

Despite its confusion and contradictions, federal Indian law — in d’Errico’s terms, ​“anti-Indian law” — has long had an unchanging purpose. By destroying Native individuals and communities, it has helped the rich and powerful scoop up vast lands and resources. This landgrab is accomplished in part because what’s typically called federal Indian law is hardly a systematic set of statutes. Instead, according to d’Errico, it’s what mid-20th-century U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter called ​“a vast hodge-podge” and covers all areas of Indigenous life and activity with a massive array of U.S. court decisions, laws, executive orders and agency regulations that have piled up over the years in a disorderly and improvised fashion.

Kent McNeil, a professor emeritus at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, calls d’Errico’s Federal Anti-Indian Law ​“a frontal attack on the whole field of American law pertaining to Indigenous peoples.” He lauds it as a ​“must-read” for those wanting to understand what motivates any claims that the dispossession of Indigenous people has been legally sound. Similarly, Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution and a Mashpee Wampanoag tribal citizen, hails the book as ​“important and enlightening for all people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.”

Throughout the chaos, the application of U.S. law to Indigenous people has had an unflinching goal: theft.

 

 

Source: Shaky Ground: How the United States Uses the Law to Steal Indigenous Land – In These Times

Stop Training Police Like They’re Joining the Military – The Atlantic

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Police killings are of course not the only fuel for the mass protests. Beyond the deaths of Americans such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor lie countless other large and small indignities—the massive stop-and-frisk program practiced by the NYPD until a court order declared it unconstitutional, the needlessly aggressive execution of warrants—that also fall most heavily on people of color and the poor.But many of the most egregious police abuses are avoidable, and the anger over them has created an opportunity for real police reform. The nation must jettison paramilitary approaches to policing. That means moving beyond shallow critiques of “police militarization,” most of which focus narrowly on federal programs allowing the transfer of military equipment to police, and looking at subtler and more entrenched aspects of police culture as well.Wesley Lowery: The breaking pointTo be sure, federal military-surplus transfers like those through the Defense Department’s 1033 Program do little good, and much harm: Police departments obtaining used Army filing cabinets at cost isn’t cause for concern, but there’s no earthly reason for small-town cops to wear military fatigues, ride around in mine-resistant Humvees, or carry bayonets. Studies suggest that police departments that receive such equipment see no measurable improvement in officer safety or crime rates, but greater quantities do seem to correlate with higher rates of officer-involved shootings and reduced public trust.Federal programs that allow the provision of military equipment to domestic police departments are only part of the problem, however. Although tightening the restrictions on such programs would be a good first step, the training that police recruits go through must also be reformed.We’re living in a dark moment: President Donald Trump’s threat to send in active-duty federal troops to quell protests further blurred the line between policing and the military. But some hopeful signs have emerged.For one, some progressive police leaders are questioning the value of paramilitary academies. In Washington State, for instance, former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr, now the head of the state’s Criminal Justice Training Commission, has pioneered an academy-training approach centered on a vision of police as guardians, not warriors. Rahr calls her training method “LEED,” for “Listen and Explain with Equity and Dignity.” Instead of an emphasis on yelling and standing at attention, her recruits are trained to engage others in courteous conversation, and are evaluated during role-play exercises on their ability to listen, show empathy, explain their actions, de-escalate tense situations, and leave everyone they encounter “with their dignity intact.”

Source: Stop Training Police Like They’re Joining the Military – The Atlantic

Brothers in the Movement ::: The Protest Psychosis :::: Recommended Reading

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An account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness

The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America.

A recommended read on the history of how the medical field responded to the civil rights/Black power movements by diagnosing Black men as schizophrenic.

Stop Cowering Before This Half-Bright Florida Fascist – In These Times

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Ron DeSantis wants to break the unions and make a temporary advantage permanent.

” . . . In Florida, all of the most important macro-issues of American politics are screaming out as we speak. The proud fascism that DeSantis embodies must be met with radicalism. Clinton-esque Democratic attempts to triangulate their way out of the problem are doomed to fail, and will only serve to drive home the untrue impression that Florida is a red state. You can’t equivocate with DeSantis. He puts Black people in jail at gunpoint for voting; he bans books and outlaws Black history teaching with a bluntness that would make George Orwell blush; he demonizes trans kids, perfectly happy to drive a few young people to suicide if it helps him solidify his own position. This guy is not some sophisticated mastermind — he’s an asshole. He is the embodiment of the worst 30% of Floridians, the ones who make the state a national punchline. And those who roll over for him, like the dozens of college presidents who publicly kowtow to his backwards ​“vision,” are cowards who will find themselves on the wrong side of history when the uncensored textbooks eventually get written.

That is one thing Florida proves: The absolute need for the Democrats to stop being weak and afraid of their own convictions. The second thing it proves is the absolute centrality of organized labor as a path out of the political quandary that afflicts America. Inequality has killed public faith in institutions, and modern media has entrenched national partisanship to a degree that some perceive as hopeless. Unions can roll back inequality. Unions can bring people of different political persuasions together in common cause in the workplace. Unions can show people an actual functioning democracy. Unions can lead regular people to political activism based on principles they learn by fighting for fair treatment for themselves. Unions can be strong enough to serve as a wall that stops the predations of opportunistic, hateful politicians like Ron DeSantis.

But all of that can only happen if many people are in unions. In Florida, as in the rest of the South, they’re mostly not. Unions need to spend much more money to organize new workers. Unions need to spend much more money organizing in the South. The Democratic Party needs to prioritize and enable this to a much larger degree — out of self-interest, if nothing else. Unions can change people, and they can change Florida, and they can change the country. But only if they rouse themselves out of their stupor and organize millions of people.

All of these things are connected. Working people and environmentalists together can unquestionably be a strong enough coalition to control the state of Florida, far stronger than the petty racists and boat-owning car dealers that make up the DeSantis base. Pulling this together requires a strong labor movement, and it requires the Democratic Party helping to build that movement. There is nothing impossible about any of this. The threat here is bigger than one teachers union, or one state. Ron DeSantis intends to make Florida a stepping stone that he will use to walk into the White House and prove that America is still a racist, oppressive nation at heart. Stop him before he gets there. As a native Floridian, I politely call on the Florida Democrats, unions, teachers, and people of all stripes who don’t prefer life in a dystopia: Get your shit together, before it’s too late. . . “

 

Source: Stop Cowering Before This Half-Bright Florida Fascist – In These Times

The Forgotten Ron DeSantis Book – The Atlantic

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Ron DeSantis's face refracted

The Forgotten Ron DeSantis Book

The Florida governor’s long-ignored 2011 work, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, reveals a distinct vision of American history and how it should influence the present.

By David Waldstreicher

 

DeSantis of 2011 praises the Tea Party movement and the backlash it inspired, which cost Democrats the House in 2010. He thinks the movement was absolutely right to identify itself with the American Revolution, fighting against un-American tyrannies of the Obama Democrats. But he argued it should go deeper than symbolic acts like dressing up in 18th-century garb or brandishing rifles at rallies. The book is intended firstly as a wholesale indictment and a game plan, pointing out the ways Republicans should attack “progressives” for the “transformational change” they are attempting—by which DeSantis meant federally mandated health care, corporate and mortgage bailouts, and increased regulation.

DeSantis of 2011 praises the Tea Party movement and the backlash it inspired, which cost Democrats the House in 2010. He thinks the movement was absolutely right to identify itself with the American Revolution, fighting against un-American tyrannies of the Obama Democrats. But he argued it should go deeper than symbolic acts like dressing up in 18th-century garb or brandishing rifles at rallies. The book is intended firstly as a wholesale indictment and a game plan, pointing out the ways Republicans should attack “progressives” for the “transformational change” they are attempting—by which DeSantis meant federally mandated health care, corporate and mortgage bailouts, and increased regulation.

Source: The Forgotten Ron DeSantis Book – The Atlantic

How Liberty HealthShare Left Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire — ProPublica

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A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline

For generations, members of the Beers family of Canton, Ohio, have used Christian faith to sell health coverage to more than a hundred thousand people like Martin. Instead they delivered pain, debt and financial ruin, according to an investigation by ProPublica based on leaked internal documents, land records, court files and interviews. They have done this not once but twice and have faced few consequences.

Source: How Liberty HealthShare Left Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire — ProPublica

Myth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nation | Books | The Guardian

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A statue of George Washington beneath The Apotheosis of Washington, an 1865 painting, in the US Capitol.

Another foundation of the disinformation crisis was the deregulation of broadcast by the Reagan administration, which eliminated the fairness doctrine in 1987. That simple change insured the pollution of the radio airwaves by Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, creating the first echo chamber.Of course, the internet allowed these waves of lies to reach warp speed, more destructive than anything humanity has experienced. In the understated description of this volume, “the conservative media ecosystem was augmented by … Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, where the tendency to find like-minded partisans and the freedom from fact-checkers took disinformation to new depths.”These venues have given “far-right lies unprecedented access to significant numbers of Americans” and allowed “ordinary Americans to spread lies to one another”, instantly. “As a result, misinformation and disinformation have infused our debates about almost every pertinent political problem.”The vastness of the problem is underscored by the fact that Fox News Digital ended 2022 as “the top-performing news brand” with more than 18bn multi-platform views and an average of 82.7m monthly multi-platform unique visitors. Not to mention 3.4bn Fox News views on YouTube. It was the first time Fox had surpassed CNN in these categories since 2019.The essays in Myth America attack rightwing myths about everything from immigration to Reagan. The authors were chosen in part because they are already “actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media”.In one of the very best chapters, Ari Kelman, a professor at the University of California Davis, tackles the foundational American myth: “Vanishing Indians.” He begins with the former Republican senator Rick Santorum’s assertion in 2021 that colonists arrived with a “blank slate” because there was “nothing here”. (Santorum said he had been misunderstood but was booted off CNN nonetheless.)

Kelman documents how such remarks can be traced back to myths started by the New England colonists, who “systematically erased evidence of long-standing Indigenous cultures … as a way of legitimating Euro-American land claims”. Portraying native Americans as hopelessly primitive, they “turned imperial violence into innocent virtue”.The alliance of some native tribes with the British during the War of 1812 made it even easier to marginalize them. “That Indigenous peoples might disappear” began to “look like just deserts”.

A counter-narrative began in the 1880s, when Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, which described “robbery” and “cruelty … done under the cloak” of 100 years “of treaty-making and treaty breaking”. Hunt described the culpability of white settlers in what we now realize was genocide: “This history of the United States government’s repeated violations of faith with the Indians … convicts us, as a nation” of “having outraged the principles of justice, which are the basis of international law.”Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the 1970 book by Dee Brown which sold millions, did more than any other modern work to explain how the conquering of the west was only possible because Americans assumed “treaties could be shredded” and the slaughter of Native Americans was just part of the natural order of things.The book described a vanished Native American culture, at a moment when Native Americans had experienced enough of a resurgence to become “the nation’s fastest growing minority”. As a result, “a book written to debunk one pernicious myth unwittingly reifies another, hammering home the message that by the start of the 20th century, Indians had vanished”.Another compelling chapter, The Southern Strategy, dismantles the assertion of the conservative political scientist Carol Swain “that this story of the two parties switching identities is a myth … fabricated by left-leaning academic elites and journalists”.Karl Mundt, right, sits next to Roy Cohn, special counsel to the McCarthy Senate investigations subcommittee, during a hearing in Washington in 1954. Photograph: Henry Burroughs/APWritten by Kruse, the chapter traces the Republican party’s decision to embrace racism to a cross-country tour in 1951 by a South Dakota senator, Karl Mundt, who was the first to propose a merger of Republicans and southern “Dixiecrat” Democrats committed to segregation. In 1952, the Republican platform endorsed every state’s right “to order and control its own domestic institutions”.The election of the Republican John Tower to fill Lyndon Johnson’s Senate seat in 1961 made him the first Republican to enter the Senate from the south since the end of Reconstruction – and showed “the segregationist vote was up for grabs”.Republican strategy shifted so quickly that by the time the party gathered in 1964 to nominate Barry Goldwater for president, for the first time in 50 years there were no Black delegates in any southern delegation. One of the few Black delegates who did attend “had his suit set on fire”. The B . . .

Karl Mundt, right, sits next to Roy Cohn, special counsel to the McCarthy Senate investigations subcommittee, during a hearing in Washington in 1954.

Karl Mundt, right, sits next to Roy Cohn, special counsel to the McCarthy Senate investigations subcommittee, during a hearing in Washington in 1954. Photograph: Henry Burroughs/AP

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Source: Myth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nation | Books | The Guardian