Category Archives: Consumer Information

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.

How Insurance Companies Used Bad Science to Discriminate | JSTOR Daily

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After the Civil War, the United States searched for ways to redefine itself. But by the 1880’s, the hopes of Reconstruction had dimmed. Across the United States there was instead a push to formalize and legalize discrimination against African-Americans. The effort to marginalize the first generation of free black Americans infiltrated nearly every aspect of daily life, including the cost of insurance.

Initially, African-Americans could purchase life insurance policies on equal footing with whites. That all changed in 1881. In March of that year Prudential, one of the country’s largest insurers, announced that policies held by black adults would be worth one-third less than the same plans held by whites. Their weekly premiums would remain the same. Benefits for black children didn’t change, but weekly premiums for their policies would rise by five cents.

Prudential defended the decision by pointing out that the black mortality rate was higher than the white mortality rate. Therefore, they explained, claims paid out for black policyholders were a disproportionate amount of all payouts. Most of the major life insurance companies followed suit, making it nearly impossible for African-Americans to gain coverage. Across the industry, companies blocked agents from soliciting African-American customers and denied commission for any policies issued to blacks.

The public largely accepted the statistical explanation for unequal coverage. The insurer’s job was to calculate risk. Race was merely another variable like occupation or geographic location. As one trade publication put it in 1891: “Life insurance companies are not negro-maniacs, they are business institutions…there is no sentiment and there are no politics in it.”

Companies considered race-based risk the same for all African-Americans, whether they were strong or sickly, educated or uneducated, from the country or the city. The “science” behind the risk formula is credited to Prudential statistician Frederick L. Hoffman, whose efforts to prove the genetic inferiority of the black race were used to justify the company’s discriminatory policies.

Hoffman had plenty of bad science to work with. Most of the available data on African-American health statistics came from Civil War-era studies of black and white soldiers. Hospital administrator J.F. Miller and other researchers consistently claimed to have proof of the inherent weakness of the black race, reporting that the internal organs, including the lungs and brain, weighed less in blacks than in whites, making them more susceptible to diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis, and syphilis. Since most white physicians held the common belief that enslaved blacks had been relatively healthy, this proved that the constitution of the black race was incompatible with freedom:

These laws affect him in the air he breathes, the food he eats, the clothes he wears and every circumstance surrounding his habitation. In the wholesale violation of these laws after the war…was laid the foundation of the degeneration of the physical and mental constitution of the negro.

Black Americans were more likely to live in poverty and often lacked access to medical care, among many other hardships. Still, little credence was given to the theory that environmental factors were the reason for the higher black mortality rate. Hoffman’s work received widespread coverage in respected journals, including that of the American Statistical Association, a professional society where Hoffman later served as president.

Hoffman predicted that African-Americans would eventually die off like the Native Americans before them. He surmised that they wouldn’t be able to survive in “civilized” society, outside the bonds of slavery. The theory didn’t gain any traction, but Hoffman’s broader work on the racialist science behind black mortality rates did have lasting effects. Discriminatory policies based on race were standard in the insurance industry well into the twentieth century. In a 1940 survey, over forty percent of companies did not accept black policyholders.

Source: How Insurance Companies Used Bad Science to Discriminate | JSTOR Daily

What my mother’s death taught me about money as an African American – Business Insider

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My mother purchased her home on the south side of Chicago for $55,000 in 1986, the equivalent of $123,000 today.When she died without a will, court fees and fines left our family with just $40,500 — a loss of over $80,000 on the purchase price of her house.I realized that, because of our history, many African Americans haven’t learned how to transfer wealth generationally by making an estate plan.So, after my mother’s death, my husband and I drafted an estate plan, which we review annually around my mother’s birthday.

  • My mother purchased her home on the south side of Chicago for $55,000 in 1986, the equivalent of $123,000 today.
  • When she died without a will, court fees and fines left our family with just $40,500 — a loss of over $80,000 on the purchase price of her house.
  • I realized that, because of our history, many African Americans haven’t learned how to transfer wealth generationally by making an estate plan.
  • So, after my mother’s death, my husband and I drafted an estate plan, which we review annually around my mother’s birthday.

Full Article and Source: What my mother’s death taught me about money as an African American – Business Insider

Against Black Homeownership | Boston Review II KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

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RACE

Against Black Homeownership

The real estate market is so structured by race that black families will never come out ahead.

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

Image: Flickr

In January 1973, George Romney, Nixon’s enigmatic Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, administered an open-ended moratorium on its 1968 initiatives to open up single-family homeownership to low-income borrowers by providing government-backed mortgages. The experiment to make homeownership accessible to everyone ended abruptly with massive foreclosures and abandoned houses, but the questions ignited by these policies persisted. Some analysts insisted that the failure of HUD’s homeownership programs was proof positive that poor people were ill equipped for the responsibilities of homeownership. African Americans experience homeownership in ways that rarely produce the financial benefits typically enjoyed by middle-class white Americans.And they insisted that it more specifically implicated low-income African Americans as “incapable” homeowners. Others pointed to HUD’s obvious mismanagement of these programs as the real culprit in their demise, and, importantly, how the programs gave an industry already known for its racial bias new opportunities to exploit low-income African-Americans. But the lessons from HUD’s experiment were muddled by other economic sensibilities, including the commitment to private property and the centrality of homeownership to the American economy.

Today, homeownership, even for low-income and poor people, is reflexively advised as a way to emerge from poverty, develop assets, and build wealth more generally. The historic levels of wealth inequality that continue to distinguish African Americans from whites are powerful reminders of how the exclusion of Blacks from this asset has generationally impaired Black families in comparison with their white peers. Owning a home as a way to build wealth is touted as an advantage over public or government-sponsored housing. It grounds the assumption that it is better to own than rent. And the greatest assumption of all is that homeownership is the superior way to live in the United States. This, of course, is tied to another indelible truth that homeownership is a central cog in the U.S. economy. Its pivotal role as an economic barometer and motor means that there are endless attempts to make it more accessible to ever-wider groups of people. While these are certainly statements of fact, they should not be confused as statements on the advisability of suturing economic well-being to a privately owned asset in a society where the value of that asset will be weighed by the race or ethnicity of whoever possesses it.

The assumption that a mere reversal of exclusion to inclusion would upend decades of institutional discrimination underestimated the investments in the economy organized around race and property. The concept of race and especially racial inferiority helped to establish the “economic floor” in the housing market. One’s proximity to African Americans individually, as well as to their communities, helped to determine the value of one’s property. This revealed another reality. Markets, as in the means by which the exchange of commodities is facilitated, do not exist in vacuums, nor do abstract notions of “supply and demand” dictate their function. Markets are conceived and constituted by desire, imagination, and social aspirations, among other malleable factors. This does not mean that markets are not real, but that they are not shaped by need alone. They are shaped by political, social, economic, and in the case of housing, racial concerns. And in the United States, these market conditions were shaped and stoked by economic actors that stood to gain by curtailing access to one portion of the market while then flooding another with credit, capital, and indiscriminate access to distressed and substandard homes.

HUD’s crisis in its homeownership programs in the 1970s reveal deeper and more systemic problems with the pursuit of homeownership as a way to improve the quality of one’s life. It is undeniable that homeownership in the United States has been “one of the important ways in which Americans have traditionally acquired financial capital” and that the “tax advantages, the accumulation of equity, and the increased value of real estate property enable homeowners to build economic assets. . . . These assets can be used to educate one’s children, to take advantage of business opportunities, to meet financial emergencies, and to provide for retirement.” Investment in homeownership, and its role in the process of the personal accumulation of capital, has been fundamental to the good life in the United States.

Full Article and Source: Against Black Homeownership | Boston Review

Methodist Le Bonheur Makes Millions, Owns a Collection Agency and Relentlessly Sues the Poor

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In July 2007, Carrie Barrett went to the emergency room at Methodist University Hospital, complaining of shortness of breath and tightness in her chest. Her leg was swollen, she’d later recall, and her toes were turning black.Given her family history, high blood pressure and newly diagnosed congestive heart failure, doctors performed a heart catheterization, threading a long tube through her groin and into her heart.

Her share of the two-night stay: $12,019.Barrett, who has never made more than $12 an hour, doesn’t remember getting any notices to pay from the hospital. But in 2010, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare sued her for the unpaid medical bills, plus attorney’s fees and court costs.Since then, the nonprofit hospital system affiliated with the United Methodist Church has doggedly pursued her, adding interest to the debt seven times and garnishing money from her paycheck on 15 occasions.

Source: Methodist Le Bonheur Makes Millions, Owns a Collection Agency and Relentlessly Sues the Poor

OUR COMMON GROUND
Black Voice Sanctuary 

Establish a Public Credit Registry | Demos

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“Credit reports and scores directly impact Americans’ economic security and opportunity. Credit history can affect the way Americans are treated by lenders, landlords, utility companies, hospitals and employers. Having a poor credit history or a “thin file” with insufficient credit information to generate a credit score can mean a consumer will end up paying more for loans and insurance (or have trouble even getting them in the first place). Misuses of credit history are prevalent and harmful: Job seekers can be denied work based on their credit history, and the Trump administration has even proposed using credit history to determine whether immigrants should be eligible for permanent residency. Most harmfully, our credit system is built on—and continues to reinforce and expand—deep racial inequities.  Generations of discrimination in employment, lending, education and housing have produced significant racial disparities in credit history. Past discrimination is baked into current determinations of creditworthiness: Credit scores and other lending algorithms disproportionately represent black and Latino loan applicants as “riskier” customers. As a result, decisions drawing on credit data reproduce and spread existing racial inequality, making it harder to achieve true economic equity.”

Source: Establish a Public Credit Registry | Demos

A loophole lets SC hospitals take millions from residents’ tax refunds for unpaid bills | Business | postandcourier.com

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South Carolina hospitals are using a loophole in state law to scoop millions of dollars a year from the pockets of the poorest of patients. It mostly takes place outside the courts and the public eye.

A law originally written to help state and local governments collect debts is being used to seize tax refunds from people with past-due medical bills. The S.C. Department of Revenue does the legwork, and the cash flows straight into the coffers of some of the region’s largest health care companies.

The payoff is huge.

Source: A loophole lets SC hospitals take millions from residents’ tax refunds for unpaid bills | Business | postandcourier.com

Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide – Inequality.org

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The deep and persistent racial wealth divide will not close without bold, structural reform.  It has been created and held in place by public policies that have evolved with time including slavery, Jim Crow, red lining, mass incarceration, among many others. The racial wealth divide is greater today than it was nearly four decades ago and trends point to its continued widening.

Source: Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide – Inequality.org

HUD’s House of Cards — ProPublica

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HUD’s flawed oversight of living conditions in federally subsidized housing can leave people living among rats, roaches, mold and other dangerous conditions for years. The lack of solutions for small- and mid-sized cities is the affordable housing crisis nobody’s talking about.

Source: HUD’s House of Cards — ProPublica

Black-owned Makeup Brand Pat McGrath Projected to Surpass Kylie Cosmetics with $1B Valuation ::: Atlanta Black Star

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Black-owned Makeup Brand Pat McGrath Projected to Surpass Kylie Cosmetics with $1B Valuation

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Kiersten Willis

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(Photo by John Phillips/BFC/Getty Images for BFC/ Kevin Tachman/Getty Images for Vogue)

 

Black-owned cosmetics company Pat McGrath Labs lands a $60 million investment deal with Eurazeo Brands has put the two-year-old business’ valuation in excess of $1 billion. That accomplishment, according toWomen’s Wear Daily, launches her ahead of Kylie Cosmetics, a brand that Forbes controversially said put reality star Kylie Jenner on track to become the youngest self-made billionaire.

A press release issued on behalf of Pat McGrath Labs, which was founded in 2016 by the world’s number one makeup artist Pat McGrath, said the investment will build on the British brand’s success. It will also expand the company’s U.S. distribution to 90 Sephora stores in the fall as well as increase worldwide demand. Eurazeo Brands will become a minority shareholder in the company. Additional terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“It has always been my dream to create an iconic beauty brand that goes beyond the usual limitations, that lives outside the parameters of what is expected,” McGrath said in a statement of her company that swiftly transformed modern beauty with its must-have, straight-from-the-runway makeup experience. “I am thrilled to be working with the unique and expert team at Eurazeo Brands.”

Her brand has become a major staple at Sephora stores, where it’s available online and in 54 stores and became the top-selling SKU brand. It also has attracted more than 30 billion social media impressions since launching.

“The next phase is to continue our incredible trajectory,” McGrath told Fashionista of expansion plans. “We have been so blessed to have such an engaged and passionate customer base and the aim is to continue to provide them with more groundbreaking, straight-from-the-runway products and a makeup experience that they cannot get anywhere else. I get so much joy and satisfaction when I see how much our loyal customers love the products, it fuels us to come up with even more innovative creative ideas.”

 

From ATLANTA BLACK STARabs_logo_black-600x64

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