Go Green 2026

Lawrence Grandpre is Director of Research for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. His focuses include drug policy, criminal justice, police accountability, and community-based economic/educational development. He is the co-author of “The Black Book” and his work has been featured in The Guardian, The Baltimore Sun, Time Magazine and Black Agenda Report. He is also the co-host of the In Search of Black Power Podcast. In this episode Lawrence and I discuss the foundations of intercommunal violence in Black communities and the limits of a public health model of Community Violence Intervention. Lawrence provides a critique of the way that clinical "best practices" and "evidence based solutions" offered by the public health academy and non-profit industrial complex displace Black community efforts to address interpersonal violence. Lawrence calls for a methodology which situates the interpersonal violence as part of a political economy of anti-blackness, and discusses the importance of policy solutions that give Black people the power, resources and sovereignty to solve the problems that capitalism, white supremacy and over policing have created in Black communities. We filmed this episode one day after attending the funeral of our friend Anthony Day, who was murdered while on his lunch break at his job. The emotion is raw, but so is the necessity to have a sharp critique of the problems and solutions on offer by the current political order, and to provide an alternative vision of the way that interpersonal and structural violence can be ended, by the people most targeted by it.

Lawrence Grandpre is Director of Research for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. His focuses include drug policy, criminal justice, police accountability, and community-based economic/educational development. He is the co-author of “The Black Book” and his work has been featured in The Guardian, The Baltimore Sun, Time Magazine and Black Agenda Report.

 

He is also the co-host of the In Search of Black Power Podcast. During this episode we discuss the communal impacts and communal responses to drug criminalization, addiction, and harm reduction. We focus on Baltimore and Maryland, but the lessons are applicable beyond that.

 

Reparations are a large part of the framework Lawrence advocates, but he has a definition that challenges the typical way that reparations are defined arguing: "The definition of reparations presented by the interview subjects did not center on repairing the divide between oppressed and oppressor by granting the oppressed increased access to existing political and social service infrastructure, but instead on using public investment to build up the infrastructural capacity of the oppressed, so they were no longer dependent on the goodwill of the oppressor for their survival."

Dr Bernard Tamas is an Associate Professor at Valdosta State University. He is an expert on elections, electoral bias and US Third Parties. His 2018 Book  The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties: Poised for Political Revival? is an excellent exploration of the History of Third Parties in American Elections. He provides a deep dive into the historical and comparative data about third parties and offers a laser focused analysis on what needs to happen for third parties to be a meaningful factor in american politics. In this hour we discuss his book, some third parties in the news right now and some advice for Greens and for my campaign

Nnamdi Lumumba of the Ujima People's Progress Party will join Andy to talk about "The Impossibility of Justice in a Two Party System", building new political parties in Maryland and beyond, and more.