Black Grassroots & Community-Based Approaches to Violence Prevention

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.