In this conversation, Peter Laarman tells Dick and Sharon how he resisted reading the sprawling new biography of James Baldwin—Nicholas Bogg’s James Baldwin: A Love Story—out of deep respect for this great writer. The reviews were all telling Peter that Boggs digs into the details of his subject’s sex life. This turned me off, says Peter, even though I am a gay man who has not been averse to slurping up the salaciousness in profiles of other gay icons. Peter went on to tell us the he resisted in this case, however, because he could not help recalling that Baldwin himself, who wrote beautifully and often about the challenges of intimacy and vulnerability, was forever reluctant to have his sexuality brought under the microscope. He thought it was vulgar. And to the end of his life, he also remained deeply conflicted about his attraction to men and sometimes boys, which is not at all surprising in view of his origin story and the straitened circumstances of his unlikely and difficult rise to recognition and respect. To read this story in full click here

lder activists talk a lot about “passing the torch” to the next generation.

After spending time with AngelMarie Taylor, I’m beginning to think we may have the metaphor wrong.

Young people like Taylor aren’t standing around waiting for somebody to hand them a torch. They have already picked it up. The more urgent question is whether those of us who have been doing this work for decades are prepared to support them, listen to them and help clear obstacles out of their way.

Taylor is a Youth Vanguard Organizer with Black Lives Matter Grassroots, and when I recently interviewed her, I was struck by the contrast between her youth and the amount of organizing she has already packed into her life.

During her years at California State University Channel Islands, she was active with groups including Students for Quality Education, the Black Student Union, reproductive and gender-equity organizing, Students for Justice in Palestine and Students Against Fascism.

But her activism started long before college.

It started when she was 10 years old.

Organizing Because Children Needed Lunch

Taylor told me that she and her siblings sometimes went to school without being able to afford lunch. Rather than accepting that as simply the way things were, she joined student government and began working to make food universally available at her school.

“I started as a student organizer when I was 10 years old,” she told me. “There were so many situations where myself and my siblings were going to school and could not afford lunch.”

That first experience taught her something enormously important: organizing could actually change conditions. To read the full article go to the LA Progressive

Mario is a longtime LA Progressive contributor, political strategist, broadcaster, policy commentator, and now Substack writer. He is also very funny—although he insists he is not a comedian.

“I hear that a lot,” he told me when we recently sat down to talk. “Sometimes the only way to deliver honesty is with a little bit of humor.”

The humor helps, because what we ended up discussing was anything but funny.

We began with California unemployment. From there we moved to federal budget cuts, local government austerity, corporate media, the manosphere, Latino men who shifted toward Donald Trump, the disappearance of pathways into the middle class, and finally to the question underneath all of it:

Can Americans who are being squeezed by the same economic system recognize one another as allies before we are persuaded to fight over the scraps?

Mario thinks we can.

But first, he says, we have to understand the frame.

California Unemployment Is Rising. The Media Is Missing the Role of Federal Funding Cuts

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The Cuts Happened in Washington. The Pain Arrives Locally.

One of Mario’s central concerns is the growing disconnect between decisions made by the federal government and the consequences people experience months later in their neighborhoods.

Federal budgets are abstract.

A closed clinic is not.

A laid-off social worker is not.

A city eliminating services is not.

Neither is a family suddenly discovering that an organization it depended upon no longer has the staff or money to help.

Mario argues that this delayed effect allows political responsibility to disappear.

Donald Trump returned to office and his administration moved aggressively to cut federal spending, personnel, grants, and programs. Elon Musk became the public face of that campaign, at one point quite literally appearing onstage wielding a chainsaw as a symbol of government-cutting zeal.

The theater was memorable.

What happens after the theater is less visible.

Communities can absorb financial shocks for a while. States move money around. Cities tap reserves. Nonprofits reduce expenses. Agencies freeze hiring. Organizations stretch grants further.

Then the cushion disappears.

“And now people are feeling the cuts,” Mario told me. “Many times we don’t associate what we’re feeling on the ground with where the funding source is.”

That distinction matters.

Every February, the same poster goes up in the break room. Martin Luther King Jr., mid-speech, arm raised, quote stripped of context and shrunk to fit a frame. Every May 5th, someone brings tacos to the office potluck. Every June, a rainbow logo. Every November, a land acknowledgement read aloud before the meeting starts, then never mentioned again.

None of that is nothing. But none of it is the thing itself.

That gap — between the gesture and the structure underneath it — is where “liberal” and “progressive“ stop being interchangeable words people use loosely in the same sentence and start being two genuinely different theories about what’s wrong and what fixes it. The confusion is understandable. Both sides vote blue. Both sides say they’re against racism. But they disagree, sometimes sharply, about what racism actually is and what it would take to end it — and nowhere is that disagreement clearer than in how each camp handles race, specifically.

Two Theories of Change

The liberal approach starts from a basic faith: the system works, mostly, and where it doesn’t, it can be fixed from inside. Liberals believe in gradual progress through established institutions — courts, legislatures, HR departments, school boards. The strategy is to protect rights, expand access, and promote fairness within the current system. Legal scholar Ian Haney López calls this framework “Liberal Race Theory”: the belief that racial inequality can be overcome through gradual reform, legal protections, and equal opportunity, built on individual rights, colorblindness, and inclusion. In a conversation on the podcast The Weeds, López offered a shorthand for the split that’s stuck with me ever since: it’s like comparing Martin Luther King to Malcolm X. Same century, same enemy, fundamentally different theory of the case.

The progressive approach starts from a different premise: the system isn’t broken, it’s working as designed, and the design itself is the problem. Progressives argue the system is structured to produce inequity and must be transformed, not just improved. Where liberals focus on individual rights and access, progressives focus on structural inequality, corporate power, and historical injustice — the rules, not just who gets let into the room where the rules get made.

Neither camp denies that racism exists. The disagreement is about its address. Is it a bug — a set of individual failures, outdated laws, and unconscious biases that a fairer, more inclusive version of the current system can correct? Or is it a feature — something built into the foundation, requiring not reform but rebuilding? That question is the whole argument, and almost everything downstream of it — including how each side handles Black History Month — follows from which answer you start with. To continue reading this article click here.

Frank Joyce and Elizabeth Woodson joined Dick and Sharon of the LA Progressive to talk about the role that white people MUST play in creating democracy for all. They are both dedicated to dismantling racism. When speaking of herself and Frank, Elizabeth said, “We are not of the same gender or generation. But we have two things in common. We are both white as defined by the racial categories entrenched long ago to sustain white male power. And we’re both dedicated to confronting and repairing the harms of whiteness, settler colonialism, enslavement, segregation and other aspects of the enduring racial hierarchy within ourselves and our white communities.”

In our interview, Elizabeth explains white racialization and the toll it takes. Frank’s journey was initiated by the 1960s Black Freedom struggle; Elizabeth’s in 2014 by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Both Frank and Elizabeth agree that, in order to see a more perfect union, we can’t continue to do what we have always done. They say that that only perpetuates the cyclical pattern but doing something different might lead to real and lasting change.

For a very long time U.S. efforts at social change can be described as pursuing a pendulum theory of change. The idea is that our history see-saws between good times and bad. That’s how it is and how it will always be is what many think as if it’s an inescapable cage. But Frank Joyce and Elizabeth Woodson have another idea and they share it with Dick and Sharon. You can see their full article here:

https://www.laprogressive.com/racism/responding-to-the-chaos

Frank and Elizabeth have dedicated their time to dismantling the co-dependent, symbiotic relationship the white male power formula has with the rest of this country.

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From his early days as a commentator on BET to his groundbreaking role as the first African American to host signature talk programs on both NPR (The Tavis Smiley Show) and PBS (Tavis Smiley), he has consistently used his platform to uplift stories that are too often ignored—those rooted in the Black experience, in the struggle for justice, and in the enduring quest for dignity. Tavis Smiley spent time chatting with Sharon Kyle of the LA Progressive. They talked a little about his past, his present and his plans for the future. Tavis Smiley keeps and real all the while pushing forward and uplifting voices that aren’t always heard.

Thank you for listening and reading. Please like, share and subscribe.

You can find the full article that accompanies this video here:

https://www.laprogressive.com/civil-liberties-and-civil-rights/from-pbs-to-kbla-tavis-smileys-mission-to-reclaim-the-black-narrative

Across the country, classrooms are under pressure—politically, ideologically, and pedagogically. One quiet but powerful force distorting how young people understand the world is reductionist reasoning and erasure of marginalized perspectives in the teaching of history.

Dick Price and Sharon Kyle invited Nora Lester Murad to discuss her first hand knowlege of the erasure of Palestinians in Israel. Nora is the author of the award-winning young adult novel, Ida in the Middle. A story about a Palestinian-American girl who eats a magic olive that takes her to the life she might have had in her parents’ village near Jerusalem. An important coming of age story that explores identity, place, voice, and belonging. Nora, herself is Jewish, raised in a Jewish family in Southern California but spent decades living in the West Bank with her Palestinian husband where they raised three daughters. She now lives in Massachusetts where she promotes social justice education and activism. Nora shares K-12 teaching and school advocacy resources at www.IdaInTheMiddle.com and can be reached through her blog at www.NoraLesterMurad.com.

Dick, Nora, and Sharon discuss the importance of ethnic studies. They discuss what happens to democracy when children learn from a curriculum that reduces history to a timeline of presidents and wars and omits the voices of Indigenous people, Palestinians, enslaved Africans, immigrants, workers, and women. At first glance, it might sound like good teaching—distilling complex events into simple cause-and-effect stories. But in practice, reductionist history oversimplifies the past, flattens conflict, erases marginalized voices, and prepares students to obey rather than question. In doing so, it shapes not just what students know—but how they think, act, and vote.

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Culture is the primary battlefield authoritarians use to establish a foothold in the public imagination, where fear is normalized, dissent is demonized, and history is rewritten to serve the interests of power. In our conversation with Henry Giroux, a regular writer for the LA Progressive, Dick and I learn more about the ways of authoritarians who thrive on ignorance, historical amnesia and the brutal aesthetics of cruelty, all the while normalizing their cruelty as common sense.

Our conversation was sparked after we read an article on this topic that Henry Giroux wrote and submitted to the LA Progressive. That article can be found here:

https://www.laprogressive.com/education-reform/against-the-erasure-machine

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