GRITtv with Laura Flanders

Launched on May 12, 2008 as a daily, 30-minute discussion syndicated on broadcast, satellite and cable TV, today GRITtv is an online source for reporting, interviews and commentaries by Laura Flanders and her colleagues. Incorporating viewer-submitted content, grassroots activism, and a positive, progressive message, Flanders, goes way beyond party politics to seek out the smartest thinkers and doers of our time.

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The real reason the system wants to pass hate crimes laws and put our names on it, isn't because the system wants to save our lives but because the system wants to grown in any direction.

Dean Spade, this week on GRITtv

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Michelle Alexander: Beyond Black Spring | #GRITtv

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What I see right now, and it's because this is what I've been working on for years, is that we are in a particular moment in history where we are looking at state violence, and I think we can use this moment to look at state violence as a way to look at many other things, such as poverty, such as homelessness. These are not unique to the United States, but something that I think is unique is the ways in which state violence is being uplifted in this moment of history. I think we have an opening, which doesn't happen very often, to change policy, to change the culture, and to shift some pretty deadly dynamics.

Patrisse Cullors, this week on #GRITtv

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Mike Brown (born May 20, 1996) would have turned 19 today. Rest in power, Michael. 

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It is not about us, the privileged, coming up with our form of boycott. It is about us, the privileged, supporting the underprivileged in their just struggle.

Ronnie Barkan, Boycott From Within

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I think that most Israelis are not fanatics. They're just apathetic. They don't know, and they don't want to know. They actively do not know. In that sense, I think that that also applies to Americans. Most people in the US don't know much about the ongoing wars of aggression that the US is carrying out in so many places around the world, it's difficult to keep count.

Ronnie Barkan, of Boycott From Within, on this week’s GRITtv

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[Black girls] told us that zero tolerance schools - schools where there's a heavy emphasis on punitive measures, punishment rather than active intervention - that those kinds of schools were where they didn't feel safe. Sometimes they didn't even want to come to school.

Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, on GRITtv this week

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"[Black girls surveyed] said that if they knew that they needed some kind of help the best way to get it was to show face, to act out. In an institution that's based on discipline, to get resources and attention one has to become a disciplinary problem.”

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#Blackgirlsmatter: Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and a new #homecare documentary, Care | #GRITtv

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It is called My Brother's Keeper. It's not called Our Children's Keeper. So, it's pretty clear what the message is. That in and of itself is something that we want to challenge. Because what you don't name and what you don't measure, you generally don't care about. Right? We want to lift the profile and create public will to address boys as well as girls.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, on this week’s GRITtv

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Actually Octavia [Butler] is an amazing model of someone who did so much to change the world, sitting at a desk, turned inward, feeling awkward about social interactions and not necessarily seeing herself as a leader.

adrienne maree brown, on Octavia Butler, this week on GRITtv

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I think even just having a market-driven economy for anything from energy to our  food system, education, all of those things is really the wrong premise for getting people's needs met.

Esteban Kelly this week on GRITtv - from Local to Global: we check in on the New Economy movement’s progress

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“The skills needed to make a play are the skills needed to make a society that works.” 

Kathleen Chalfant on GRITtv. Watch now! 

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The wonderful thing about the theater is that it happens in every home that has a small child in it, because that's what children do. They make up - encourage your children to make-up stories. To be characters. Play with them the best you can. Take them to places where people are doing things live. Because there's nothing like it.

Kathleen Chalfant, actor and activist, this week on GRITtv. Watch her thoughts on theater in schools, activism, Gaza and growing up to be here

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Where do art and social justice meet? From early roles in films like Bob Roberts and Five Corners to her award winning roles in plays including Wit and Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, to her current starring role in the award-winning Showtime series The Affair, Kathleen Chalfant is one of the most acclaimed actresses in the US. She has also been an outspoken advocate on issues like Middle East peace and incarceration. This episode also looks at Stanley Cohen, a radical lawyer who has represented Hamas and other official US enemies. Cohen is going to jail in a case seen as payback from the US government for his unpopular cases.

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I've often said that actually, the MAP test boycott didn't start at my school at Garfield High School; in fact, it began at Lakeside High School, a school down the road where Bill Gates went, where he sends his kids, because they never administered the exam and they wouldn't do that to their own children; reduce teaching and learning to this score and teach to the test.

Jesse Hagopian, this week on GRITtv. WATCH.