"The Laura Flanders Show" (25 minutes)
If we're going to liberate anyone in the era of Trump, we'll have to start looking where we
haven't looked before. This week's guests, radical Southern activists Suzanne Pharr and Stephanie Guilloud, spoke with Laura at Facing Race in November 2016, just days after the election. Through their movement work in the South, both have seen, and built, ground models for equitable, democratic, and defended communities.
Pharr, a movement hero, was the former head of the Arkansas Women's Project and the Highlander Center, the movement training school that graduated among others, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King. Pharr was also one of the founders of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), a group that Guilloud came up through. Now Guilloud co-directs Project South, which has been part of a Southern Movement Assemblies process seeking to build local governance since Hurricane Katrina.
Also in this interview, breakout Latinx singer/songwriter Xenia Rubinos meets us at Tonita's Social Club (found in Williamsburg, Brooklyn). Tonita's Social Club is playfully called the last "social club" of its kind, a venue where seasoned neighborhood locals -- most of them Dominican and Puerto Rican -- come to meet the block's recent young hip transplants. Regularly featured on 2016's Best Album lists (NPR, Remezcla, Pitchfork), Xenia talks about her own version of looking at unseen places, featured in her song "Mexican Chef," a song about the back of the restaurant meeting the front.
"Guns with History" (3.5 minutes)
States United to Prevent Gun Violence opens a "gun store" in New York City as a hidden camera social experiment to debunk safety myths.
Every gun has a history.
Let's not repeat it.
"The 800 Mile Wall" (89 minutes)
The 800 Mile Wall highlights the construction of border walls along the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the effect on migrants trying to cross into the U.S. This powerful 90-minute film is an unflinching look at the failed U.S. border strategy that many believe has caused the death of thousands of migrants and violates fundamental human rights. Since border walls have been built, well over 5,000 migrant bodies have been recovered in U.S. deserts, mountains and canals. Some unofficial reports put the death toll as high as 10,000 men, women and children. As a direct result of U.S. border policy, migrants are forced to cross treacherous deserts and mountains in search of low skill and low paying jobs in the United States.