SIT DOWN.
REASON.
No savior. No throne. Just truth from the ground. You share yours too — that's how we grow.
What Grounding means.
/ rastafari glossary
In Rastafari, a grounding (also groundation or grounation) is a gathering to reason together — an open, unhurried circle where elders and youth share scripture, history, music and lived experience as equals. No pulpit, no audience: everyone speaks, everyone listens, and the truth is worked out on the ground, face to face.
The verb to ground means to sit with someone long enough to actually hear them. That's the posture of this section.
RoU876 borrows the word on purpose. What we do here is not a lecture series. It's a circle you can step into.
Meet Jan.
Dr. Janette Gayle — historian, teacher, keeper of the Atlantic story. She holds the circle.
Jan is Associate Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she has taught since 2016 after six years teaching African American and United States History at Harold Washington College in Chicago. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, an M.A. at UCLA, and a B.A. at Antioch University of Southern California.
Her work is transnational: race, gender, migration and labor across the United States, the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her book project, Sewing Change: Black Dressmakers and Garment Workers and the Struggle for Rights in Early Twentieth Century New York City, follows Black dressmakers migrating from the American South and the British Caribbean to New York, and the part they played in the making of a Black middle class, a Black industrial working class, and the early civil rights movement. She also leads the Mapping Harlem Digital Project, which uses U.S. census data to trace Black migrant settlement in Harlem across the first half of the twentieth century.
She teaches Labor, Race & Gender in the Making of America; African American History I & II; Black Women and the Struggle for Rights; Race-ing America; and The Great Migration. She is a member of the American Historical Association, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, and the Association of Caribbean Historians.
For RoU876, Jan grounds the music in the history that made it possible — and makes sure the reasoning stays honest, sourced and rooted.
Easy to follow. Easy to join.
We meet people where they already listen, watch and read — so the message doesn't stay locked in a classroom.
Talk with us.
Live groundings, open Q&A and podcasts — conversations you can sit in or carry with you. No script, no stage, just reasoning.
Open →Read & study.
Short essays, reading lists, primary-source drops and class themes — written to be read on a phone, not in a library.
Open →Meet the circle.
Janette Gayle as anchor, plus a growing network of experts, coaches and mentors you can book for sessions, groups or mentorship.
Open →Formats will grow as the circle does. If a platform is where your people are, we want to be there too.
No savior. No throne.
Just truth from the ground.
You share yours too.
That's how we grow.