Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers cover image

Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

Latest episodes

undefined
Mar 6, 2021 • 1h 4min

What Counts? ft. Rochelle Gutierrez

What counts? And who’s counting? For what purpose, and toward what social end? Some years ago the Business Roundtable and their Education and Workforce Taskforce issued an influential challenge: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” it instructed. “No executive can run a business without accurate, granular data that explains what’s working and what’s not. Our school system should be no different.” And yet, any third grade teacher will tell you that each child is unique—the one of one. Mention that to the Business Roundtable and they’ll tell you that teachers can’t be trusted because they’re just spouting “anecdotal evidence” when what’s demanded is granular data. We’re joined today by Dr. Rochelle Gutiérrez, a professor of mathematics education and Latino and Latina studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who will lead us on a journey into the contested question: What counts?
undefined
Feb 27, 2021 • 1h 13min

Free. Free Palestine! ft. Rashid Khalidi

Fifty years ago, Americans who understood and acted upon their responsibility to rise up in solidarity with the oppressed people of the world, stood with the Vietnamese against the US invasion, occupation, and genocidal assault. Through the years internationalist consciousness and activism here has focused on defending the Cuban revolution against the US boot, and supporting anti-imperialist struggles around the globe from South Africa and Mozambique and Angola to Chile and Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Today anyone who stands in solidarity with the oppressed against imperialism recognizes the urgency of fighting for the liberation of Palestine. We’re joined today by a long-time friend and comrade, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of seven books about the Middle East, including the acclaimed Palestinian Identity, and most recently, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
undefined
Feb 18, 2021 • 57min

What history do you stand on? What future do you stand for? ft. Flint Taylor

Life can only be lived leaning forward, of course, even as its shifting and dynamic meanings can only be sorted out looking backward. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, in effect, that you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you—and so it is with history. With no impulse toward nostalgia, we struggle to understand this moment more clearly by glancing back: First, Malik Alim brings us up-to-date on a victory for justice that we mentioned earlier, the unprecedented and many-sided struggle against money bail; we’re then joined by Flint Taylor, a human rights lawyer whose dogged pursuit of justice takes us from the 1969 state murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark, through the widespread use of torture by the Chicago Police Department against young Black men over decades, on to the ultimately successful campaign to end the death penalty in Illinois and to obtain reparations for torture survivors. His book The Torture Machine Racism and Police Violence in Chicago was recently published by Haymarket Books in Chicago.
undefined
Jan 30, 2021 • 54min

Insurrection for Whom, and Toward What Social Order? ft. Daphne Muse

I’m no tactician, but I know that tactics are neutral in themselves—Nazi soldiers blowing up a bridge in occupied France to stop an Allied advance is despicable; partisans blowing up the bridge to prevent the Nazis from overwhelming a village and slaughtering its inhabitants is both defensible and righteous. So it is with insurrections: the goals and purposes matter. January 6, 2021 was a white supremacist insurrection against state power—part of a long American tradition that includes the secessionist insurrection of 1861, the uprising by the White League seeking to overthrow the biracial Reconstruction government of Louisiana in 1894, the violent toppling of the government in Wilmington North Carolina in 1898, and more. Each of these insurrections was in naked defense of white power. By contrast, the Haitian and Cuban revolutions, for example, were emancipatory insurrections designed to move human society forward. We’re joined today by legendary freedom fighter Daphne Muse whose life in struggle—from the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Pan-Africanist Movements to the fights for women’s liberation and disability rights— illuminates while it inspires.
undefined
Jan 19, 2021 • 20min

Goodbye to All That!

A new year provides a formal opportunity for a practice we ought to engage in every day: looking backward and leaping forward. Rather than make hollow resolutions that we will likely break soon enough, we encourage sustained reflection as we walk on two legs toward a new multi-racial and participatory democracy. We’re reminded of the words of the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Malik Alim and Bill Ayers begin the new year in dialogue about learning, growing, and dreaming big.
undefined
Jan 7, 2021 • 1h 9min

A Word on Statistics ft. Kari Kokka

The idea of a “seminar” provides us a vast metaphor, offering infinite roads to travel and pathways to pursue: Poems and Free-writes, Language Arts and Current Events, History and Geography, and much much more. Today, we’ll get to something we’ve been missing up until now: the wide and wonderful world of Mathematics. Of course, everything we humans produce is created in context, and the stuttering cliche that math is just the objective truth neither explains nor justifies the manipulation, deception, damage, and fraud as well as the beauty and power that flies at us from every direction in the name of facts and figures—the mantle of math. Numbers don’t express the gospel—they can easily hide injustices and conceal reality. We’re joined in conversation today with Kari Kakko, an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the most thoughtful people working today to rescue math from the many myths and misunderstandings that seem to cling to it like a tangle of ugly barnacles.
undefined
Dec 23, 2020 • 18min

Violence is as American as Cherry Pie

America’s hyper-violent history of generational slavery based on African ancestry, of genocide, ethnic cleansing and land theft rolls seamlessly into the ongoing crisis of white supremacy, militarism and militarized police forces, the massive prison-industrial complex, and more. Bullets and bombs aren't the only ways to kill people—bad hospitals and a predatory health care system kill people; government sponsored enclosures kill people; decomposing schools and brainwashing curriculums kill people. In this episode Bill meditates on the word “violence,” and pays attention, not only to the violence that’s visible and overt, but also to the violence that’s cloaked and hidden, and the accompanying feigned innocence—the hypocrisy—which can compound and intensify the original crimes.
undefined
Dec 10, 2020 • 60min

Aligning our Practices with our Values ft. Eve Ewing

Martin Luther King, Jr famously said that “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.” From the Birmingham jail he exhorted us to open our eyes, link arms, and get firmly on the freedom side: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” We explore an expanding vision of justice and freedom—and responsibility—with Eve Ewing, poet, playwright, academic researcher and teacher, institution builder, and Marvel Comics creator.
undefined
Dec 3, 2020 • 1h 2min

The Work of the World ft. Bill Fletcher Jr.

Joblessness is sky-rocketing, unnecessary suffering on the rise, even as we see plainly that there’s an endless amount of real work to be done: repairing the infrastructure, creating livable housing, improving the parks and public spaces, caring for the children and the elders, cleaning the environment, growing our food, and more. The “jobs economy” enthrones profit as it disconnects work from basic human needs—it’s called capitalism. Our guest today is the preeminent labor organizer, trade unionist, racial and economic justice activist Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of “They’re Bank­rupt­ing Us” and Twenty Other Myths about Unions.
undefined
Nov 26, 2020 • 57min

Liberation is a Curatorial Act ft. Kristiana Rae Colón

The road to deep structural change—to revolution—is built on seeing the world as it is, and then imagining a world that could be or should be, but is not yet. Organizing and mobilizing are essential, yes, igniting a far-reaching wildfire from below, but without  deploying our vital imaginations, we remain stuck. We’re joined by the transcendent artist and activist, Kristiana Rae Colon, as we explore the central role of creatives as we join in the work of imagining, rehearsing, mapping, inventing, and embodying that possible world.

The AI-powered Podcast Player

Save insights by tapping your headphones, chat with episodes, discover the best highlights - and more!
App store bannerPlay store banner
Get the app