Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 sparkly quadrennial carnival known as our “national election” is like a magnetic hole in space, sucking light and energy into its powerful jaws, energy and effort disappearing into a gloomy, starless void. Sensible folks can be found staring at the glittering sites of power we have no access to, taking our eyes off the sites of power we’re a natural part of—the workplace and the community, the classroom and the house of worship. Now that the carnival is packing up and leaving town—and not a moment too soon—we turn our attention to getting back to work. We’re joined in conversation by the consummate organizer and activist Aislinn Pulley, co-executive director of the Chicago Torture Justice Center and founder and a lead organizer with Black Lives Matter Chicago.

Voter suppression may be the only strategy left for the reactionaries, but, truth-be-told, voter suppression is as American as cherry pie, baked deep in the national DNA. Founded on war and conquest, land theft and forced removal, ethnic cleansing and genocide, kidnapping and a complex system of generational slavery based on African ancestry, the US is hardly innocent in spite of the noisy protestations of the White Nationalists. It’s a settler-colonial, racial capitalist system, and the founding documents are crystal clear: power will be exercised by and for the few. A fundamental revolutionary duty—and really the responsibility of anyone whose eyes are open—is to struggle to know what time it is, and so we explore this treacherous, ominous, and oddly hopeful moment with a dear friend and comrade Barbara Ransby, historian, award-winning author, professor of history, Black studies, and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

We have taken up the question and the problem of freedom from various angles of regard, and today we move from an expansive metaphor—freedom as the wide, wide sea—to a material reality—freedom as the concrete act of unlocking the prison gate and walking out, free. We visit with Kathy Boudin, a social justice activist who spent 22 years in a New York State prison, and has, since her release in 2003, helped to organize a remarkable network and a wide range of projects to dismantle the system of mass incarceration.

We’re altering the framework for Episode Eleven because we’ve reached a milestone of sorts—a small milestone, to be sure, but a milestone nonetheless—and, therefore, this offering represents a kind of interlude, a time to reflect and recap, reimagine and rebuild. With ten episodes of Under the Tree live—a decathlon run—and a zillion episodes up ahead, let’s look back at where we’ve been, listen to a few excerpts, and then plunge ahead into a brief dialogue between Ayers, Alim, and Professor Stovall as we prepare for the road ahead.

The conquerors and the occupiers—the victors—are always the ones who write the history, and so we’re left with stories of the glorious conquest of the American west against “savage Indians,” the “Lost Cause” of the “valiant” Confederacy, or the acclaimed creation of “a fragile democracy” in the backward Middle East—“a chosen land for a chosen people.” Each of these accounts is sharply contested, and in that narrative battle we see a protest and hear an appeal: look more deeply, uncover the silenced voices—flawed and partial, contingent and fragmentary—discover a larger and more honest understanding of events. We’re joined today by Aaron Dixon, a former Black Panther Party leader whose journey proceeds from the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter movement of today, and whose decades of experience and accumulated wisdom can help us answer that appeal.