Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

In America is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan describes his good fortune at landing a job in a library where he could be close to books: “I was beginning to understand what was going on around me, and the darkness that had covered my present life was lifting.” Ursula Le Guin writes of a library’s sacredness: “its accessibility, its publicness.” She calls the public library a public trust, and continues: “A great library is freedom,.” We’re honored to be joined in conversation with Emily Drabinski, past president of the American Library Association, and a brilliant and intrepid defender of the public square.

Comix is a distinct art form—sequential art—that expresses ideas with multiple images, most often combined with text. It's a hybrid (think co-mix) and, importantly, it’s a medium not a genre—don’t confuse the two in the presence of a comix creator or you might get your head bit off (for a real-life dramatization, see the opening of To Teach: the journey in comics). Comics aren’t just for kids anymore, and the medium has been creatively deployed to communicate non-comedic content—see Maus or Persepolis or Fun Home. They’ve taken over the world in this golden comix age, and you can find them everywhere—classrooms, special sections in bookstores and libraries, and, yes, still hidden in that secret drawer in the closet—and still the medium retains a sense of its insurgent origins. The word “comix” (or “comics”) is a “non-count noun” like “politics” or “economics” referring to the medium itself. We’re joined by two old friends in conversation about comix and the world—Eve Ewing, poet, playwright, scholar, teacher, author of the Ironheart series for Marvel comics, and the first Black female author of the Black Panther series; and Ryan Alexander-Tanner (www.ohyesverynice.com), illustrator/comics artist and educator, co-author of To Teach: the journey in comics, and author and artist of Muhammad Ali: The Greatest Comics Biography of All Time Volume One: Cassius Clay. 

When Freedom is the Question… was published on September 10, and we had a book launch that night at our home-away-from-home, Pilsen Community Books, in conversation with Eve Ewing. We traveled to Women and Children First, Seminary Coop, The Wooden Shoe in Philadelphia, Book and Puppet in Easton, PA, Riff Raff in Providence, Firestorm in Asheville, NC, Red Emma’s in Baltimore, Busboys and Poets in DC, the PIT (Property is Theft!!) in Brooklyn, and more. I read at public libraries, coffee shops, and Movement venues like Haymarket House, Hasta Muerte, and The James Connelly Social Club. A couple of the events were taped, one at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY where I was in conversation with the legendary thinker and activist Barbara Smith, co-author of the Combahee River Collective statement, and one at La Pena in Oakland where I was in conversation with Cat Brooks, organizer, activist, and KPFA radio host---Under the Tree will drop those spicy conversations in the future. I was honored and often awed to be in conversation with several other powerful comrades and dazzling friends: Lisa Lee, Danaka Katovich, Alice Kim, Damon Williams, Jacqui Lyden, Daniel Kisslinger, Martha Biondi, Adam Bush, James Michael MacDonald, Jeff Jones, Martha Swan, and more.

The word “racism” can apply to a specific person or to the social structure, and in our hyper-individualistic culture, the word most commonly devolves to a singular individual who did something obviously prejudiced: Cliven Bundy, the Nevada cattle rancher, Amy Cooper, the New York person who called the cops on a bird-watcher who’d asked her to keep her dog on a leash. Racism is this or that person or particular act or behavior, and it means“bigoted, backward, stupid, and offensive.” But since I’m not backward and bigoted and stupid like them, “I’m not racist.” Convenient for white liberals, but not helpful in repairing the harm. We dive into that  wreckage with the brilliant thinker, writer, and teacher, Janine de Novais who explores and engages human liberation as a cultural project. Her book, Brave Community: Teaching for a Post-Racist Imagination, illuminates practices that confront racism and empower and edify everyone involved.

This is the country we live in…no doubt about it: white nationalists well-organized and rising; a fascist in the white house surrounded by his loyal Renfields; a preannounced genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza underway, funded and fueled by our taxes; raging, racialized police violence unchecked; capitalist-induced climate collapse on full display; fragile and anemic democratic institutions on life support; religious authoritarianism on the rise; women’s bodily integrity under sustained assault. The day after the recent election, the 10 richest Americans added $64 billion to their personal wealth, and extreme right-wing para-militaries armed up. The overlapping crises threaten to overwhelm us. We’re joined in conversation with Davarian Baldwin, a leading historian and cultural critic from Trinity College, and David Stovall, engaged scholar and legendary teacher/activist from the University of Illinois at Chicago, to reckon with the wreckage, and to discuss  where we might go from here.

Let’s talk about teaching, which means let’s also talk about racism—attitudes, stereotypes, prejudices, for sure, and much, much more. Let’s talk about structures and institutions, as well, about laws and legacies, cultures and the dogma of common sense. Co-host Adam Bush and I are joined in conversation with Christopher Emdin and Sam Seidel. After Chris published the wildly successful and useful book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood . . . and the Rest of Y’all Too, he and Sam, long-time friends and comrades, decided to reach out to over twenty white anti-racist teachers—including my brother Rick—to tell their own stories, creating From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Identity,  a dazzling companion text and a powerful guide to teaching toward enlightenment and liberation.

Abolition can perhaps best be understood as a collection of creative and complex acts of world-building—what kind of world would we need to build in order to have no slavery? our forebears asked. And what kind of world could we begin to create today that would render prisons and police and militarism obsolete, predation and exploitation relics of a cruel past? Abolition is not simply a policy, it’s an entire politics—the politics of realizing our freedom dreams by building the world we want and need. All of us—workers, teachers, nurses, midwives, parents—can reimagine and rebuild our worlds. Everything can change. And abolition work—changing everything—is the practice of freedom. We’re joined Under the Tree by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson, co-editors of We Grow Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, an anthology focussed on  connecting liberatory parenting and movements for freedom. 

We’re in conversation today with Lawrence Grandpre from the group Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS), a grassroots think-tank that advances the public policy interests of Black people in Baltimore through youth leadership development, political advocacy, and autonomous intellectual innovation. Founded by young freedom fighters, you can find them and follow their work at lbsbaltimore.com

Amos Kennedy, self-described “humble negro printer” and author of Citizen Printer, is a visionary treasure, an imaginative freedom-fighter, and the creator of type-driven messages of justice, freedom, and Black Power. He understands that freedom comes to life in action, and that we are most truly (and paradoxically) free when we name the obstacles to our humanity, and then throw ourselves against the imposing wall of unfreedom. His weapon of choice, the sledgehammer with which he bangs away day by day, is letterpress printing, and every image he brings to life urges voyages—wobbly rambles away from the cold reality of the world we inhabit into worlds that could be or should be but are not yet. Join Bill Ayers and Amos Kennedy “under the tree”—in this case, amidst the unique randomness and studied messiness of his Detroit studio, seated on folding chairs between presses and with stacks of paper and trays of type as far as the eye can see—as we dance the dialectic, discussing history and the future, politics and  resistance, inspiration and aspiration, justice and freedom. His book is available here: https://www.madejacksonhole.com/products/amos-paul-kennedy-jr-citizen-printer?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwu-63BhC9ARIsAMMTLXRHIz_eZ1HcQf5xLPBaPxLz2TfhEVDJa-44hPfEkEaWZvTFBuUquMsaAl7rEALw_wcB

At a time when women’s bodily integrity is under sustained assault, and simultaneously huge numbers of women across a wide political spectrum have rallied, mobilized, ands refused to accept a medieval definition of their rights, we sit down with Alicia Hurtado, a Chicago-based grass-roots organizer, activist, and advocate to discuss the state of the movement and where we need to go from here.