Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

We’re excited to be joined in conversation with Ash-Lee Woodard-Henderson, an activist and organizer, extraordinarily innovative educator, an intensely forward thinker and a powerful doer, and for several years now, co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, one of the most storied social justice and activist centers in the country. The pedagogy employed at Highlander i...

The Indian novelist Arundhati Roy says, “The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t un-see it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing becomes as political an act as speaking out. Either way, you’re accountable.” And implicated. Our guest today is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of the classic An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, whose lifework has been an ongoing p...

The predatory heart of capitalism is the rage to accumulate, to expand, and to overrun all boundaries. Racial capitalism demands growth— unleashed and unchecked—but the Earth objects. Violence and aggression are the inevitable accomplices of predation, and when the casualties of cataclysmic capitalist climate collapse resist—as they inevitably will—they are labeled “illegal aliens,” “lawbreakers,”...

There’s a vast delusional gulf between the world as it is, and the world as each one of us thinks it is. I’m not being negative or accusatory, but simply stating the obvious: here we go, mistaking our self-constructed little world for the whole wide world. If you believe emphatically enough that the world of your perception and mental construction is in fact the whole wide world, and if you’re wil...

The capacity to see the world as if it could be otherwise unleashes yearning and liberates desire—we are freed (or condemned) to run riot. Our lively imaginations can be rowdy, and can tend toward disruption and subversion—opening up alternatives always calls the status quo into question. Suddenly the taken-for-granted becomes a choice and not an echo, an option and no longer a habit or a life (de...

Sometimes we ask, What can one person do? The first step is to stop being one person. Move away from “me,” and take steps toward creating a “we.” From one to two, from two to three, step-by-step toward an irresistible movement for justice and peace, powered by love—the organizer’s credo. We’re honored to be joined by Mariame Kaba, educator and legendary abolitionist organizer who’s been building s...

The stories people tell and share can become powerful tools against propaganda, political dogma, and all manner of impositions and stereotypes. Seeking honesty and authenticity in stories means oral historians become attuned, to contradiction—to disagreements, silences, negation, denials, inconsistencies, confusion, challenges, turmoil, puzzlement, commotion, ambiguities, paradoxes, disputes, and...

Education is a fundamental human right and a basic community responsibility. We want schools that prepare free people to participate fully in a free society—schools that young people don’t have to recover from, but rather that act as the hopeful launch pads for the dreams of youth. We’re honored to be joined by Raynard Sanders, an old friend and a legendary New Orleans educator and freedom fighter...

We dive once more into the wreckage, and swim as hard as we can toward a distant and hazy horizon—a place of hope and possibility. To begin, Malik Alim offers another installment in his growing Freedom Chronicle, and lifts up a remarkable Chicago moment when activist organizers built Freedom Square, a brave space brought to life in the spirit of love and abundance. We are then delighted to invite...

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 differ...

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 strug...

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 b...

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 su...

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 wor...

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...

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; gove...

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 fre...

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 bas...

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 explo...

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...

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 protest...

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...

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...

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, a...

Life begins in wonder, and so does art—authentic education, too, begins in curiosity, and proceeds through discovery and surprise. Emily Dickinson wrote that “Art lights the slow fuse of possibility,” reminding us that every human being is endowed with the powerful and unique capacity to imagine, and that the arts can help us unleash our deepest human hopes and aspirations, our wildest dreams. We...