Under The Tree With Bill Ayers 공개
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“Under the Tree” is a new podcast that focuses on freedom—a complex, layered, dynamic, and often contradictory idea—and takes you on a journey each week to fundamentally reimagine how we can bring freedom and liberation to life in relation to schools and schooling, equality and justice, and learning to live together in peace. Our podcast opens a crawl-space, a fugitive field and firmament where we can both explore our wildest freedom dreams, and organize for a liberating insurgency. "Under t ...
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 …
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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 th…
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with Guest Hosts Lisa Lee and Adam Bush interviewing Bill Ayers, and with surprise interventions from Light Ayli, Barbara Ransby, and Tom Morello. What is freedom? What are the "freedom dreams" that encourage us and move us forward? How do we get free? Join our brilliant guest hosts as they chop these questions up in dialogue with Bill Ayers.…
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The activists from the militant peace organization Code Pink—in conjunction with the Dissenters, Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and a host of others—are calling for mass mobilizations in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, which will be held from August 19-22, 2024. Their goal is to issue a thundering response…
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Years of coordinated effort by the reactionary Heritage Foundation has culminated in a frighteningly dystopian document describing the future society they hope to build: Project 2025. At 900-plus pages, it’s been described as a blueprint for a second Trump presidential term, but it's so much more than that. It is in fact a sweeping manifesto, and a…
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The centuries-old struggle for Black Freedom is filled with victories and defeats, tragedy and triumph, forward motion and backlash. Today we sit down with historian and engaged scholar Say Burgin to uncover some of the myths that pass as history, focusing particularly on the historic turn toward Black Power and the resulting strategy of “racially …
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The dynamic and engaging Socialism 2024 conference will meet in Chicago from August 30 through September 2, shortly after the sure-to-be chaotic Democratic National Convention, bringing together thousands of socialists, activists, abolitionists, and organizers from across the country and around the world to name this political moment, build communi…
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Join me for a classic American road trip with the legendary photographer, photo-journalist, writer, and film-maker Danny Lyon. Danny left the University of Chicago in the 1960s and headed South to join the great Civil Rights Movement, where he became the official photographer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. We will visit the Black…
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Patriotism can never express a common human aspiration nor a universal moral code—if everyone on earth claimed to be a fierce and focused patriot today, 20 % of the world’s people would be Chinese patriots, and only 4.4 % patriotic Americans. Patriotism promises a steady anchor, but it is, in reality, entirely unstable. We note that every human bei…
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This centennial episode of Under the Tree features an enlightening conversation with Stanley Howard, the legendary jailhouse lawyer and founder of the Death Row 10, a group of African American men on Illinois' death row who organized a powerful campaign from their prison cells to save their lives and to spark a new abolitionist movement decades ago…
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Every aspect of life in our society is lived on the hard-edge of racial hierarchy and class division—and the American way of birth is no exception. Black maternal mortality is 69.9 per 100,000 live births, nearly 3 times the rate of white women—and that’s only part of the story. We’re delighted to be meeting up at Pilsen Community Books with my mag…
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Precarious times, phenomenal times. As protests for peace and freedom explode across the country and around the world, we’re searching for and finding democracy in the streets and in the campus encampments, in prison study groups and collectives of artists and writers. We’re honored tonight to be meeting up at our beloved Pilsen Community Books wit…
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You may already know that 15 US governors recently rejected federal funds available for families who qualify for free school lunches that would provide $120 per child per month through the summer. If you forgot, I get it—your cruelty/stupidity quotient may have reached capacity, and your brain simply couldn’t accommodate one more item. We’re joined…
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Prison and police abolitionists, rebels and radicals, peace activists and environmental warriors, freedom fighters and dissidents, political prisoners of every type—the voices of dissent and defiance—are gathered together in a dazzling collection from AK Press called Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners. Join us …
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As the savagery in Gaza continues unabated, we’re deeply honored to be joined from Jerusalem by the brilliant writer Nathan Thrall for a conversation about his latest book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. Here in one family facing one heartbreaking moment, we experience Israeli apartheid up-close and personal—its e…
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For voters in Chicago it’s been a strenuous non-stop election cycle for the last couple of years. We're all tired and burned out – but as always, we must carry on! So as we head into the last weekend before the election, we offer up this incentive to get those among us motivated and informed about why this election, while not changing the world - d…
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Chicagoland area is home to more Palestinians than anywhere else in the U.S., with over 18,000 living in Cook County alone. The Palestinian community has led powerful protests that have led to Chicago becoming the largest city in the country to endorse a ceasefire resolution. It is in the midst of this atmosphere that we gathered for an urgent exch…
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Julian Assange who founded WikiLeaks in 2006 went on to win multiple awards for his investigative journalism covering, among other stories, political killings in Kenya and social unrest in Tibet. Assange came to wide international attention in 2010 when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, includi…
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The brutality of capitalism is apparent in every direction: war, invasion, and occupation throughout the world; militarized police forces at home; super-exploitation at the point of production; the looming catastrophic climate collapse; the banality of evil in the increasingly pervasive carceral state. Capitalism willfully and skillfully nurtures o…
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As Israel’s crimes against humanity multiply and mass death and indiscriminate destruction escalates, as the world unites around a near-universal call to stop the genocide against the Palestinian people and militant resistance to US complicity deepens here at home, we are fortunate to be joined by Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human…
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As Israel continues to execute its pre-announced genocide of the Palestinian people, ethnically cleanses Gaza, and attempts to liquidate an enclosure that they themselves created, everyone of goodwill around the world is calling for a ceasefire. As of now 22,000 Palestinians have been murdered, close to 2,000,000 displaced in Gaza, countless hospit…
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In this episode we’ll be heading over to the dazzling Pilsen Community Books, a regular stop on our freedom tour, for a conversation with Janie Paul, Professor Emerita at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, and curator and co-founder with her late husband, Buzz Alexander, of the Exhibitions of Artists in Michigan Prisons, a …
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Images from Gaza crowd into the available space, disrupting sleep, shattering the calm, demanding to be taken into account. Dead children and babies piled upon one another, body parts littering a hell-scape of demolished homes and apartment buildings, collapsed bridges and towers, refugee centers burned to the ground, hospitals in utter ruin. This …
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Charles Dickens would recognize our predicament at once: the winter of despair and the spring of hope; an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom; Darkness in combat with Light. Life is never one thing isolated from every other thing; a lot of things can be—and are—happening at once. Contradiction—the dynamic, noisy, frenetic magnificence of life a…
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A group of Chicago writers brought together by the worker/owners of Pilsen Community Books gathered to support and raise resources for our comrades in Atlanta fighting to Stop Cop City. But events ran ahead of us, as they often do, and by the time we gathered, the preannounced genocide against the Palestinian people was in full swing. The connectio…
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A favorite political poster hangs on a wall in my office: “Homeland Security” it proclaims in bold letters above a photo of a group of Indigenous elders holding rifles; below it reads, “Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.” It’s a reminder of the centuries of settler colonial policy and genocidal terror carried out by the US government against Indigenous…
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Listeners of Under the Tree are well aware of the fact that the US is a Prison Nation, with over 2,000,000 people locked inside cages every day, aware, as well, that we are abolitionists involved in the movement-making and world-building work that will one day make prisons obsolete. But the carceral state is a many-legged monster with dangerous ten…
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These are terrible times—escalating wars, racialized police violence, environmental collapse on full display, democratic institutions on life support, bodily integrity under assault. On the other hand—26 million people poured into the streets in response to the police murder of George Floyd, women across a wide political spectrum have refused to ac…
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These are terrible times—an escalating cold war with China, a proxy war in Europe, racialized police violence unchecked, environmental collapse on full display, fragile and often anemic democratic institutions on life support, religious authoritarianism on the rise, women’s bodily integrity under sustained assault. On the other hand—26 million peop…
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We’re bombarded with relentless and punishing propaganda that places the US at the epicenter of the whole wide world. We are the exceptional nation, it says, the indispensable nation, the most remarkable people who ever lived, a shining beacon on a hill to the lesser nations. The propaganda is so unremitting that it can take on the color of common …
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We were at the Winter Garden of the Harold Washington Library this month for the launch of “Help This Garden Grow,” a new docuseries that tells the story of Hazel Johnson, a visionary of the Environmental Justice movement and a resident of the Altgeld Gardens community on the far South Side of Chicago. “Help This Garden Grow” is a project of Respai…
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For millennia and all over the world fire was a powerful tool in the hands of Indigenous peoples. As they stewarded the land generation after generation, fire was understood to be a natural and necessary element for an abundant world—fire was regeneration and revitalization. But fire was taken away from Native people and handed over to agencies and…
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The forest is disappearing—it’s becoming a ghost—and along with its entire ecosystems. This is not something distant from us; it is us—the power of a tree is the air we breathe. Two and a half billion years ago enough oxygen had built up on earth to support multicellular life, and the first trees evolved about 400,000,000 years ago. The first prima…
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The Palestinian people’s ongoing struggle for self-determination and basic human rights has appropriately drawn the attention and support of freedom lovers the world around. Invasion and occupation, ethnic cleansing and segregation as both policy and law are all part of the continuing and everyday catastrophe. Rick Ayers co-hosts this episode, and …
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Young people in many parts of the country are denied decent school facilities, honest and forward-looking curriculum, and fully qualified teachers, but the fundamental injury they face is the deliberate and systematic suppression of freedom. They have endured institutions—not only schools, but the cops and La Migra, the courts and the hospitals—tha…
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“If we have to use force,” former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said, “it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation.” A benign interpretation of that extravagant claim might visualize the country as a shining city on the hill, the very paragon of democracy and freedom; a more realistic assessment sees the US hol…
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Unchecked, the US juggernaut is headed for catastrophe, either a new and friendly-looking American fascism, or some other form of extreme social disintegration. Another world is surely coming—greater equality, socialism, participatory democracy, and peace are all within our reach, but nuclear war, complete capitalist climate collapse, work camps an…
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One of Karl Marx’s most famous dictums is carved onto his gravestone: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” The first step is opening our eyes, making meaning, making sense, interpreting and constructing a world. Another step is allowing ourselves to feel the world throbbing inside…
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This political moment—complex, contradictory, and characterized by escalating crises—urges us to focus our attention on movement building. Beyond campaigns, projects, policies, or organizations, we need to find multiple ways to weave our work together into a sturdy quilt, or a mighty and irresistible social upheaval that advances the cause of peace…
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The struggle for Black Freedom was intensifying in 1966, and when the term “Black Power!” leapt from the March Against Fear in Mississippi into the mainstream, the Freedom Movement was newly energized. White supremacist hearts were all aflutter, and Mister Backlash went into overdrive with the usual bullshit: Black Power is hate! Is racist! Is dest…
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What’s the worst thing you ever did in your life? OK, stop blushing, and be honest. Are you sure you haven’t repressed, suppressed, and forgotten the most unkind or terrible or illegal or unjust things you’ve done? Think harder. What were the consequences of your actions for others, and for yourself? I’m joined in conversation with Michael Fischer,…
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We’re in a five-alarm shit-storm of trouble to be sure, and the overlapping crises can feel overwhelming— racial reckoning, catastrophic capitalist climate collapse, a financial system that parodies a massive, out-of-control Ponzi scheme, a legislature impersonating a medieval auction block, and more. We meet up with Danny Katch to help us name thi…
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It takes a lot to change the world, and because we live day-by-day immersed in what is—the world as such—imagining a landscape much different from what’s immediately before us requires a combination of some things: seeds, surely, desire, yes, effort, of course, always effort, idealism and romance, maybe, necessity and desperation at times, and a vi…
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A border can be “a story of identity” or “a wound…in the landscape.” It is sometimes a place to be feared, and other times a place to be honored. Borders can, of course, be metaphors: the boundary between boy and man, or girl and woman; the thin line between sanity and madness; the final frontier between life and death. In any case, a border, as th…
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Stephanie Skora is the force behind the Girl, I Guess Progressive Voter Guide. She's a self-proclaimed 'Jewish, queer, trans, nerd' dedicated to helping members of the community navigate confusing ballot races and identify the most progressive candidates. A grouchy Jewish trans dyke, and an anarchist with a political science degree – Stephanie is a…
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We travel to the Illinois Parole Board to stand in solidarity with a couple of my students seeking clemency or commutation or a pardon from Governor Pritzger, and to support our friend and colleague Marshan Allen as he asks to have his conviction erased so that he can practice law when he finishes law school. Since coming home after 24-years in pri…
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We’re joined in conversation with the philosopher, youth organizer, and innovative educator Theodore Richards at the legendary destination bookstore 57th Street Books in Hyde Park, Chicago. He and I have shared the mic at half a dozen book talks over the years, and today our focus is on his latest book, Reimagining the Classroom: Creating New Learn…
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