Bill Ayers

OK, folks.
Sanctuary is a big idea that can’t reasonably be left in the hands of the mayor, the State, or any government agency. Imagine if the Underground Railroad required mayoral or governmental approval before the Abolitionists undertook their brilliant and brave work. DOA! The racist, reactionary governor of Texas just signed SB 4, the anti immigrant bill outlawing sanctuary in Texas. Six hundred people testified on the bill, and a tiny group (and only one sheriff in all of TX) testified in favor. Overwhelming opposition did nothing to slow down the bastard governor. Everyone reading this imagines they’d have been an Abolitionist in the 1850’s. Now’s your chance: Immigrants Welcome Here! Sanctuary Lives in the Hands of the People!

April 29, 2017

Office of the Dean

The University of Illinois at Chicago

1040 W. Harrison St. (MC 147)

Chicago IL 60607

Dear Dean Alfred Tatum and College of Education Community:

I am writing to thank the Department of Curriculum & Instruction for selecting me to receive public honor as a graduate of the College of Education (COE). However, after discussions with members of the College’s Decolonize Education Coalition, reviewing the data and analyses posted on the group’s Tumblr (Views From the Silenced), and reflection on my experiences as a COE graduate student, I feel that I must decline this award as well as participation in the honoree events. Because of my high regard for the COE, I don’t take this decision lightly. Yet, as the Nicaraguan poet Giocanda Belli wrote, “Solidarity is the tenderness of the peoples.” I offer this open letter to explain why I have chosen to forego this award and stand in solidarity with the students of COE and the Decolonize Education Coalition.

Accepting the award and participating in related events would be an implicit endorsement of the COE today, and based on the evidence offered by current students, that validation is not warranted. In contrast to the years I enjoyed studying and attaining two degrees in the COE, working closely with faculty who both professed and practiced education that centered democratic engagement, racial and social justice and critical perspectives, and fostered the thriving Curriculum Studies doctoral program from which I graduated, today’s COE has steered far from the University of Illinois’s land grant mandate to serve the needs of the state’s working classes, and from UIC’s social justice mission. There are four specific concerns that animate the work of the Decolonize Education Coalition:

First, the COE seems to have abandoned its commitment to the preparation of Black and other teachers and academics of color. According to Voices of the Silenced testimony, the numbers of admitted students of color are small (with only one Black junior year student enrolled) and declining between freshman and senior year. In addition, the COE does not support students of color who struggle academically in the Urban Education licensure program. Rather than provide these future teachers with resources (such as the individual and group tutoring the teacher education program I directed for six years offered students) aimed at retaining them in teacher education, as well as succeeding as the next generation of teachers in our public schools, the COE created a non-licensure undergraduate program with no clear employment pathway to which they are diverted at the urging of COE advisors. This bait-and-switch is devastating—emotionally and financially—to students. One undergraduate describes this on the Voices of the Silenced site:

I was admitted into candidacy conditionally with hopes of meeting licensure requirements. Faculty and advising staff ensured me that we would come up with an action plan for meeting licensure requirements. Soon, I learned that an action plan was merely meaningless discourse. The only action plan was them making me “aware of other options outside of teaching.” As a student of Color, I never felt like a priority…Failure costing me nearly four hundred dollars, I was out of money and time. Every time I took the test I became more and more disappointed and discouraged. There was no financial support or academic support for success. I also did not receive any emotional support during the obstacles I faced.

And COE programs, contra their land grant mandate, are now more exclusionary. The means by which I, a poorly performing high school and junior college student, was admitted to COE graduate studies was through conditional admittance—after a year of academic work and a favorable review I was accepted at full status. This option is now denied to freshman applicants, contributing to the declining numbers of students of color in the Urban Education program. In sum, despite the fact that public school students are increasingly of color, and research shows that these students benefit from teachers of color, there is little evidence that UIC’s COE is helping to prepare teachers of color for employment by our city’s public schools.

Second, and related to the previous point, new enrollment of students of color in COE doctoral programs has declined by almost half between 2012 and 2016, from 13 to 7 (UIC’s data is here).

Third, the COE has nearly decimated and seems determined to destroy Curriculum Studies, previously the intellectual home of many of its most critical scholars, including Dr. William Watkins, who researched Black curriculum orientations, Dr. Annette Henry, a critical race feminist who lifted up the educational lives of Black women and girls, and Dr. William Ayers, who wrote widely about social justice and education. The COE has not filled the vacancies created when faculty leave Curriculum Studies, as one concern, and in 2016 it admitted only one doctoral student (and no students of color) to the program, down from 13 admitted (of whom four were students of color) in 2012, according to UIC’s data.

Last, the COE has fostered a climate that suppresses dissent, critique, and critical scholarship, which has been particularly intimidating and destructive to students of color, some of whom have been removed from teaching appointments, encouraged to leave their programs, and in other ways been made to feel that their voices and perspectives are of little importance. They share these experiences to depressing effect on the Coalition’s Tumblr.

I encourage my fellow COE alumni to thoroughly examine the powerful words and well-stated demands of COE students, and ask Dean Tatum and the College to respond to the charges there by demonstrating (not simply stating) a commitment to the pledge to “Make Good on the Promise of Public Education,” before supporting the College with donations and affirmations. I plan to withhold my own donations until the College dialogues with its students and creates, shares, and acts on a plan to address the terrible conditions that the Decolonize Education Coalition and Voices of the Silenced have bravely brought to our attention. I am proud to stand in solidarity with them.

Sincerely,

Therese Quinn, University of Illinois at Chicago

College of Education (MEd – Instructional Leadership 1999, PhD – Curriculum Studies 2001)

Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Museum & Exhibition Studies

Affiliated Faculty – Curriculum & Instruction, Gender & Women’s Studies

Onward—shoulder-to-shoulder, heart-to-heart—toward the future.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

~~Zora Neale Hurston

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

~~William Butler Yeats

Violence is Black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years’ worth of education.

~~Julian Bond

To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible—and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people—must be prepared to ‘go for broke.’  Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance.  There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.

~~James Baldwin

If you come here to help me, then you are wasting your time.  But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then we can work together.

~~Lilla Watson

The Chicago Chapter of BYP100 is headed to New Orleans this summer for the National Convening! The convening will help them build with other BYP100 chapters, expand political education, and increasing their skillsets to strengthen the resistance work for Chicago. Please donate if you can, or share with your friends and family! https://www.gofundme.com/help-byp-100-build-black-futures

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40241-storm-the-heavens-notes-from-the-weather-underground-on-resistance-to-trump

I get a huge dose of harassment and hatred on social media—relentless trolling and lots of invented narratives about me, including, famously, that I’m President Obama’s ghost writer and terrorist consigliere, but I also get real-life death threats sent, or on occasion hand-delivered, to my home mailbox—and that’s always alarming.

Sometimes I feel like the Billy Goat Gruff on the bridge, the troll below preparing to gobble me up.

But who are these trolls?

I imagine a couple of lonely guys with several email accounts living in their mom’s basement, fueling up on Scotch or speed and bad coffee, watching Fox News at full volume, raging with—but never against—the machine.

I’m not a special victim here, and on occasion the surreal becomes weirdly amusing.

Last summer, for example, a package arrived filled with right-wing kitsch. It was like a large SWAG bag from a secret alt-right convention featuring Steve Bannon.

Two items stood out—one, a T-shirt with a picture of Welch’s grape juice on the right side, and on the left, my FBI wanted poster from 50 years ago. Under the grape juice it said, “Good Free Radical,” while under my youthful countenance? You guessed it—“Bad Free Radical!”

The other fun item was a brightly printed bumper sticker that read: “Bill Ayers and his wife should be in prison!” When I showed the bumper sticker to Bernardine, my partner of almost 50 years, she responded indignantly: “His wife? I have a name!”

Not a word of objection about the prison part!

Bernardine, now called BB by one and all because the grandkids found it easier to pronounce, couldn’t be here tonight—she’s teaching in Amsterdam, and I’m holding down the fort single-handedly: the every Saturday night sleep-overs with the grandchildren, for example, and feeding the jungle of house plants all by myself—the grandkids are thriving as always, and they’ll be fine. The greenery…not so much.

Like most of you we were unprepared for the violent volcano that blew up last November, spewing deadly clouds of ash and fiery rivers of lava in all directions.

Donald Trump had run a dangerous campaign to be sure—the bigotry and intolerance; the disdain for reason and the arts; the demonization of whole communities; and the dark promise to transform active citizens into passive corporate consumers. This was Trumpism.

Candidate Trump had concocted convenient sacrificial scapegoats for every problem, and managed to cook up a toxic stew of bigotry and white supremacy—elements always lurking in our American soil—into a revitalized force with its own unique optics: the white robes and swastikas were suspended, the orange pompadour beneath the red baseball cap was in vogue.

For months leading up to the election I’d said that Trump would easily be crushed—I’m about as prescient as Carnac the Magnificent—but that Trumpism was a hazard that would endure.

Election night was a rough awakening.

If you were surprised by the outcome you have plenty of company, but if you’re still surprised—even if you held on to your sense of wretched betrayal and bewilderment for more than a day or two—you need to get out more.

We hosted a brunch for our neighbors—BB had leafleted our block, inviting people we rarely speak to beyond “good morning,” and whose dogs are more familiar to us than they are, suggesting we gather and name this unique political moment together. Twenty-three people  showed up, more hungry for conversation and a hug than for bagels. We shared information, sites of resistance, and what we were each up to at our jobs or schools or places of worship. We wondered what it might mean to think of our street as a sanctuary, and we agreed to stay in touch. One neighbor wanted to investigate collectively installing solar panels, and, why not? Every idea was welcome.

Months before the election BB and I had planned to go to Washington to participate in the traditional Peace Ball held every Inaugural weekend. We’d lay down our small antiwar markers, and everyone would stand in their predicted places: I intended to vote for Hillary, and she’d be in the White House; and there we’d be in the streets with our peace banners unfurled.

It sounds so quaint now. But, God, how I wish.

We drove to DC more freaked out and  more on fire than we could’ve imagined just two months earlier, and with a deeper and more urgent charge: with Trumpism about to be installed officially in the West Wing, we’d link arms against Trump’s fascist campaign and the prospect of that power consolidated. Trump’s rise was testing us—indeed, the nation itself was being tested. And at every rest stop along the way, the swelling numbers of pink hats and fists in the air cheered us up, step by wobbly step.

Busboys and Poets, the marvelous Washington restaurants open to all kinds of progressive gatherings year round, was the unofficial headquarters of the resistance. We headed to the 14th and V location on our first morning in town—I ordered Vegan Scramble, and BB, the Oaxaca Omelette. We’ve had this neat division for years—I don’t eat any dairy or meat (well, the occasional cheeseburger), and she (from Wisconsin) eats only dairy, with unpredictable bursts of bacon. Kind of like Jack Sprat and his wife—oh, shit, like BB she surely has her own name.

After breakfast we climbed to the second floor, a buzzing beehive of activist activity. Code Pink had set up tables, some with sign-making materials, others heaped with pink pussy hats knitted by armies of volunteers. After picking out two for ourselves, and four really unique hats to take to our grand-kids, we joined the poster makers: Fight Like a Girl! we wrote. Black Lives Matter!

People streamed in and out, colleagues and former students, comrades from past campaigns, and an eye-opener every few minutes: here was a cousin and her college-aged daughter, thrilled to be at the first demonstration ever for either of them; and here was BB’s young human rights colleague who’d just been through a shitty divorce with—surprise!—her wonderful new lover, Joan.

The Peace Ball, part rally, part party, took place at the African American Museum of History and Culture, now known far and wide as the Blacksonian—a dazzling site of conscience. It was packed with a bright rainbow of Freedom Fighters, young and old. Solange rocked the house, and we boogied for peace with thousands, including our Chicago friends Lana and her wife Karen. This was not the first test—not yet. Let’s call the Peace Ball our practice test.

Next day BB and I were on our way to the Inauguration when we were accidentally swept into a swarm of Black Block anarchists, bandanas covering their anonymous faces, tearing through downtown smashing bank windows—I was so tempted, but they were way too fast for us, thank goodness, and we were left in the dust.

But we did make it to the Inauguration itself—two actual bodies among the million and a half folks Trump imagined as he looked down at the sparsely populated great lawn. We live on the South Side, and as you can imagine, our Congressman had a surplus of tickets—few of his constituents could stomach this shit—so we scored a fistful and handed most of them over to our sisters in Code Pink. We heard the Prince of Darkness, live and in color, speak of American Carnage from the Death Star, and it was chilling.

But BB’d smuggled a banner past security—SAY NO TO RACISM and ISLAMOPHOBIA!—and she held it high for almost 3 hours, engaging  high school students, tourists, and, of course, the Trumpsters themselves. A lot of people recognized us because we’re featured monsters at Fox and on the alt-right web sites—and a surprising number wanted selfies.

One woman, cozying up to BB, said happily, “My friends back home in Dallas won’t believe I got this close to a communist.” BB assured her that there were way more communists and anarchists in Texas than she imagined, and added, “But I’ll bet you and I agree about a lot of things.” Like what? “Well, like if a child’s hungry or sick, we ought to feed and care for that kid.” Of course, said the Trumpster, but keep the government out of it. They talked on—back and forth—for another 15 minutes.

Staking out a public space to engage and talk to strangers was lovely and instructive, but this was not the first test either. Not yet. Let’s call this one the pretest.

The first test came the next day, January 21st—the historic, mind-blowing, necessary and heartening Women’s March.

The crowds were building with every step we took as we made our way toward Busboys, signs and chants filling the air— “If you’re not pissed off, you’re not paying attention,” read one, and right below, “If you’re only pissed off we won’t make the revolution we deserve.”

A determined love army was on the rise.

A contingent calling itself “Dykes to Watch Out For” held aloft a banner that read: “If my uterus shot bullets it would have more protection than it does now,” and right beside them a group wearing hijabs carried this radiant message: “Two-thirds of Trump’s wives were immigrants, proving once more that immigrants do the work most Americans won’t.”

And then this chant from a contingent of preschool teachers carrying a likeness of Sam-I-Am from Green Eggs and Ham: “Don’t put your hand up my skirt, don’t put your hand down my shirt, don’t put your hand near my rump—I do not like you Donald Trump!”

We felt right at home—the teeming streets of the America we always want to be a part of.

We’ve been activists and organizers for half a century—knocked on doors, marched, sat-in, gone to jail, organized an underground and a campaign of sabotage against war. But we’d never seen anything like this spontaneous and wild momentum of resistance.

This was the first test of the Trump regime—the first test—and we passed with flying colors.

More tests followed—the airport protests and the Town Halls—and there’ll be many more tests to come. Not just the next demonstration, but principles and prospects, values and ongoing organizing.

All of us imagine what we’d have done long ago when history was being made: we’d have built the Underground Railroad, saved Ann Frank,  stood strong on the Selma bridge.

Well—now’s our chance to do something.

We headed home, and when we got back to Chicago, the house plants were on life support.

BB spent the afternoon in triage and rescue.

http://www.iamweubuntu.com/millions-for-prisoners-human-rights.html