Occupy your Imagination!

Occupy the Future!

Bill Ayers interview

With the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements there seems to be a distinct parallel between what is happening now and what was happening in the 60’s: the summer of ’68, world uprisings, the Civil Rights movement, the general malaise with the establishment. What is your take on Occupy?

1). It’s tempting to make comparisons, but I resist. Humanity plunges forward, circumstances shift, unpredictable upheaval and fickle fate allow us to redraw the maps of the known world. What’s consistent is this: people find ways to resist what they find unjust and unacceptable—not everyone all the time, not neatly nor universally, certainly not predictably. And our responsibility—personally, collectively, generationally—also remains the same: to make a concrete analysis of real conditions, to open our eyes to the world around us, to act on whatever the known demands. We are fortunate to live at a moment when hope and history rhyme, and when a participatory, popular movement for justice and peace is in-the-making.

Occupy is an expression of hope and an invitation to pay attention at this unique and expectant moment. It’s an opening, not a destination. People naming the obstacles to their full humanity, people in motion, people growing and changing and teaching and learning are people who can storm the heavens and accomplish the previously unthinkable.

And Occupy has already won, that is, the movement has changed the frame, redefined the discussion, and introduced a range of new ideas into the public square, for example: We are the 99%! Like every other movement in history, it was “impossible” the day before it burst onto the scene, and yet it seemed suddenly “inevitable” the day after.

The response of the powerful follows an age-old, exhausted and predictable script: ignore them, ridicule them, try to co-opt them, and beat the shit out of them—and all four responses are still in-play. The wonder of the movement is its ability to see these moves for what they are, and to hold tight to their independent vision, unique approach, and this precious thing. 99%!

As American culture has evolved over the past 100 years it has gone through
some abrupt shifts in ideology. Perspectives changed dramatically through
the mid-20th century and yet we are now seeing a kind of cultural stagnation
in which there is a growing resistance to change. The concept of America as
the “melting pot” has been thrown out the window and now immigration, class warfare and economic inequality are political campaign points. Why do you think there is such a growing market for the “us vs. them” fear mongering we are seeing in today’s political theater?

2). I fear you’re looking at history through rose-colored glasses. There has always been resistance to change, class warfare, nativist and jingoistic attitudes, and hatred of immigrants. And at any given moment, things can indeed feel slow and stagnating in spite of the fact that chaos, turmoil, commotion, pandemonium, dynamism, zip and zing are churning just out of sight. Look again.

Throughout the latter half of the 20th century there has been a constant
attack on the educational systems of the US, particularly from the far
Right. As states like Texas continue to rewrite the history books, attempt
to introduce fundamentalist ideologies into schools, and challenge
scientific research and facts with moral and ethical concepts based on
religious belief how do you see this affecting the future of America’s
youth?

3). It’s generous to call anything coming from the Right concerning the school battles “moral and ethical concepts.” These moves are ideology, unvarnished and unchained.

The noisy proponents of market competition in public education have managed to push their ideology onto the agenda by the force of their wealth, certainly not because of any moral persuasion, or even the results that their schemes have produced. But the project continues, because it is dogma: faith-based and fact-free. We need to challenge the freight train with evidence and argument, and most important, with a vision consistent with our deepest democratic dreams.

Education in a democracy must be distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy, but how?  Surely school leaders in fascist Germany or Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia or apartheid South Africa all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters, so those things don’t differentiate education in a democracy from any other. What makes education in a democracy distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, a foundational belief in the infinite and incalculable value of every human being. The implication of this for education is enormous: the fullest development of all, I believe, is the necessary condition for the full development of each, and conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all. Education is where we decide whether we love the world enough to invite young people in as full participants and constructors and creators; and whether we love our children enough to give them the tools not only to participate but also to change all that they find before them. Democracy, after all, is geared toward participation and engagement, and it’s based on that common faith: every human being is a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force, and each one is also a piece of the many.  Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights, each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. We focus our efforts, not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens and residents who can participate fully in public life.  Democratic teaching encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands.  Education in a democracy is characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing—always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider, shared world. Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making; much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime throughout history. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant.  There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt.  While many of us long for teaching as something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information.  This is a recipe for disaster in the long run. Educators, students, and parents press for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served.  All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers.

It seems that as education plays less and less of a role in the life of
people in America, particularly in the south, people are turning toward the
media to inform themselves. With much of the current media controlled by
corporations whose bottom line is profit, disinformation has become a
selling point. How does this affect political change? What ways can people
educate themselves in order to be informed without falling victim to the
“filter bubble” of being told what you want to hear?

4). No whining, no nostalgia…when was the Golden Age in education? When 10% graduated high school, or when racial segregation was legal? When was the media free and smart?

The reality is that everyone at all times must search for the truth from multiple sources, including first-hand participation, in an environment of mystification and lies and stupidity. Every movement has had its underground press. We must open our eyes and reinvent a media for our own uses and for our own time. Today our access to the world is unprecedented, and the capacity to speak up and speak out exceptional. Look at your own efforts right here, right now, just this.

SDS was a movement that grew out of dissatisfaction with the state of
affairs on the mid 1960s, as it evolved it became focused on the Vietnam War
and the US’s continued presence there, as well as on the Civil Rights
movement. Do you see parallels between SDS and the Occupy movement? Do you see distinct differences?

5). SDS was part of the “New Left.” We were defining ourselves as participatory and peace and justice-oriented, as well as an opening of a public space for the expression of a million grievances and our wildest dreams. We were in opposition to capitalism and the political establishment, but also to the “Old Left” of Stalinism and centralized and organizational dogma. This was a great strength, but also a weakness: we were no longer shackled with the dead hand of the Communist Party, but we cut ourselves off from the best experiences of a generation of activists. Occupy is powered by an anarchist impulse—it rejects Stalinism, but also the idea of charismatic leaders defining the direction of the struggle. Again, this is a great strength with its own challenges.

In the way that youth culture got behind the Civil Rights movement in the
60’s the current Occupy movement is focused on Economic Rights. Do you think there is a valid comparison to be made between the US involvement in Vietnam and the way in which corporations are waging economic war on free speech and constitutional rights now? Are Economic Rights as pertinent as Civil Rights?

6). No. Yes.

Much of the current Occupy movement has been a passive protest movement that attempts to avoid violence, yet these protestors have been met with an
increasingly militarize police force that seems bent on violent
interactions. What do you think the role of authority is in shaping the
relationship between the protestor’s actions and the police actions?

7). I wouldn’t call the movement “passive.” Sitting in your chair, hip and cynical, sucking on a pipe and doing nothing is passive. Power is based on violence no matter how calm things appear; when effectively challenged it always bears its teeth.

Outside of the US there has been a wide ranging series of uprisings,
particularly the in Middle East. Governments like Tunisia and Egypt have
been fully overthrown/removed and the politicians/dictators are currently
being brought to justice. While this is happening at the same time as
Occupy, the approach and the scope of those involved in the Arab Spring
uprising are radically different and much more popular, with tens of
thousands of people taking over Tahir Square, as opposed to low thousands at
most in the US. Do you feel the situations outside the US are so different
that they provoke a larger response or is it that American’s themselves are
less likely to go to the streets in order to affect change?

8). The Arab Spring is still in play, and it has not fully accomplished anything. Stay posted. Occupy is also in-the-making, a work-in-progress, and surely an off-spring of the events abroad. Remember too that Tunisia was more than that famous self-immolation. Wikileaks released documents that enraged the Tunisians. The US continues to imprison and torture Bradley Manning who initially leaked the papers.

Before Tahrir Square, those kids were seen as crummy, passive, stupid, uninvolved, apolitical, and irrelevant. No more. They changed themselves/they began to change the world. It can happen anywhere, anytime, and it’s always thus: look at Mississippi in 1963, South Africa in 1985, Tianenman Square in 1989, and on and on.

1. What words of advice would you give a teacher who is struggling to incorporate reflective writing practices into his or her pedagogy?

Recognize that aesthetics is at the heart of teaching—strive for beauty and something pleasing and lovely in your work—and remember that the opposite of aesthetic is anesthetic. Anesthetics put us to sleep, but an educated person is always striving to open her eyes, to pay attention, to see more clearly from wider and different angles of regard. Wake up! Get moving! Nourish the imaginative and the weird and the queer! This is a call to ourselves no less than to our students. Art often hurts, is unruly and refuses to be domesticated, but art also urges voyages.

2.  How would you direct your class to learn the fundamentals of writing while helping them better connect to the culture they live in?

Everyone has to “learn the fundamentals” in light of something, or while engaged in something, so why not in larger concentric circles of culture, society, experience, personal observation, politics? Classrooms should always ask in one way or another: What’s your story? How is it like or unlike the stories of other people here and elsewhere? How did you get here? Where are you headed? What are your choices?

Here are a couple I use a lot to get the juices flowing: What’s the story of your birth? How do you know? How’d you get your first name? What are three nicknames you might consider for yourself? Have you ever been wrongly accused? What are three things you MUST do before you die?

So begin class: Write for 10 minutes and finish this thought: “People always ask me…” After 10 minutes, ask them to read aloud. Your mind will be blown. Then collect the papers and give a second prompt: I can’t believe I did it, but I guess I did…While they work on the second, go from person to person, teaching the fundamentals: spelling, grammar, usage. I also like homework assignments that are simple lists: everything you saw in the last 24 hours that was red; a collection of things observed on the sidewalk outside school; all the ingredients in dinner last night.

3.  What are good writing challenges/assignments that will help the student enjoy Discovery and Surprise?

Discovering things is inherently enjoyable—watch a baby or a toddler, anyone under six who has not yet been schooled, and witness both their internal desire to discover, to explore, to ask queer questions of the cosmos, and the deep satisfaction that accompanies making connections, proving hypotheses, reaching contingent conclusions. So you don’t have to labor hard; simply create a classroom environment and challenges/assignments that reflect what was learned by watching babies and toddlers.

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions—Who in the world am I?  How did I get here and where am I going?  What in the world are my choices?  How in the world shall I proceed?—and to pursue answers wherever they might take them.

Good classrooms are rich with materials to explore, opportunities to leap into learning, and provocations to think more deeply. Because I’m a freak for comics (and just wrote my first graphic novel), I want you to embrace graphics in writing, and across the curriculum. (By the way, looking at the finished product, a comic book about teaching seems somehow just right to me now—the intimacy of classrooms, the aesthetic and the feel of being an educator, the challenge and the joy, the pain and the promise—all of it tough to describe, and represented here with a distinct immediacy. It’s a pathway into the ineffable, relying neither on words nor images, and not mashing pictures onto words, but a third thing altogether with its own opportunities and demands—words and images working together in a dance of representation and meaning).

Graphic novels are now a normal part of the wildly diverse, wacky, and rich gumbo of our culture. If you were teaching a history class today on the Holocaust in Europe, you would mobilize memoir (Ann Frank, Elie Weisel) essay (Hannah Arendt, Thodore Adorno), and film (Shoah, The Sorrow and the Pity) to help students get a deep and meaningful, nuanced and complex picture of the entire sweep of the times and events. To leave out Maus would be to banish a fresh and intimate work that adds immeasurably to our overall understanding of the Holocaust.

Dykes to Watch out For is an essential text if you hope to understand the Clinton/Bush years. On and on and on: teachers integrate poetry and literature, art and science, film and painting into everything they teach, as they should. So why not comics?

I teach a writing class on memoir, and I use the graphics Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home, and Epileptic along with more traditional offerings like Homage to Catalonia and Black Boy. Students respond variously, but I would be irresponsibly narrowing their horizons if I left out the comic books.

Plus, the comics world might give teaching a new breath of life—wouldn’t it be cool if a zillion artists and marginalized bodies flocked to our classrooms to lend a hand?  

4.  Do you think a teacher’s reflections, or, perhaps, his or her ability to successfully teach all students, is enhanced and strengthened when students are invited to participate in the process? If so, have you tried to incorporate this sort of collaboration in your classrooms?

Everything is better/fuller/deeper/more authentic if students are in it from the start. The work of teaching—planning, organizing, setting up, cleaning up—should not be invisible to the kids. Quick example: A teacher sees the possibility of getting $500 from a local foundation if she submits a two-page proposal for a curricular project; she proposes to paint a huge map of the county on the playground blacktop, gets the grant, and one weekend she and her partner and friends get the supplies, paint the map, and dazzle the students until the novelty wears off. Another teacher starts from a different place: she says to the kids one Monday, “I saw this announcement in a teacher paper for a $500 grant…” The kids spend days brain-storming, calculating, writing a proposal, and executing the work. They are active, not passive, co-creators and colleagues not quiet recipients. Whenever my teaching feels to me like it’s not what it should be, or the class is heading south, I pause and say, “Something isn’t working for me here…Let’s spend some time talking about where the class is headed and where you want it to go…” Or I have an evaluation form that flips the script: What have I (student) done to make this class work well? What is one thing I’ve learned that I will carry with me, and what have I taught others? What do I want Bill to do next to contribute to our learning? It sounds scary, but it is essential.

5.  Do students do enough creative writing exercises in school from your point of view, or are their assignment formulated, dull, boring, and geared towards standardized tests?

Not enough, not nearly enough; and, yes, boring, dull, clichéd, etcetera…

6.  Could you elaborate more on how teachers can teach in an alternative way as an ‘Act of Resistance?’

I’d never really considered teaching until it snuck up on me, and captured me when I wasn’t paying attention. I was 20 years old in 1965, living in Ann Arbor, and returning to the University of Michigan from a stint in the Merchant Marines. The US invasion of Viet Nam was escalating, and in October, in the midst of growing conflict and protest, I was one of 39 students who sat-in and disrupted the local Selective Service office. I was jailed for 10 days, and there I met a fellow anti-war activist who was involved in a small freedom school affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement. I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position and everything—the kids, the sounds and smells, the energy and the rhythm—felt somehow just right to me. From that day until this I’ve been a teacher, a peace activist, a trouble-maker, an artist-in-residence, and a work-in-progress, and teaching has been linked in my mind to the long and never-ending struggle to create a more peaceful, just, and balanced world.

There is no recipe for resistance, but there are some simple (simple to say if not to do) steps one can take to stay alive: 1) Make a list of your commitments to your students today (I will never treat them like objects; I will never undermine their integrity), and put it on your mirror and try to live up to it every day, especially after failing to fully live up to it yesterday; 2) Creative insubordination (cut the wires to the PA); 3) Ask forgiveness not permission (Oh, I didn’t realize I needed that form); 4) Befriend the custodian; 5) Take the side of the child; 6) Get to know the parents outside of school (bar-b-q, book club); 7)Make friends in the community; 8) Find allies among the teachers, and create a teacher-talk group; 9) Tell the truth as you see it, but always with the goal of communicating and convincing (as opposed to having a goal of feeling self-righteously superior); 10) Have a sense of humor, doubt, skepticism, and agnosticism, especially about yourself.

I try to resist bureaucracy and mindlessness, powerlessness and despair, and sometimes I am slapped down and sometimes praised. I’m never sure in advance which will come or when or why. I was on the organizing committee for a faculty union recently, and took a lot of abuse from the administration; I was advised against being involved in school reform in the early 90’s and then got praise and promotion because of my involvement. Since I can’t predict with certainty what will happen, I think the best course of action is to do the very best job you can of being fully you, doing what you do.

7.  In ‘Seeing the Student’ you mentioned that ‘developmental theory’ was used to speed kids up through the stages of development. What happens to kids when the institution tries to speed them up? How does this affect their morale or performance?

I think I said that it could be employed as speed-up, just as high-stakes testing spawns test-prep tutors. But the important point is that human beings take time to grow, time to reflect, wonder, imagine, pretend, rest, be bored, and a lot else. In our fast-moving, OCD, ADHD world, too many adults and institutions consider childhood a messy and unfortunate problem to be overcome. Out come the drugs and more.

8. You wrote in the Introduction of ‘To Teach’ that teachers should not be mechanical cogs in an impersonal system but ethical actors with a large degree of flexibility in order to support the growth of the children. Since you first started teaching until now, have teachers become more like cogs in a machine or ethical actors there to support the development of children?

My brother Rick with whom I wrote Teaching the Taboo describes coming to terms with a fact of life: I’m an agent of the state, he says, and an agitator and inciter—both. I have to live within, not run away from, that contradiction.

And it’s always been so. I have no nostalgia for a golden age when teachers were moral actors, or the path to excellent and engaged teaching was paved with rose petals. When I say we should not be mechanical cogs, I’m urging us to recognize and embrace that contradiction, live within it, and find ways to organize, link up with our natural allies (parents and students and colleagues and community folks) and fight back! This involves in the first place changing the frame of the discussion. I hope that people might see that teaching at its best is profoundly intellectual and ethical work, filled with joy and challenge, agony punctuated with moments of ecstasy, and certainly that all the ideas of teaching as clerking are not only reductive and morally repulsive, but they are also aesthetically unappealing and unlovely, entirely unworthy of our deepest humanistic dreams.

Education in a democracy must be distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy, but how?  Surely school leaders in fascist Germany or communist Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters, so those things don’t differentiate a democratic education from any other.  What makes education in a democracy distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, the belief that the fullest development of all is the necessary condition for the full development of each; conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all. Education is where we decide whether we love the world enough to invite young people in as full participants and constructors and creators; and whether we love our children enough to give them the tools not only to participate but to change all that they find before them. Democracy, after all, is geared toward participation and engagement, and it’s based on a common faith: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force.  Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights, each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. We focus our efforts, not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in public life.  Democratic teaching encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands.  Education in a democracy is characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing—always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider, shared world. How do our schools here and now measure up to the democratic ideal? Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making.  Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime throughout history.  Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant.  There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt.  While many of us long for teaching as something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information.  This is a recipe for disaster in the long run. Educators, students, and citizens might press now for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served.  All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers.

The noisy proponents of market competition in public education have managed to push their ideas onto the agenda by the force of their wealth, certainly not because of any moral persuasion, or even the results that their schemes have produced. But the project continues, because it is faith-based and fact-free. We need to challenge the freight train with evidence and argument and a vision consistent with our deepest democratic dreams.

In a school focused on the needs and dreams of the broad community, we would be inspired by fundamental principles of democracy, including a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being. We would rally around the idea that the full development of each is the condition for the fullest development of all, and conversely that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each. One implication of this principle is that in a truly democratic spirit, whatever the wisest and most privileged parents want for their kids—that is exactly what we as a community want for all of our children.

Imagine a school or a classroom where asking, framing, and pursuing their own questions becomes the central work of both teachers and students; where the question of what is worthwhile to know and experience is taken up as a living challenge to focus all student activity; where we would practice participatory democracy; where all the themes, implicit and explicit, are built on a foundational idea that we are swirling through a living history, that nothing is guaranteed or foreordained, that we are, each and all of us, works-in-progress swimming shakily toward an uncertain and distant shore; and where every day we act out the belief that the classroom, far from being a preparation for life, is indeed life itself. Building community and trust and traditions and engagement would then become central lessons of a successful school.

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

18 November 2011

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

Linda P.B. Katehi,

I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.

You are not.

I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:

1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today

2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality

3) to demand your immediate resignation

Today you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday—a rally that I organized, and which was endorsed by the Davis Faculty Association. These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons, hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.

What happened next?

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

You are responsible for it because this is what happens when UC Chancellors order police onto our campuses to disperse peaceful protesters through the use of force: students get hurt. Faculty get hurt. One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.

One week after this happened at UC Berkeley, you ordered police to clear tents from the quad at UC Davis. When students responded in the same way—linking arms and holding their ground—police also responded in the same way: with violent force. The fact is: the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses, and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly. Many people know this. Many more people are learning it very quickly.

You are responsible for the police violence directed against students on the UC Davis quad on November 18, 2011. As I said, I am writing to hold you responsible and to demand your immediate resignation on these grounds.

On Wednesday November 16, you issued a letter by email to the campus community. In this letter, you discussed a hate crime which occurred at UC Davis on Sunday November 13. In this letter, you express concern about the safety of our students. You write, “it is particularly disturbing that such an act of intolerance should occur at a time when the campus community is working to create a safe and inviting space for all our students.” You write, “while these are turbulent economic times, as a campus community, we must all be committed to a safe, welcoming environment that advances our efforts to diversity and excellence at UC Davis.”

I will leave it to my colleagues and every reader of this letter to decide what poses a greater threat to “a safe and inviting space for all our students” or “a safe, welcoming environment” at UC Davis: 1) Setting up tents on the quad in solidarity with faculty and students brutalized by police at UC Berkeley? or 2) Sending in riot police to disperse students with batons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas guns, while those students sit peacefully on the ground with their arms linked? Is this what you have in mind when you refer to creating “a safe and inviting space?” Is this what you have in mind when you express commitment to “a safe, welcoming environment?”

I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.

Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students. Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students. And I want you to know that this is clear. It is clear to anyone who reads your campus emails concerning our “Principles of Community” and who also takes the time to inform themselves about your actions. You should bear in mind that when you send emails to the UC Davis community, you address a body of faculty and students who are well trained to see through rhetoric that evinces care for students while implicitly threatening them. I see through your rhetoric very clearly. You also write to a campus community that knows how to speak truth to power. That is what I am doing.

I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.

Sincerely,

Nathan Brown
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Program in Critical Theory
University of California at Davis

http://education-radio.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-road-with-patricia-williams-and-bill.html

[Talk at the National Association for Multicultural Education – NAME —
Conference, Chicago, November 4, 2011]
CopyLeft: Vijay Prashad
{Copyleft means that you are permitted to make as many copies of this as you’d
like, you can publish it in a magazine or journal, or even on the web. Whatever
you do with it, please let me know: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu}

My heart makes my head swim.
Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.

Part I: Bare Life.
Reports and rumors filter out of government documents and family distress
signals to locate precisely the ongoing devastation of social life in the United
States. Unemployment rates linger at perilously high levels, with the effective
rate in some cities, such as Detroit, stumbling on with half the population without
waged work. Home foreclosures fail to slow-down, and sheriffs and debtrecovery
para-militaries scour the landscape for the delinquents. Personal debt
has escalated as ordinary people with uneven means of earning livings turn to
banks and to the shady world of personal loan agencies to take them to the other
side of starvation. Researchers at the RAND corporation tell us that absent
family support, poverty rates among the elderly will be about double what they
are now: economist Nancy Folbre’s “invisible heart” is trying its best to hold back
the noxious effects of the “invisible hand.”
Swathes of the American landscape are now given over to desolation: abandoned
factories make room for chimney swallows and the heroin trade, as old
farmhouses become homes for meth-amphetamine labs and the sorrows of broken,
rural dreams. Returning to his native Indiana, Jeffrey St. Clair writes, “My
grandfather’s farm is now a shopping mall. The black soil, milled to such fine
fertility by the Wisconsin glaciation, is now buried under a black sea of asphalt.
The old Boatenwright pig farm is now a quick lube, specializing in servicing
SUVs.” Into this bleak landscape, St. Clair moans, “We are a hollow nation, a
poisonous shell of our former selves.”
What growth comes to the Economy is premised upon the inventions and
discoveries of a fortunate few, those who were either raised with all the
advantages of the modern world or who were too gifted to be held back by
centuries of hierarchies. Bio-chemists and computer engineers, as well as musical
impresarios and film producers – they devise a product, patent it, and then mass
produce it elsewhere, in Mexico or China, Malaysia or India. These few collect
rent off their inventions, and hire lawyers and bankers to protect their patents,
and to grow their money. Around them, in their gated communities, exist a ring
of service providers, from those who tend to their lawns to those who teach their
children, from those who cook their food to those who protect them.
Those many who would once have been employed in mass industrial production
to actually make the commodities that are invented by the few are now no longer
needed. They have been rendered disposable – unnecessary to the political
economy of accumulation. These many survive in the interstices of the economy,
either with part time jobs, or crowded into family shops, either with off the books
legal activity or off the books illegal activity: the struggle for survival is acute.
Only 37% of unemployed Americans received jobless benefits, which amounts to
$293 per week, and only 40% of very poor families who qualify for public
assistance actually are able to claim it. Strikingly, the new recession has hit hard
against low-wage service jobs with no benefits, which are mainly held by women.
In recession times, these women, with those jobs, stretched their invisible hearts
across their families; now, even this love-fueled glue is no longer available.
The few luxuriate, the many vegetate: this is the social effect of high rates of
inequality, the trick of jobless growth.
The political class has no effective answer to this malaise. It has drawn the
country in the opposite direction from a solution. Rather than raise the funds to
build a foundation for the vast mass, it continues to offer tax cuts to the wealthy:
the average tax cut this year to the top 1% of the population was larger than the
average income of the bottom 99%. Furthermore, the political class has diverted
$7.6 trillion to the military for the wars, the overseas bases, the homeland
security ensemble, and for the healthcare to the veterans of these endless wars.
There is no attempt to draw-down the personal debt that now stands at $2.4
trillion, and none whatsoever to tend to the $1 trillion in student debt that
remains even if after a declaration of bankruptcy. Our students are headed into
the wilderness, carrying debt that constrains their imagination.

Part 2: Dates.
By 2042, the country is going to become majority minority, or, to put it bluntly,
more people who claim their descent from outside Europe would populate the
country. This worried Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, who wrote
in an influential Foreign Policy article in 2004, “The persistent inflow of Hispanic
immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures,
and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos
have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own
political and linguistic enclaves — from Los Angeles to Miami — and rejecting the
Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States
ignores this challenge at its peril.”
Globalization hollows out the core of the nation’s manufacturing, devastates the
social basis of its culture, and threatens the integrity of its people, and yet, it is
the Migrant who bears the cross. Illusions about the social glue of Anglo-
Protestantism, which whips between the Declaration of Independence and
Chattel Slavery, provide the only outlet for Huntington’s frustrations. There is no
authentic cultural project to attract the new migrants, to encourage them to find
shelter in these Anglo-Protestant values. Huntington knows that these have run
their course, or were never such strong magnets in the first place. Huntington’s
fearful panic can only be mollified by the prison-house of border walls, the
Minutemen, the Border Patrol agents, SB-170, English Only ordinances, and so
on. Force alone can govern Huntington’s vision. It no longer can breed mass
consent.
2042 is far off. Closer still is 2016. It is the date chosen by the International
Monetary Fund in its World Economic Outlook report from 2011 to signal the shift
for the world’s largest economy: from the United States to China. We are within
a decade of that monumental turn, with the U. S. having to surrender its
dominant place for the first time since the 1920s. The collapse of the U. S.
economy is a “sign of autumn,” as the historian Ferdinand Braudel put it; our
autumn is China’s springtime. Linked to this 2016 date is yet another: 2034. The
U. S. governmental data shows that by 2034 the United States will have a rate of
inequality that matches Mexico. The United States today is more unequal than
Pakistan and Iran. The rate of inequality has risen steadily since 1967; it is going
to become catastrophic by 2034.
By 2042, the country will be minority majority. By 2034, it will be as unequal as
Mexico, with an economy shrinking and formal unemployment steadily rising.
By 2042, people of color will inherit a broken country, one that is ready to be
turned around for good, not ill.

Part 3: Conservatism.
In his new book, Suicide of a Superpower, Pat Buchanan bemoans the decline of the
United States and of white, Christian culture. What is left to conserve, asks the
old warrior for the Right? Not much. He calls for a decline in the nation’s debt
and an end to its imperial postures (including an end to its bases and its wars).
These are important gestures. Then he falls to his knees, begging for a return of
the United States to Christianity and Whiteness. Buchanan knows this is
ridiculous. He makes no attempt to say how this return must take place. His is an
exhortation.
But Buchanan is not so far from the general tenor of the entire political class,
whether putatively liberal or conservative. It is not capable of dealing with the
transformation. It is deluded into the belief that the United States can enjoy
another “American Century,” and that if only the Chinese revalue their currency,
everything would be back to the Golden Age. It is also deluded into the belief
that the toxic rhetoric about “taking back the country” is going to silence the
darker bodies, who have tasted freedom since 1965 and want more of it.
The idea of “taking back the country” produces what Aijaz Ahmad calls “cultures
of cruelty.” By “cultures of cruelty,” Aijaz means the “wider web of social
sanctions in which one kind of violence can be tolerated all the more because
many other kinds of violence are tolerated anyway.” Police brutality and
domestic violence, ICE raids against undocumented workers and comical
mimicry of the foreign accent, aerial bombardment in the borderlands of
Afghanistan and sanctified misogyny in our cinema – these forms of routine
violence set the stage for the “a more generalized ethnical numbness toward
cruelty.” It is on this prepared terrain of cruelty that the forces of the Far Right,
the Tea Party for instance, can make its hallowed appearance – ready to dance on the misfortunes and struggles of the Migrants, the Workers and the Disposed.
The pre-existing cultures of cruelty sustain the Far Right, and allow it to appear
increasingly normal, taking back the country from you know who.
The Right’s menagerie sniffs at all the opportunities. It is prepared, exerting itself,
feeding off a culture that has delivered a disarmed population into its fangs. They
are ready for 2034 and 2042, but only in the most harmful way.

Part 4: Multiculturalism.
Obviously multiculturalism is the antithesis of Buchananism. But
multiculturalism too is inadequate, if not anachronistic. Convulsed by the fierce
struggles from below for recognition and redistribution, the powers that be
settled on a far more palatable social theory than full equality: bourgeois
multiculturalism. Rather than annul the social basis of discrimination, the powers
that be cracked open the doors to privilege, like Noah on the ark, letting in
specimens of each of the colors to enter into the inner sanctum – the rest were to
be damned in the flood. Color came into the upper reaches of the Military and
the Corporate Boardroom, to the College Campus and to the Supreme Court,
and eventually to the Oval Office. Order recognized that old apartheid was
anachronistic. It was now going to be necessary to incorporate the most talented
amongst the populations of color into the hallways of money and power. Those
who would be anointed might then stand in for their fellows, left out in the cold
night of despair.
The same politicians, such as Bill Clinton, who favored multicultural
advancement for the few strengthened the social polices to throttle the
multitudinous lives of color: the end of welfare, the increase in police and prisons
and the free pass given to Wall Street shackled large sections of our cities to the
chains of starvation, incarceration and indebtedness. Meanwhile, in ones and
twos, people of color attained the mantle of success. Their success was both a
false beacon for populations that could not hope for such attainment, and a
standing rebuke for not having made it. There is a cruelty in the posture of
multiculturalism.
When Barack Obama ascended the podium at Grant Park in Chicago on
November 4, 2010 to declare himself the victor in the presidential election,
multiculturalism’s promise was fulfilled. For decades, people of color had moved
to the highest reaches of corporate and military life, of the State and of society.
The only post unoccupied till November 4 was the presidency. No wonder that
even Jesse Jackson, Sr., wept when Obama accepted victory. That night,
multiculturalism ended. It is now exhausted itself as a progressive force.
Obama has completed his historical mission, to slay the bugbear of social
distinction: in the higher offices, all colors can come. Obama’s minor mission,
also completed, was to provide the hard-core racists with a daily dose of acid
reflux when he appears on television.
What did not end of course was racism. That remains. When the economy
tanked in 2007-08, the victims of the harshest asset stripping were African
Americans and Latinos. They lost more than half their assets, which amounts to
loss of a generation’s savings. As of 2009, the typical white household had wealth
(assets minus debts) worth $113,149, while Black households only had $5,677
and Hispanic households $6,325. Black and Latino households, in other words,
hold only about 5% of the wealth in the hands of white households. The myth of
the post-racial society should be buried under this data.
Even Obama knew that it was silly to speak of post-racism. Before he won the
presidential election Obama told journalist Gwen Ifill for her 2009 book The
Breakthrough, “Race is a factor in this society. The legacy of Jim Crow and
slavery has not gone away. It is not an accident that the African Americans
experience high crime rates, are poor, and have less wealth. It is a direct result of
our racial history. We have never fully come to grips with that history.” What
was meant in the jubilation of Obama’s victory was that we are in a postmulticultural era. Racism is alive and well.
Multiculturalism is no longer a pertinent ideology against the old granite block.

Part 5: Occupy.
In 1968, just before he was killed, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Only when it is
dark enough, can you see the stars.”
It is now dark enough.
Out of the social woodwork emerged the many fragments of the American people
to occupy space that is often no longer public. It began in New York, and then
has spread outward. The demand of the Occupy Wall Street movement is simple:
society has been sundered into two halves, the 1% and the 99%, with the voice of
the latter utterly smothered, and the needs of the former tended to by bipartisan
courtesy. Why there is no list of concrete demands is equal to the broad strategy
of the movement: (1) it has paused to produce concrete demands because it is
first to welcome the immense amount of grievances that circle around the
American Town Square; (2) it has refused to allow the political class to engage
with it, largely because it does not believe that this political class will be capable
of understanding the predicament of the 99%.
Two more reasons to discount the ideology of multiculturalism: Oakland Mayor
Jean Quan, one of the founders of Asian American Studies; San Francisco
Mayor Ed Lee, one of the main fighters in the I-Hotel struggle in 1977. One sent
in the police to run riot through Occupy Oakland, and the other threatened the
same in San Francisco. The passion that is pretended is only to obtain
advancement.
Occupy is not a panacea, but an opening. It will help us clear the way to a more
mature political landscape. It has begun to breathe in the many currents of
dissatisfaction and breathe out a new radical imagination. In Dreams of My Father,
Obama relates how he was motivated by the culture of the civil rights movement.
From it he learnt that “communities had to be created, fought for, tended like
gardens.” Social life does not automatically emerge. It has to be worked for. The
social condition of “commute-work-commute-sleep” or of utter disposability does
not help forge social bonds. Communities, Obama writes, “expanded or
contracted with the dreams of men – and in the civil rights movement those
dreams had been large.” Out of the many struggles over the past several decades
– from anti-prison to anti-sexual violence, from anti-starvation to anti-police
brutality – has emerged the Occupy dynamic. It has broken the chain of
despondency and allowed us to imagine new communities. It has broken the idea
of American exceptionalism and linked U. S. social distress and protest to the
pink tide in Latin America, the Arab Spring and the pre-revolutionary strivings
of the indignados of Club Med.
This new radical imagination forces us to break with the liberal desires for reform
of a structure that can no longer be plastered over, as termites have already eaten
into its foundation. It forces us to break with multicultural upward mobility that
has both succeeded in breaking the glass ceiling, and at the same time
demonstrated its inability to operate on behalf of the multitudes. Neither liberal
reform nor multiculturalism. We require something much deeper, something
more radical. The answers to our questions and to the condition of bare life are
not to be found in being cautious.
Two years ago I spoke to some middle school teachers from Springfield, MA., a
town with the highest number of foreclosures in New England and with a
powerful anti-foreclosure movement called No One Leaves. One of the teachers
said that it had become almost cruel to teach the curriculum, which assumed that
every student had equal access to upward mobility. Little in the study plans
addressed the actual condition of life. No point training for a system that is on life
support by our own thankless efforts. To tell the youth that they could do
anything with their lives seemed like a lie; to tell them the truth would be too
harsh. What was the way forward? What about a curriculum that emphasizes the
history of community making, that offers a laboratory on community organizing,
that protects the dignity of each student by galvanizing the bonds between
students? What about learning skills to help re-fashion convulsed communities,
bringing our intelligence to bear on the revitalization of our lifeworld? We need
to cultivate the imagination, for those who lack an imagination cannot know what
lacks.

http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/gaza-bound-humanitarian-flotilla-reaches-international-waters

The take over of the Tahrir and the Saoirse was violent and dangerous. Despite very clear protests from the occupants of the two boats that they did not want to be taken to Israel, they were forcibly removed from the boats in a violent manner. The whole take over took about 3 hours. Many of those on the Canadian boat were beaten.

It began with Israeli forces hosing down the boats with high pressure hoses and pointing guns at the passengers through the windows. Fintan Lane, on the Saoirse, was hosed down the stairs of the boat. Windows where smashed and the bridge of that boat nearly caught fire. The boats were corralled to such an extent that the two boats, the Saoirse and the Tahrir collided with each and were damaged, with most of the damage happening to the MV Saoirse. The boats nearly sunk, the method used in the take over was very dangerous.

The Israeli forces initially wanted to leave the boats at sea but the abductees demanded that they not be left to float unmanned at sea, for they would have been lost and possibly sunk. David Heap, a Canadian delegate, was tasered and beaten. All belongings of the passengers were taken off them and crew and they still do not know if and what they will get back. 6 prisoners were released-both of the Greek Captains, 2 of the journalists and 2 delegates. The passengers remain in Givon detention center and many, including Kit Kittredge of the U.S., have not been able to make phone calls.

Those remaining are being asked to sign deportation papers which state that they came into Israel illegally and that they will not attempt another effort to break the Gaza blockade. If they sign they will not be allowed into Palestine, through Israel, for 10 years. Obviously their goal was to go to Gaza not Israel, and a signature could validate Israel’s right to blockade Gaza, so they refuse to sign. This will mean longer detention. Their continued detention is designed to force them to agree to abandon their legal rights and has nothing to do with the security of Israeli civilians – just like the blockade of Gaza’s civilians is clearly punitive and has nothing to do with the security of Israeli civilians

Our State Department has not been an advocate for its citizens. They would rather join Israel in stating that we are terrorists. Obama on Thursday said the passengers on these boats are defying Israeli and American law. He must have been confused. It’s the other way around. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the U.S. was renewing its call to Americans “not to involve themselves in this activity,” and warned of possible consequences.

WE NEED ALL OF YOU TO GET ON THE PHONE TODAY AND CALL:

U.S. Emergency Consular Services 202-647-4000
and the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv 011-972-3-519-7575

Tell them you want them to insist Israel free the prisoners immediately and end its siege of Gaza.

Just a few phone calls can make a difference.

Thanks for all you do.

Jane Hirschmann and Felice Gelman

Please distribute this press release:

November 6, 2011

Contact: Felice Gelman 917-912-2597

Passengers on boats to Gaza beaten, denied visits by lawyers and access to families; misled by U.S. consular authorities

Although Freedom Waves to Gaza organizers have not yet had direct communication with the people taken into custody by Israeli armed forces as they tried to peacefully sail to Gaza last week, information is emerging that Israeli armed forces tactics in confronting the non-violent activists have been violent and dangerous. This despite claims from the IDF spokesperson that “every precaution will be taken for the safety of the activists.”

Prisoners include U.S. citizen Kit Kittredge, a delegate on the Tahrir from Quilcene, WA, and Jihan Hafiz, a U.S. citizen and journalist from Democracy Now, the national news program. Both have been advised by the U.S. consul in Israel to sign an Israeli deportation agreement. Both have refused because the statement says they came into Israel illegally and will not attempt another effort to break the Gaza blockade. Both statements are untrue.

A letter from Canadian David Heap, smuggled from the Givon prison, states that he was tasered and beaten when the Israeli Navy attacked the Tahrir. Irish prisoner, Fintan Lane, in a telephone call from Givon prison, reported that the takeover of the Saoirse was also violent. The Tahrir and the Saoirse were forced by Israeli warships to crash into each other, crippling both ships.

Palestinian Israeli Mad Kayal, a delegate aboard the Tahrir, who was arrested and released confirms these reports. “As a Palestinian, I was not surprised at how the IDF treated us,” said Kayal, after his release, noting this kind of abuse is a daily reality for the 1.5 million people of Gaza, who are indefinitely detained in an open-air prison. “However, for the Canadians and other Westerners onboard, it was a complete shock.”

“Israeli brutality and the unnecessary use of force against non-violent protests are well documented. What has happened to the passengers on the Tahrir and the Saoirse is just a tiny fraction of the daily abuse directed at Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as part of Israel’s occupation policy,” said U.S. coordinator Jane Hirschmann. “Nonetheless, all people – Palestinians under occupation and peace activists kidnapped and imprisoned – have human rights under international law that civilized governments must respect. The purpose of the boats’ voyage to Gaza was to demonstrate that Israel continually violates those laws, and that the U.S. government cares more about Israel than about its own citizens.”

Iraq war veterans, who had earlier marched along the sidewalks of Lower Manhattan to Zuccotti Park, have been addressing crowds at the Occupy Wall Street camp. Ryan Devereaux writes:

Gathered at the east end of the park a young man in an Iraq Veterans Against the War t-shirt and fatigues kicked off a press conference for the demonstrators occupying the plaza.

“My name is Joesph Carter,” he said through the human mic, “I am a two-time Iraq war veteran and this is the only occupation that I believe in.

“For too long our voices have been silenced, suppressed and ignored in favour of the voices of Wall Street and the banks and the corporations. Their money buys them disproportionate influence over the decision-makers in Congress.

“For ten years we’ve been engaged in wars that have enriched the wealthiest one percent, decimated our economy and left our nation with a generation of traumatized and wounded veterans that will require care for years to come.”

END the WARS!
Bring the Troops Home Now!

Excerpt from Fred Klonsky’s blog:

White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf pays the State of Illinois $1.5 million a year for using The Cell.

On a good weekend he probably sells that much in beer.

He got that deal from former Republican Governor Jim Thompson. Thompson headed the Illinois sports authority, which owns The Cell. Need I tell you that Jim and Civic Committee President and former Illinois Attorney General Ty Fahner are close pals.

Fahner created Illinois is Broke, the Civic Committee front group that is going after teacher pensions.

If Illinois is broke, it ain’t because a retired teacher is making 48 grand a year.

It is because Thompson, Fahner, Reinsdorf and the rest of the one-percenters use the state as their personal playground.

Literally.

Like when Jerry used the state owned, tax-paid-for Cell to throw a private birthday party for his buddy, millionaire Andrew Berlin.

I wonder if Mary, the retiring kindergarten teacher, whose sole income is her teacher pension, can throw a retirement party free of charge at The Cell?