Bill Ayers

Colleagues:

As you may be aware, the Trump administration recently administered a blistering critique of anti-racist professional development. In doing so, he referred to critical race theory – a chief area of study for me – as Un-American and essentially banned its use in professional development funded by federal dollars. I got together with a few of my colleagues this week and wrote a response. It has been signed by another 220 scholars of race in education. If you’d like to sign, you can do so here. Here is the statement for your information.  Feel free to forward as you see fit. You can also find an online version of the statement on Medium. Also, check out this Critical Race Theory in Education Teach-In today with Gloria Ladson-Billings and a bunch of other critical race scholars. It was organized by Adrienne Dixson at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It was broadcast and can be watched via Facebook. Here is the Zoom link to the teach-in as well. If you wait til the very end of the teach-in, you’ll hear from me as well. See the statement and signers below.
Critical Race Theory in Education Scholars Respond to Executive Memo M-20-34
On September 4, 2020, Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Executive Office of the President issued M-20-34, a “memorandum for the heads of executive offices and agencies.” The document states that “Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars, to date, on “training” government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda.”  As critical race scholars working in universities and communities across the globe, the following statement is our response to Mr. Vought’s memorandum.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is committed to the historical documentation and naming of atrocities carried out in this country in the name of “freedom” and “liberty.”  In spite of this historical context, the claim that the United States is founded on freedom from tyranny, freedom of expression and speech, and the right to exist as a whole person, are ideals that all citizens of the US are taught in school to value, cherish and honor. From our purview as scholars of race and education, the United States of America has struggled to uphold not only the Constitution but also the Preamble of the Constitution. We are clear that racial healing cannot occur absent the recognition of the historical and current struggle against all forms of structural oppression that encumber the U.S. from ever fully living up to its democratic ideals.

Conflating Critical Race Theory (CRT) with workshops on white privilege is an example of the profound ignorance the current administration has as it pertains to studying and understanding race in the United States. Furthermore, labeling CRT, an area of scholarly study, and diversity training that examines the role of white privilege as divisive and anti-American is an affront to the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The current attempts to silence and suppress CRT also violate principles of academic freedom upheld by the American Association of University Professors.

We are deeply concerned about the lack of understanding, ignorance, and silencing of Black, Indigenous, and other scholars of color, who have been instruments in the fight against racism, sexism, classism, and all xenophobic ways of thinking. We are outraged over a federal call to end efforts to name racism and address systemic racial inequities. We are disappointed to see leaders weaponize their position and power to further fuel racial discord during a time of significant racial unrest. We are disturbed that the Office of the President would denounce a well-vetted, rigorous, and theoretically sound framework that thousands of scholars have utilized for the last 40 years to understand how race shapes every imaginable societal system.

CRT is necessary and powerful in the fight against systemic racism and essential to antiracist educational and professional development and training. We call on our institutions, fellow academicians, institutional leaders, community partners, policymakers, and all who have benefitted from CRT or learned as a result of their participation in anti-racism workshops to stand with us in acknowledging that systemic racism exists and is violence against ALL humanity. If this country is to “insure domestic tranquility,” it must work to protect ALL people, and make ALL people safe. We refute any communication that denies social and political realities and prohibits forward movement toward a racially just society. We support academic work by those who are fearful of open and critical discourse.  We honor the reality that multiple histories and experiences exist for the diversity of peoples in the United States, for every race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion brings with it its own histories included in and not erased by a whitewashed “American” experience. Most importantly, we fight against willful ignorance, hatred, and violence due to racism. The revolutionary roots of CRT drive us to contest such injustices. We have a lot of work to do. But we remain committed to engaging together in the worthwhile struggle to move this nation toward Dr. Martin Luther’s King Jr.’s vision of a beloved community.

As hunger escalates and haunts children and families across the country and around the world, remember that when the people have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.

Episode #8: Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom

Reparations for America’s “original sin”—generational slavery—as well as the long and abiding afterlife of chattel slavery, including Black Codes, poll taxes, Jim Crow, the regime of lynching and white terror, pogroms, red-lining, segregation, voter suppression, and mass incarceration, has moved urgently into the forefront of the national agenda. Malik Alim and Bill Ayers focus their conversation on reparations as both a moral imperative and a multi-dimensional practical necessity before turning to Katherine Franke, a leading scholar on law and racial justice and chair of the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Her most recent book, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition, takes a clear-eyed look at what might have saved us a century and a half ago, and what it will take to save us today.

A right-wing form of government that opposes liberal democracy, Marxism, socialism, and anarchism, and attempts to forge national unity under an autocratic leader with a totalitarian program advocating stability, law and order, and more and more centralized power, claiming all of this is necessary in order to defend the homeland from internal as well as external enemies, and to respond effectively to economic instability. The mobilization of a mass base through deliberately constructed fear and hatred as preparation for armed conflict and permanent war. An appeal to patriotic nationalism. The supremacy of military and police power, and the militarizing of all aspects of society. The agitation of “popular” movements in the streets, apparently spontaneous (but in reality well-funded and highly organized) based on bigotry, intolerance, and the threat of violence, all of it fueled by the demonization of targeted, distinct racial, religious, or gendered vulnerable populations and the creation of convenient sacrificial scapegoats who are repeatedly blamed for every social or economic problem people experience. Disdain for the arts, for intellectual life, for science, for reason and evidence, as well as deep contempt for the necessary back and forth of serious argument or discussion. The suppression of labor and the protection of corporate power. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Protectionist and interventionist economic policies as corporations are entangled with the state.

It’s the textbook definition of fascism.

Fifty years ago the socialist senator Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in a peaceful and democratic election. For 1000 days the people of Chile participated in an experiment in popular democracy, and the lives of workers, women, farmers, families, and students improved. When the Fascist General Pinochet overthrew the popularly elected Allende government under the direction of the US CIA, a reign of terror reversed the peoples’ progress. When Nikki Haley said last week at the Repulsican Convention that socialism has always failed wherever and whenever it has been tried, we might add a footnote: the ruling class and the imperialists never mean their withdrawals; they will concede nothing without a fight.

Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom

Societies organize and build schools which are, of course, set up to serve the goals and interests of their hosts. Schools are both mirror and window: authoritarian schools serve authoritarian societies, and authoritarian nations create autocratic schools. We start this episode with a conversation between Malik Alim and Bill Ayers about the schools we need and the schools we deserve. We then welcome Kevin Kumashiro, author of The Seduction of Common Sense, Against Common Sense, and the forthcoming Surrendered, to help us explore the essential dimensions of an education for free people.

Do you feel eerily that we’re living in Kansas, 1859, and that tensions are boiling over, but only years later will people say, “Yes, the Civil War began there and then?”

First 6 episodes of this PODCAST available now:

1. Let’s Talk About Freedom

This inaugural episode dives directly into the wreckage: What do we talk about when we talk about freedom? “Under the Tree” references the Freedom Schools created in Mississippi and throughout the South during the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960’s—fugitive spaces where folks gathered to organize an insurgency against Jim Crow and white supremacy. We begin our ongoing reflection on the challenge, the demand, and the meaning of freedom, and then we’re joined by Chesa Boudin, long-time public defender and recently elected District Attorney of San Francisco.

2) We Are Each Other’s Magnitude and Bond

Freedom is a layered, complex, and dynamic concept that defies a Webster’s Dictionary-type definition, and so we continue to explore the meaning of freedom, and we follow it as it makes its twisty way through our lives and our consciousness. We’re joined by Crystal Laura, author of Being Bad: My Baby Brother and the School to Prison Pipeline, and we explore in detail how educators can disrupt the march toward mass incarceration by deploying a pedagogy of joy, love, and justice.

3) In Your Dream of Dreams, What Would Schools for Free People Look Like?

Schools are both window and mirror into any society: authoritarian schools serve repressive regimes; segregated schools mirror  severed societies; a free society builds schools anchored in enlightenment and liberation. David Omotoso Stovall lights up this episode with a conversation about the school to prison nexus, and the provocative possibility that the call for prison abolition link up with a demand to abolish the schools we have in favor of an education for freedom. Professor Stovall is an activist, a scholar, and the author or editor of several texts, including Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation, and the Politics of Interruption; From Education to Incarceration: Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline; Handbook of Social Justice in Education; Black, Brown, Bruised: How Racialized STEM Education Stifles Innovation; Teaching Toward Democracy; and Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools: The Impact of Charters on Public Education.

4) Imagine the Angels of Bread.

When Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which way she ought to go, the Cat responds, “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” Alice says she doesn’t much care where she goes, to which the Cat says, “Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.” We spend this episode exploring our radical dreams, and imagining where we’d like to go, accompanied by the radical poet, Martin Espada, and legendary activist, Bernardine Dohrn.

5) Defund the Police

Malik Alim and Bill Ayers open with a spirited dialogue on the link between defunding the police, abolition, and a vision of a society free of prisons and armed agents of the state. We then turn to a conversation with Alec Karakatsanis, author of Usual Cruelty a powerful unmasking and reframing of the myths of “the rule of law” and “law enforcement.”

6) Where in the World Are We?

Americans are known across the globe for a singular lack of knowledge about who we are and where we’re located; we collectively have a thin knowledge of both history and geography. Making up less than 5% of the world’s people, we tend toward an exaggerated and narcissistic sense of our place in the larger scheme of things. In this episode we take a closer look at the link between freedom and patriotism, and note the retarding quality of an anemic flag-waving nationalistic loyalty. We’re joined by Prexy Nesbitt, a spirited internationalist and freedom fighter whose efforts over many decades have focused on labor and human rights, Black Freedom and the liberation of Southern Africa.