Bill Ayers

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen~~~Lenin

https://portside.org/2020-06-06/mpd150-working-towards-police-free-minneapolis

Defund the Police!

What would a public safety and policing look like in a free and democratic society?

A key question to raise up and organize around.

Police would not deploy military equipment and weaponry, would not get training from Israeli armed forces, would not act like an occupying army, would not carry lethal weapons, and would not operate with a contract beyond any popular scrutiny or control and a shadow leadership with more power than elected officials.

Police would be under community control—a democratically chosen citizen review board (100 people, to whom they are accountable.

And budgets would reflect people’s priorities—millions more for education, housing the unhoused, community mental health clinics, drug treatment centers, health care, job creation, guarantees of income…Money taken from the bloated and extravagant police budget.

See the link? Policing, surveillance and prison are the last entitlements, while every social need and priority is hollowed out or eliminated, and the occupying police forces are brought in to manage the predictable crisis.

Defund the Police!

Racism as an attitude—backward, bigoted stupidity—is one thing, but this is not about that. This is not about having a self-designated “good heart.” The question is: What are you doing to dismantle and destroy the system of white supremacy—social, structural, and historical racism—a system that every single one of us lives within, a system that benefits white people in a zillion ways? White supremacy has a knee on the throat of Black people in every area (health, justice, education, economic) and those who don’t see the crime being committed in front of our eyes are choosing to be blind, and their faux innocence only serves to perpetuate the crime.

https://www.spreaker.com/user/radiosputnik/education-for-liberation-in-a-time-of-ma

https://www.theonion.com/sweatshop-worker-devastated-to-hear-jacket-she-worked-s-1843834363

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-05-30/dont-understand-the-protests-what-youre-seeing-is-people-pushed-to-the-edge?utm_source=The+Marshall+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=917a97deea-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_06_02_11_57&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5e02cdad9d-917a97deea-120768025

We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.
~~~Frantz Fanon, Provocateur.

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.
~~~Martin Luther King Jr., Outside agitator.
Can liberals even hear themselves?
Yes, yes, all the liberal commentators, observers, and political operatives rightly point out that Trump incites violence with his lies and his threats and his racist dog-whistles, including calling demonstrators “thugs” and warning (with a sly and evil wink) that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
But then their narrative goes—predictably—wrong: protests against the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police are legitimate, say the commentators, observers, and political operatives, and “effective,” but a rebellion against the system of oppression (including systemic police violence) that led to the murder is inappropriate and will “never work.” Who are these people? And how do they know “what works”? Colin Kaepernick courageously took a knee years ago, and it was powerful and important, but did it “work” in their terms? Why would anyone look to the powerful for guidance on strategy and tactics? Note the framing: not a lynching by armed agents of the state, the latest in a pattern of serial-assassinations and a continual series of state-sanctioned murders, but an isolated incident. The cop in Minneapolis was a “bad apple,” they say, but this is entirely upside down: the whole barrel is rotten, the cop culture corrupt, the code of silence a license to kill, and, sure, there are likely a few random “good apples” in there, but the good apple is the exception, not the rule.
Listen up: do not tell oppressed people and the victims of white supremacy how to experience their pain, or how to protest injustice, or what to demand of the ruling class.
Oh, and furthermore, according to these commentators and operatives, the larger rebellion and the “violence” is the work of “outside agitators” with an “agenda.”
“Outside agitators,” according to the guardians of the apartheid system, were the cause of every demonstration in the 1950’s and 60’s, and the charge hurled at every Civil Rights activist and organizer. Martin Luther King Jr., was denounced daily as an outside agitator by Governor Wallace, Bull Conner, Lester Maddox, and the Chicago Tribune. How those outside agitators made it from Minneapolis to LA to NYC and back in a day remains a mystery(!).
The truth is that the lynching of George Floyd was a catalyst, but the rage boiling over, and the demands being hurled at power, are deeper and wider. As Malcolm X said in a different context: Chickens coming home to roost. This moment is a result of years of neglect, racist dehumanization, exploitation, marginalization, and oppression. We are now experiencing a crisis, a series of crises really, swirling into a widening vortex: the crisis of Trump (which is bad enough on its own), the health crisis of Covid19, the economic crisis (40 million jobs gone), and the crisis of the militarized police occupation of Black communities. Any one of these would be catastrophic in itself, but together they create a four-headed monster, connected by white supremacy.
The mood on the street is angry, yes, and energetic. The demand is justice—and in this case, justice must be understood as a verb, active and dynamic, not a noun—and the cry from the streets is, No Justice, No Peace. So in Chicago, and all over the country, public education, public health, pubic housing, public libraries, public transportation are being defunded and privatized, gutted and hollowed out, while police budgets are bloated and growing—note that hospital workers are begging for protective equipment here, while the cops show-up in the most expensive and most elaborate gear ever seen. The police are deployed everywhere for one central reason: to manage the crisis of predatory racial capitalism. One-third of Chicago’s budget for the cops. One-third!
This is a moment of reckoning. No one knows where it might go, but words matter: this is a rebellion, not a riot, a popular uprising where every assault, every grievance, every choke-hold and looting of people’s lives is on the table. Dilapidated housing and failing schools, disappearing jobs and rotten health care, and George Floyd, yes, and Laquan McDonald, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Rekia Boyd, Oscar Grant, and on and on.

Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense, our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
~~~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Schools We Want/the Schools We Deserve
A New Deal for Public Education
(DRAFT: 10-Point Program)

PREAMBLE
Education is a fundamental human right and a basic community responsibility.
Every child, simply by being born, has the right to a free, accessible, high-quality public education. That means that a decent, generously-staffed school facility must be in easy reach for every family. This is not at all difficult to envision: what the most privileged parents have for their children right now—small class sizes, fully-trained and well-compensated teachers, physics and chemistry labs, sports teams, physical education, and athletic fields and gymnasiums, after-school and summer programs, generous arts programs that include music, theater, and fine arts—is the base-line for what we want for all the children of our communities. Anything less weakens and then destroys democracy.
The curriculum must be forward-looking, recognizing the dignity of each person, and strengthening tolerance, understanding, peace and friendship among all people, and respect for fundamental freedoms and human rights. Schools must be geared toward the full development of the human mind and the human personality, and that includes encouraging intellectual freedom and the ongoing consideration of fundamental questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? What does this time require of us now? Where do we want to go?
Given the harsh, unresolved history of white supremacy, and the adaptable and slippery nature of racial capitalism, it’s no surprise that the descendants of enslaved workers, African-ancestored youth, the children of First-Nations people and the laboring classes and immigrants from formerly colonized nations, too-often experience schooling as oppressive and colonizing rather than liberating. This must change. The public schools can and must become sites of resistance, vigorously combatting institutional racism, racial discrimination, segregation, and all forms of oppression.
A New Deal for Public Education will be shaped from the grass roots—fire from below. As organizers, educators, student, parents, and community members, we call for popular assemblies to mobilize in every town and county, every city, every neighborhood and community in order to build a bold, creative, and spirited mass movement—a red-hot fire from below—to demand the schools we need and the schools we deserve. These assemblies should “be realistic” and demand the impossible! We begin with a focus on first questions: In your dream of dreams, what should a good school look like in a free and democratic society? What do schools need to do in order to fulfill the needs of free people with minds of their own? What could schools be, and what should they become, as fundamental pillars of a free society? Dare the schools build a free social order?
TEN(tative) POINTS (for discussion)
1) Education is a basic human right and a fundamental freedom—it cannot be reduced to a product to be sold at the market place. We demand generous, full and equitable funding for public schools, and not another penny of public money used to advance the potent but deeply corrupt campaign to privatize public education.
2) Education is freedom. We demand an end to racism and white supremacy in both policy and curriculum, the termination of zero tolerance policies and the police-presence in our schools, and the elimination of the well-documented school-to-prison pipeline.
3) Education for free people stands firmly on two legs: enlightenment and liberation. We demand curriculum and teaching that allows young people to imagine and construct the kind of economy and society that they can thrive in, and that foregrounds, not obedience and conformity, but rather the arts of liberty—respect for oneself and others, initiative and courage, imagination and curiosity, problem-posing and problem solving, mutual aid and solidarity—which are essential to a free people.
4) Education must allow each person to reach the fullest measure of their promise and potential—in a strong democracy the full development of each is the condition for the full development of all, and, conversely, the full development all is the condition for the fullest development of each. We demand an end to the massively expensive high-stakes, standardized testing regime and its obsession with sorting “winners” from “losers,” and which only serves to exacerbate existing racial, social, and educational inequities.
5) Education, like life, begins in wonder, and so does art—learning to construct and create, to question and to experiment, to imagine and interrogate, to wonder and to wander—this is work of the arts as well as the sturdiest foundation upon which to build an education of purpose for a free people. We demand a full arts program in every school.
6) Education is embedded in community, and schools belong to and must serve the real material and cultural needs and aspirations of those communities. We demand safe and secure high quality public schools—community schools and after-school programs for all children, universal child-centered early childhood programs, nurses and counselors on-site, and free universal school meals—centers of community health and education embedded in safe communities, without regard to wealth or location.
7) Education builds on relationships, and sustainable relationships are difficult to achieve in large, impersonal factory-type schools. We demand smaller class size, and smaller schools.
8) Education depends on thoughtful, caring people in every classroom performing the essential ethical and intellectual work of teaching, and good schools build on the collective wisdom of teachers and staff in conversation with one another. We demand a standard starting salary for teachers of no less than $80,000 annually, and expanded collective bargaining rights.
9) Education recognizes that each person is the one-of-one—sacred, unique, and immeasurably valuable—and, at the same time, that we are each one part of the whole human family. We demand a curriculum that affirms both our individuality and our collectivity, that acknowledges the ongoing human struggle to achieve equality and justice, and that ensures generous funding for special education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
10) Education recognizes that everything that counts can’t be counted, and that everything that’s counted doesn’t necessarily count. We demand schools that recognize children and youth as three-dimensional beings and not a collection of deficits and defects, and that acknowledge explicitly—and make count—the value of love, joy, justice, beauty, kindness, compassion, commitment, curiosity, peace, effort, interest, engagement, awareness, connectedness, happiness, sense of humor, relevance, honesty, self-confidence, and more.
CONCLUSION
We want schools that prepare free people to participate fully in a free society. We want schools that young people don’t have to recover from. We want schools that act as the hopeful launch pads for the dreams of all of our youth.