The Architecture of Oppression with JAKE FERGUSON, ANTHONY JOSEPH & JERMAIN JACKMAN

The Architecture of Oppression with JAKE FERGUSON, ANTHONY JOSEPH & JERMAIN JACKMAN

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I think as humans, we forget. We are often limited by our own stereotypes, and we don't see that in everyone there's the potential for beauty and love and all these things. And I think The Architecture of Oppression, both parts one and two, are really a reflection of all the community and civil rights work that I've been doing for the same amount of time, really - 25 years. And I wanted to try and mix my day job and my music side, so bringing those two sides of my life together. I wanted to create a platform for black artists, black singers, and poets who I really admire. And it was a no-brainer to give Anthony a call for this second album because I know of his pedigree, and he's much more able to put ideas and thoughts on paper than I would be able to.

MARGE PIERCY - NYTimes Bestselling Novelist, Poet & Activist

MARGE PIERCY - NYTimes Bestselling Novelist, Poet & Activist

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Novelist, Poet & Activist

People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…

JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, Author of "The Tradition", "The New Testament"

JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, Author of "The Tradition", "The New Testament"

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Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet
Author of The Tradition & The New Testament

I just want to make the poems like a living being…There are moments that I’m not at the desk, but I’m living life. And living life is actually what leads to writing. You have to have experiences to write about. Whether or not you are aware of those experiences as you are writing them down because if you’re doing music first, maybe you’re not aware of what you’re writing. And yet, those experiences are what come to fruition in your writing. You become aware. Oh, I did come on that roller coaster that time that I haven’t thought about in twenty years. Oh I did make love to that cute person that I haven’t thought about in ten years, but you’ve got to make love, you’ve got to get on roller coasters, you’ve got to get your heart broken. You’ve got to dance. You gotta get out and do things and that, too, is a part of writing. You have to trust you’re a writer by identity. And if you can trust that you’re a writer by identity, then you don’t have to be at a desk.

Lee Jaffe - Author of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads” - Intimate Portraits of Bob Marley - Basquiat

Lee Jaffe - Author of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads” - Intimate Portraits of Bob Marley - Basquiat

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Artist, Musician, Poet
Author of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads

Jean-Michel Basquiat's combination of words and images, this visual poetry, just from a cultural standpoint has been so important. When I met him in 1983, black people were not allowed in the art market, pretty much. And you see that he broke down this barrier, which opened the door for all this multiculturalism within the art market. And you can't diminish the importance of that at all. It's helped to give a voice and an audience to all these incredible artists that might not have had that.

Richard Thompson Ford - Author of “Dress Codes” - Stanford Prof. of Law - Expert on Civil Rights - Antidiscrimination Law

Richard Thompson Ford - Author of “Dress Codes” - Stanford Prof. of Law - Expert on Civil Rights - Antidiscrimination Law

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Stanford Professor of Law · Expert on Civil Rights & Antidiscrimination Law
Author of Dress Codes · Rights Gone Wrong · The Race Card

One of the things that I've tried to do in my work is demonstrate the way that laws that don't seem to be directly related to social equality, to equality of opportunity, to racial justice in fact are and that it's only through also reforming these kind of systemic and institutionalized forms of discrimination that we could truly achieve an egalitarian society. So what I've really wanted to argue against is the idea that civil rights are kind of a magic bullet and that those kinds of laws alone would be sufficient to achieve.

Memory Banda - Founder and Director Foundation for Girls Leadership

Memory Banda - Founder and Director Foundation for Girls Leadership

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Human & Girls’ Rights Activist
Founder & Executive Director of Foundation for Girls Leadership

One thing that we should remember as young people is that everything allowed us is political by nature. We shouldn't be really scared of getting ourselves into different political aspects of issues around us. Be bold enough to speak out on the biggest challenges that are around you. And at the same time, it's in us to understand what kind of environment I am in? What is it that I can contribute to the problems that I am facing? That young people or people in general facing? So just go on. Be a part of that, and you'll be surprised that you will be the biggest game-changer.

Ellen Rapoport · Creator, Exec. Producer & Showrunner of “Minx” for HBO Max

Ellen Rapoport · Creator, Exec. Producer & Showrunner of “Minx” for HBO Max

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Creator, Executive Producer & Showrunner of Minx
starring Ophelia Lovibond & Jake Johnson

What drew me to the time period of the 70s was the real story of these magazines Playgirl, Viva, Foxy Lady, all the magazines that existed in this period. So it was a natural outgrowth of trying to tell a story that was inspired by, to some extent, real-life events. When I started developing Minx, what struck me about the 70s, in particular, is just how similar it was to our time. It seems like the magazines were covering all the same issues that we're now talking about. Obviously, we all saw with the leaked decision in Roe vs. Wade just how close we are to that time period and how far we haven't come.


Dolen Perkins-Valdez · NYTimes Best-selling Author of “Take My Hand”


Dolen Perkins-Valdez · NYTimes Best-selling Author of “Take My Hand”

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NYTimes Best-selling Author of the books Take My Hand · Balm, & Wench
Chair of the Board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation

My dad graduated from Tuskegee, and he often told me about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. He really wanted me to understand the history, not only of medical experimentation but more specifically, medical experimentation in the state of Alabama. So my feeling about medical experimentation is that there's a long history in this country of medical experimentation on black bodies, particularly based behind this racist notion that black people don't feel pain in the same way. And so I've always sort of known that, but once I started to research this book, I began to really understand more specifically what it has meant for black women.

Ami Vitale · Award-winning Photographer, Filmmaker & Exec. Director of Vital Impacts

Ami Vitale · Award-winning Photographer, Filmmaker & Exec. Director of Vital Impacts

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Award-Winning Photographer & Filmmaker
Executive Director of Vital Impacts

When are we all going to start to care about one another? Because all of our individual choices do have impacts. And I just think the demands that we place on this planet, on the ecosystems, are what are driving conflict and human suffering. In some cases, it's really the scarcity of resources, just like water. In others, it's the changing climate and the loss of fertile lands to be able to grow food. But in the end, it's always the people living in these places that really suffer the most. All of my work today, it’s not really about wildlife, and it's not just about people either. It's about how deeply interconnected all of those things are. People and the human condition are the backdrop of every one of the stories on this planet.

TREVA B. LINDSEY
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
ALICE SCHMIDT
MARYBETH GASMAN

MARYBETH GASMAN

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Author of Doing the Right Thing: How to End Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring
Executive Director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice & Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions

We all have things to learn when it comes to these diversity-related issues or issues of identity. We have so much to learn. Just because, let's say, you’re a person of color, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to be accepting of transgender individuals. You might have some real hangups. Or you could be transgender and have some hangups around people of color, all around the spectrum. You can be a woman who doesn't support women. You can be a woman who doesn't support women trans-women. There are all of these kinds of things that I think we have to be open to, and we have to be open to learning and also open to making mistakes because sometimes people are going to make mistakes around these issues.

JON YATES

JON YATES

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Executive Director of Youth Endowment Fund
Author of Fractured: How We Learn to Live Together

I think humans really need to feel valued and loved. The question is where do you get your value from? And I try to get my value from–faith plays a big part of my life, but not everyone has that way of thinking about the world, so I'm not going to major on that, but that's only part of it, the sense that I believe there's a God who thinks I'm of worth, but it's more than that. I believe that my closest friends and my family think I'm of worth. And so I think that's probably made me more comfortable in saying if I start a charity and it fails, and I have started things that fell apart, it's not the end of the world.

BILL HARE

BILL HARE

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Founder & CEO of Climate Analytics · Physicist · Climate Scientist

Net-zero is a big idea. It’s a big theme. And, unfortunately, what's going up are many ways to look like you're doing net-zero when you're not. So in the ideal world, getting to net-zero means essentially reducing your emissions, and then, where you have residual emissions left, that means you might need to have negative emissions. For example, it's relatively easy to decarbonize the power sector completely, and you can do it quickly and cheaply in most places, but you’re always going to be left with some levels of emissions from agriculture.

(Highlights) AZBY BROWN

(Highlights) AZBY BROWN

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Author of Just Enough · Small Spaces · Lead Researcher for Safecast
Authority on Japanese Architecture, Design & Environmentalism

In Edo Japan, basically life was pretty good, and they recycled everything. Everything was reused, upcycled. Waste was considered taboo. A person who was wasting was considered an ugly person. So there’s a lot that we could talk about design, the layout, scale. Buildings were rarely taller than two storeys. Very good use of environmental features, microclimates, use of wind for cooling, passive solar heating. Good use of planting, gardens, etc. But regarding cities of the future, I think the main thing is it needs to be a place where people feel like they belong and want to take responsibility.


YOLANDA KAKABADSE

YOLANDA KAKABADSE

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Fmr. Minister of Environment, Ecuador
Fmr. President: WWF Int’l, World Conservation Union, Founder Fundacion Futuro Latinoamericano

One of the reasons why we haven't been able to overcome many of the climate crisis factors is because people don't understand what it means. What is it about? What can I do? Usually, when we hear these experts speak about the climate crisis, at least me, I don't understand 9/10ths of the speech or the document. Simplifying the message, allowing that difficult scientific knowledge to become popular language that I can use when explaining to a child, to a rural person, to someone who has a different type of education, that knows much more about the planet but not necessarily about university, explaining those difficult issues will make a difference. And we have to invest much more in that. Speaking difficult scientific language is not helpful to the majority of society.

PAULA PINHO

PAULA PINHO

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Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy

She is responsible for Just Transition, Consumers, Energy Efficiency, Innovation and Energy security. She has been previously Head of Unit at the Directorate-General Energy in the European Commission. She was responsible for Energy Strategy and Policy coordination and then for Renewables and Energy System Integration Policy and Decarbonisation and Sustainability of Energy Sources. She was Acting Director for Energy Policy where she has overseen notably the work of international energy relations, financial instruments and inter-institutional relations.

IAN BURUMA

IAN BURUMA

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Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals
by the Foreign Policy magazine.

Ian Buruma · Public Intellectual & Erasmus Prize-Winning Author of A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill...
The Creative Process Podcast · Arts, Culture & Society

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

RICHARD D. WOLFF

RICHARD D. WOLFF

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Founder of Democracy at Work · Host of Economic Update
Author of The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself

You can criticize many things in the United States, but there are taboos and the number one taboo is that you cannot criticize Capitalism. That is equated with disloyalty…This story about Capitalism being wonderful. This story is fading. You can’t do that anymore. The Right Wing cannot rally its troops around Capitalism. That’s why it doesn’t do it anymore. It rallies the troops around being hateful towards immigrants. It rallies the troops around “fake elections”, around the right to buy a gun, around White Supremacists. Those issues can get some support, but “Let’s get together for Capitalism!” That is bad. They can’t do anything with that. They have to sneak the Capitalism in behind those other issues because otherwise, they have no mass political support.