Transcript

Ai-jen Poo:

Hi, I’m Ai-jen Poo.

 

Alicia Garza:

I’m Alicia Garza, and we are so happy to have our friend Baratunde Thurston as a guest today.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

Baratunde is a writer, political commentator, and comedian. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller How To Be Black, the host of the How To Citizen podcast, and the host of the upcoming PBS docuseries America Outdoors. Every time I see him on TV, he lights up the screen with his clarity and humor.Welcome, Baratunde.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

You’re actually the best. Thank you for inviting me to this powerful space, y’all.

 

Alicia Garza:

It’s so good to have you here, Baratunde. Thank you so much for joining Sunstorm. How you be?

 

Baratunde Thurston:

I be tired and grateful, and a bit excited, a bit excited about what’s possible.

 

Alicia Garza:

What you excited about? Tell me a little bit more about that. I want to get excited. What’s going on?

 

Baratunde Thurston:

Well, on a personal front, I’m married and I’m excited about that.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

Yes.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

It feels good.

 

Alicia Garza:

Good for you.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

We’re growing together and learning together, and I’m very excited about that. I’m excited because I got my double vacs. So Moderna [crosstalk 00:01:41] in the house. I think the deep answer to your question is I’m relatively balanced between exhaustion and motivation. I’m motivated about where the world and particularly where the United States can go. I see this beautiful potential and mobilization and policies and people. And then I’m exhausted because we have a whole political party which is not committed to the democratic experiment-

 

Alicia Garza:

Wait, just one?

 

Baratunde Thurston:

… completely, explicitly not committed. I think there’s a distinction between the two parties in this regard.

 

Alicia Garza:

That’s true. I mean, that’s exciting that there’s lots of opportunities, but dive in for me for a little bit. I mean, what is driving your optimism right now? What are some of the things that are fueling that, given how tricky the political train is right now?

 

Baratunde Thurston:

Yeah. So to pander with honesty y’all are, and particularly Ai-jen, we had her on my How To Citizen podcast and the way Ai-jen, you talked about with several other people in our second season, y’all echoed each other in a powerful way about this opportunity for a new deal, for some changes that actually are for all, not just for the few, which has been such a refrain of our season around economic opportunity. Seeing the president of the United States basically read your words and say your words about CARE as infrastructure, and just the boldness of the proposals. It gives me some optimism. I listened to President Biden’s address at a joint session while I was in the car on the highway at night. And I kept wanting to pull over, like is this dude really saying these things? I didn’t vote for Joe Biden in the primary.

 

Alicia Garza:

Who of us did? I’m like, be honest.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

I feel like it’s one of those moments where it’s just like a high school athletic moment. The big game is up and you got to rise to the occasion. And I feel like he’s trying to rise to the occasion. He’s ‘try’sing to the occasion. It really moves me. And I think the specifics are in that speech, he was going on about the threats to America: North Korea, Iran, nuclear, terrorism, classic American jingoistic, militaristic talk like it’s stuff you can just throw easily, copy and paste from any president over the past 50 years. And they say the same things, they interchange the brownish nation they’re referring to.

 

And I was thinking, “Man, it’d be pretty amazing if he would acknowledge the threat in our midst, white supremacy.” He said it right after I thought it. I’m like, “Maybe there is a microchip in my vaccine.” You know what I’m saying? But more, it was unexpected. I was grateful for it. That gives me hope. Like the fact that we have a leader at both levels, that we have folks like y’all who are in it for a very long haul on the ground, with the people. And you got folks at the highest level using the same language, that’s… I don’t want to ignore that.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

He sure did.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

I can be pretty effectively pessimistic, but I will accept the optimism of that shared language in the shared moment and hope for more like that.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

Hmm. What a great reminder of all that we have to be hopeful about.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

Yeah, we kind of got this.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

We do. I think we do. We did some really hard things the last four years. I think we got this.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

What I would love to see Biden’s team propose, in addition to the Recovery Act and a Family Act, and a Jobs Act, and all this stuff, is a massage act, like just a full body massage act for everybody who dragged our democracy back from the cliff’s edge and continues to do so. Who reminded folks what was in these founding documents and tried to make the liberty and justice be for all. You get a massage, you get a week off, you get to go to Hawaii safely. That’d be real cool.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

Oh, yes, that would be amazing. One of the things that I love about you and every time you pop up on my CNN or MSNBC feed, it’s so exciting because you’re just an amazing and unique political commentator. You’re humane, but you’re also hilarious. And we need a little bit more humor in cable news these days. And how did you come to blending humor and politics in the way that you do?

 

Baratunde Thurston:

How did I come to blend humor and politics? Through anger actually. I was a big news junkie as a child. I was raised in the 1980s, born in ’77 in Washington, DC raised by my mother on her own at a time when that city was going through hell, it was the murder capital. People fitting my demographic profile, young black men, had a higher chance of ending up in jail or prison than going to college. And that was like an early tipping point for that statistical trend. And it was really an odd moment to read that newspaper headline with my black male friends, and like, “Oh, so we’re not supposed to make it, huh?” It’s just a weird mirror to look at in your local paper in The Washington Post back then in the ’90s. So I watched a ton of news and I got real fed up about it. And the humor came into my life as a way to process the anger. It was an outlet, it was a stress relief. I wasn’t good at it, I just needed it.

 

It was really a dependency and a tool that’s something to consume and ingest that always felt a little healthier in my body. I was a strident political voice well before I had any command of comedic voice. I was just a little self-righteous preachy kid. I was a ton of fun, ton of fun. Self-righteous preachy kid who was like telling all the other black kids why the way they were showing up wasn’t right. One of my early causes was the football team name of the Washington, the NFL team in DC. And I was like, “Fellow black people, we can’t be rocking with this name. This is not it. This is racist. We would burn the city down if they called this the Washington N word,” and hearing excuses from my friends, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

 

Be mad at them for playing basketball instead of being down for the struggle, which is really not like a fun friend to have in 10th grade. So it started there. And then the humor helped loosen me up a little bit. And I started writing a satirical newsletter where I took my self-assigned mission to inform the world, but toned it down a little bit to make it worth tuning into. And I found some resonance in this email newsletter that I started in my freshman year on college. And I knew it was working because people I didn’t know wanted to be on the list like, “Yo, can you put me on your Newsflash list?” And that was when I started really practicing, in a literal sense, humor and weaving it into my political voice. It’s like, “Oh, this pairs nicely, like a wine with the right fish kind of pairing.” It was good. Helped the whole meal go down.

 

Alicia Garza:

We love that you’re always giving credit to your mom Arnita for everything that she did to raise you and your sister, and the way that she influences your work to this day. So can you talk to us a little bit about her story?

 

Baratunde Thurston:

I can. I’m pausing because her story is changing, even though she’s no longer alive, as I learn more about her and learn more about myself and make the connections of what she helped plant in me. So my mother was born, Arnita Lorraine Thurston in 1940 in Washington, DC. And her mother was born in Washington, DC as well. So multi-generational Washingtonian families, statehood, no taxation without representation. There you go. There’s my DC statehood blood. Just basic human rights, here we go again. So my mom was born at this time when Black Pride, Black Power, explicit statements like Black Lives Matter, wasn’t just flowing out in the streets.

 

There was a lot of shame. There was a lot of colorism and shame, even in her own household about how dark she was. And she had to help raise herself in certain ways. I don’t know how my mother survived in this world meant to destroy her, even in a household meant to destroy her. It wasn’t just like America writ large, it’s like her own parents were abusive, sexually abusive in the case of her father, emotionally, physically abusive in the case of her mother. And so she found community elsewhere. She found gangs as a teenager. She found the black power movement in her 20s and was out in these streets with the Eritreans and Ethiopians and the Nigerians and the Afro Caribbeans.

 

Alicia Garza:

Yes, [inaudible 00:11:29], yes.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

She had to teach herself singularly and collectively to love herself. And I think that’s things that I learned from my mother, it is the power to love yourself. If you can grant that to yourself, that is a key to unlocking your own freedom. And the willingness to evolve, to grow, to let go of things, to admit mistakes and try to look with less shame at your own past decisions-

 

Alicia Garza:

So hard.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

… which is real hard to do. It’s easy to ask others to do, easy to ask a nation to do. It’s very hard to actually do it because then you’ve got to face your own demons. So my mom became a more self-loving, more independent evolving person, stumbled her way into computer programming as a profession before that was a common profession for anybody to have much less unmarried black women with no college degree in the late ’70s and early ’80s. And then my mom, she was fun. She defied a lot of the narrative of what, again, this like big fat quotation marks capital Single, capital Black, capital Mother. What does that mean in the capital H, Hood?

 

And there’s so much pop culture around who that person is, and how limited she is, and how she’s struggling all the time, or how she has all the answers all the time, or, “She’s just fixing these grits for these kids all the time.” And my mom was like into the computers. We were members of the Sierra Club and went on hikes with them. We went camping and bike riding and she was active in the peace vigils in the neighborhood around all the violence that was going on. She loved British comedies. So mom was very creative and silly. She enjoyed enjoying, she wore a lot of tie dye. She wore cowboy boots and-

 

Alicia Garza:

Sounds like my kind of woman.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

… tie dyed, bright colors. She was always playing with our hair-

 

Alicia Garza:

Totally my kind of woman.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

… and doing different things and improvising in the way she cooked.

 

Alicia Garza:

Maybe we’re long, lost siblings because I’m like that.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

I would not be surprised. I would not be surprised.

 

Yeah. And I think the pain that she experienced and some of the pain she inflicted, she tried her best to look at it, wrestle with it, and acknowledge it, and move through it, and transform it. She didn’t have a lot of help in that. And there are certain choices she made that I see now, and I’m like, “Oh, wow. She was carrying a lot.” And I’m amazed that she brought my sister, Belinda, and me into this world and helped usher us relatively healthily into this space. And I’ve been mostly, really, really grateful and humbled by what she was able to do. And I’m also starting to acknowledge and feel okay there’s things she wasn’t able to do. And that’s okay.

 

Alicia Garza:

Well, that’s the conundrum of moms, right? I mean, they are our foundation. They are the lens through which we learn to see the world. And then as we become our own people and we develop our own lens, we realize not only how hard that is, “Wow, ma, thanks.” But we also realize that our mothers and the people who raise us are also deeply complicated and complex and we give them their propers for doing their best. And we’re also like, “When I have the shot… this is what I’m going to do.”

 

Baratunde Thurston:

Mix it up a little bit, move it forward.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

It’s making me think about this new TV show that you’ve got going on. I’m thinking Sierra Club. Hmm. There’s a connection here.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

Yeah, I’m hosting a show with/for PBS called America Outdoors. Hopefully, it’ll keep that title. It’s possible they won’t. It’s not going to air until spring of 2022. So there’s some time, six episodes. And it is an exploration of people and our connection to the outdoors and our connection to each other, through the outdoors.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

I love this.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

It is a very beautifully wide net that we’re casting about what outdoors is and who we’re talking to, and about, and their connection. So it’s hiking, and marathoning, and surfing, and urban farming, and river cleanups, and all kinds of stuff. And we’re connecting with indigenous communities, which are often not a part of the narrative, especially national parks. There’s a more complicated history of those that we’re exploring pretty head on. And especially as someone who grew up kind of in national parks, it’s just this unmitigated good thing, it’s “Oh, yeah.” There’s always another story, another story. And when the federal government declares this land vacant and available for tourism and preservation, there’s also a displacement, an erasure, an act of violence against people who don’t meet the standard of land occupation, and land improvement as our government has so often done with indigenous nations here.

 

We did one episode so far, we shot in Death Valley, California. I’m enjoying it. And it’s nice to be out in the world after a year and a half of being almost just in this room. It’s like seeing other people somewhat close, moving my body out in places that I haven’t been, it was the farthest I’ve been from home.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

Wow, amazing.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

It’s the farthest I’ve been from home since March of 2020.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

Amazing.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

I’m real grateful for that. Yeah, thanks for asking about it.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

One of the things that I thought of is just the theme of this season. Sunstorm is really about, I mean, we’ve just been through an extraordinary time and we’re still in an extraordinary time and we’re really trying to meditate on what are the things that we want to take with us that we’ve learned in this extraordinary time that we want to keep, and what do we want to leave behind. I’m wondering, do you have thoughts on what you want to take and what you maybe want to leave behind from this extraordinary time?

 

Baratunde Thurston:

I mean, I want to leave COVID behind and I want to leave Nazis behind, so those two things. Yep, we don’t need more of that. I got it, like I get it. I was like, “Okay, Nazis are real, they are a thing. They wave flags and stuff. Cool… next.”

 

Alicia Garza:

We see y’all. You’ve got our attention.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

I acknowledge you. We all just want to be acknowledged. “I acknowledge you. Okay.” [crosstalk 00:18:40]. I will take with me my ability to grill a whole fish, like I’m so good at it, y’all. I take a Branzino, I marinate it. I stuff it with citrus and herbs. I got the temperature just right. I grease the grill with some good old grape seed oil, a nice high temperature oil. And I get those lines in it. And then when I flip it, it doesn’t crumble. We were hanging with the in-laws very recently for the first time since before COVID, and my wife was like, “I’m going to need you to make those fish. We’re going to have a little dinner party with it. I need to show you off a little bit.” Because I did not know how to do that before COVID.

 

Alicia Garza:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about belonging and what it means to be recognized as fully human. And here in this country, we use the word citizen often to recognize people as fully human. And I’ve heard you talking a lot about what it means to citizen in this country. And I think, “Well, here in the United States, we citizen very differently, right?” So we’re having an awakening, maybe even epiphanies around why and what it means to citizen. But I’m curious from your own perspective, in this particular moment where millions more people were inspired to participate in the decisions that shape their lives every day. What does it mean for you right now to citizen and how is citizening changing, evolving, growing, or even maybe regressing a little bit? You can give us the optimism and the pessimism, if you’d like.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

It means that I am trying to regularly check in with my neighbor who is ill and was physically and socially distancing even before COVID, but even more so during all this. And I had noted from some of the other neighbors, a reluctance to engage with this person, which I was like, “Then I need to try to engage more,” because I was new to the block as well. We lived here one year before COVID hit and I was traveling all the time, so we didn’t really live here. And then we’re like stuck here. It was a very harsh transition from kind of living here to only living here. And in the process of phoning, texting, stopping by, I’ve learned about this other person, things that didn’t match the rumors I was hearing about this person.

 

I have been able to think a little bit less just about myself. I’ll just check in. You go to the store, check in with so-and-so, see if they need anything. And I’ve watched this person open up and share more, just volunteer more, or this is how I grew up. This is what happened. “Hey,” just reaching out cold, “Could you do this? Could you help me figure this out? Could you grab my garbage bins and bring them back,” which was the case this morning. That’s a very small, specific way of interpreting what it means to citizen. But I was trying consciously, I think, to demonstrate a level of non-exclusive selfishness, to demonstrate some curiosity about this other person I kind of share space with. That’s one.

 

Another way that citizening has shown up for me, is understanding Los Angeles a bit more. And I remember when Defund the Police started to emerge from whatever hatchery phrases come from and political movements. I don’t know, is there a firm that says, “Intersectionality, that’s the thing now, now it’s BIPOC. We’re shipping BIPOC next week.”

 

Alicia Garza:

Somebody tell us where the hell that thing came from.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

Yeah. So Defund the Police got released into the wild and I decided to try to understand my own city’s budget. And I was, what is that? I think I get it, but a lot of the people I associate with are for it. So I’m probably for it too, but it was very distant. And I was, “Well, I’m new here.” Being new at a place is a great excuse to just poke around. I don’t know nothing about it. Let me go to the website, let me find this budget. Let me start looking at… and I was like, “Oh, wow, 54% of our budget goes to policing.”

 

Alicia Garza:

54%, and then when you go downtown and you see the camps growing of people who are houseless, living on the streets, and you say to yourself, “54%, why is that happening?”

 

Baratunde Thurston:

Yeah. So it’s a gross misallocation of our money. And so I was trying to do something about it, sign this thing, show up to this thing, talk about this thing, use what power I have. And that’s the last piece, I’ve just been much more conscious about what my power is and how I’m using it. And I have preached that simple line for a little while, like it’s not just voting. In democracy, we’ve got more than our vote. Voting’s super, super important, especially in election years. But we have money. We have voice. We have attention. Probably the most power we have is what we put our attention on. It doesn’t require any cash. Everybody makes that choice, and every choice we make is an exercise of our power because it’s a shift of our attention. So I’m like feeling into that, and I was like, “I have this voice. I have this radio voice.”

 

Alicia Garza:

Yes, you do. Yes, you do.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

And I’ve learned some of what that voice, the power that lies within it. And so I’ve been more conscious of late the past year ish, “What am I saying? Where am I saying it? And what unique opportunities do I have to try to plant some notions and some seeds?” So showing up, using my power in much more conscious ways, and I’m acknowledging there’s so much more to experiment with and learn and figure out, try to be humble and not trying to do everything.

 

Alicia Garza:

Ashay, and powerful. There’s something in that story too that tells us if it doesn’t happen right now, it ain’t going to happen. We’ve got to do it ourselves, and it has to happen right this second. It’s like, “Well, things are happening. Things are happening. We are planting seeds. And some of those seeds are blooming.” I mean, seven years ago, we were in a completely different place having completely different conversations. And certainly not the conversations we’re having now, even though they’re frustrating because they’re not doing as much as we want them to. They’re doing a lot more than they ever were. So that’s a good thing.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

So I have a question for you. I lean toward empowerment and optimism and hope and motivation and Yes We Can and all those affirming feelings. I am also, as I believe I said when we first started talking, I’m tired and I’m not like the hardest working person in this struggle, in this journey, in this work. But I’m tired. And I had an experience very recently where I finally watched the United States versus Billie Holiday. And it deeply affected me in ways that I didn’t expect. I know most of the stuff, at some level, my mama already told me. And if she didn’t say it explicitly, I felt it. But I watched that and it unsettled me physically because I think it was a reminder of the longevity of the systems that we’re trying to moderate at a minimum, completely overhaul and redesign at best.

 

And I just got into this like angry funk where I was just like, “Fuck it.” This whole place, there’s so much foul history here. I was like, “Man, look what they did to this person who represented so many people.” What do you do with those emotions? I’ve seen the work that you do. And I’ve heard you talk, not just now, but more broadly about where we’re going, what we can get to, how we can re-imagine, like it’s motivational and leans toward optimism and the Yes We Can side of the emotional spectrum. I also know you have, I’m not alone.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

That’s right.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

So what do you do when you are feeling and experiencing those less than positive emotions about our situation?

 

Ai-jen Poo:

While you were talking, I was thinking about the wisdom in pain, the intelligence of hurt, and what we can learn. I think Latasha Brown said this once about, “When we feel pain in our bodies, it tells us something, it kind of saves us because it’s an indication that we’re ill and something needs to be healed. And it can be exhausting for sure. But if we can harness that wisdom, the insight, the intelligence that the pain and the hurt is transmitting to us, it increases our potential to win, I think, long-term. And then I think along the way we have to figure out whether it’s the Branzinos or the outdoors or the time with our friends, the pieces that give us the energy and the joy and the beauty to keep on.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

Thank you.

 

Alicia Garza:

I love her. What keeps me going in it is transforming that anger, feeling it and not trying to be like optimistic all the time. I’m not at all. And I’ve actually had to like grow a muscle. And Ai-jen has really taught me this, right? Like you could do that your whole life. And you’ve also seen what happens to people who sit in that all the time. It stymies and it atrophies your ability to dream and to imagine, because when you stay in that place of everything is fucked up, then you can’t actually think about anything, not being fucked up. And we are being called to do that in this moment. If we don’t, if and when we win, what are you winning? What are you winning? Like $400 billion in CARE infrastructure doesn’t come from lamenting about how we need a stronger and different labor movement in this country. It comes from building it.

 

And it comes from that commitment to, not just reimagine, but like outfucking last your enemy, outlast the people who are trying to take you out. Like there is a petty in me that’s like, “No, no, no, no. We’re going to be the last one standing.” And that’s my word. You know what I mean? And I’m going to pass that to my kids, and I hope my kids pass it to their kids. It’s like, no, actually there is wisdom and petty too. It’s like, “Listen, no, no, no. Your commitment is not going to outlast my commitment.” That’s, for me, it’s like, I’m avenging my grandmother and my mom and my great grandparents, Cooper and Julia, who were sharecroppers. I’m avenging that because I’m like, “Oh, no, no, but we’re still here. And we’re going to be the last ones standing. So y’all keep creating too and we’ll see who ends up on the other side.” And I’m quite positive that it’s going to be us.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

Thank you both. The wisdom that comes from pain, the wisdom that comes from petty.

 

Alicia Garza:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 

Ai-jen Poo:

Ooh, thank you.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

That’s your album. That’s your book.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

Great summary. And with that, we want to say thank you [inaudible 00:31:45], for being you and all of the gifts that you give this world and for spending time with us, truly, thank you.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

Sunstorm queen.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

Everybody go follow Baratunde @ Baratunde on all the socials. And while you’re there, follow Sunstorm Pod Two and go listen to How To Citizen wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time…

 

Alicia Garza:

Ciao.

 

Ai-jen Poo:

Sunstorm is a project of the National Domestic Workers Alliance in collaboration with Participant. Sunstorm is executive produced by Alicia Garza, Ai-jen Poo and Christina Mevs-Apgar. Sunstorm is produced by Amy S Choi and Rebecca Lehrer of The Mash-Up Americans. Producers are Shelby Sandlin, Mary Phillips-Sandy and Mia Warren, original music composed by Jen Kwok and Jody Shelton.

 

Baratunde Thurston:

I love seeing y’all smiling. It’s the sunrise that I can’t see because it’s overcast in my neighborhood right now, so thank you.