Baratunde Thurston
Baratunde Thurston describes his experiences as a Black man in nature and the influence his mother had on his positive outlook. He’s a comedian, writer, tech guru, and the host of How to Citizen with Baratunde, a podcast where he reimagines the word “citizen” as a verb.
Transcript
Baratunde Thurston (00:06):
And so I hear what America says, and then I see how America behaves, and there's a gap. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," "liberty and justice for all," "certain inalienable rights"— it's right there. So if you hadn't said it, I wouldn't be so upset. I honestly would've less of a case to make. But you wrote it down and then you let me read. So now we got a problem because I like to fix shit.
Ted Roosevelt (00:31):
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library's content studio. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today I talk with Baratunde Thurston, comedian, writer, tech guru, media maker. He's a man who likes to fix things and he makes talking about civic engagement not only interesting, but inspiring. He does this in his chart-topping podcast, "How to Citizen with Baratunde," where he reimagines the word "citizen" as a verb— a verb that involves much more than showing up to vote, but can be as simple as treating a neighbor well in the small day-to-day moments you share. And when not trying to save our democracy, Baratunde connects with television viewers while connecting with nature on his PBS series, "America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston." He has said, "a Black person has a show about the outdoors, which is kind of cool." We talk about why that's so cool, how excursions with his mom influenced him, and what keeps him motivated. It was an inspiring conversation, so I'm excited to share it with you. Let's get to it.
Baratunde Thurston (01:42):
I saw the letter. I don't get many letters inviting me on to a podcast. I get text messages, dms, as the kids might call them. I get bullying, I get spam, but this was a letter. Like, there was a portable document formatted-file generated to capture this invitation. I felt like there was a wedding. This is really beautiful, so thank you.
Ted Roosevelt (02:07):
We try to keep it classy over here.
Baratunde Thurston (02:09):
Quite classy. Quite classy.
Ted Roosevelt (02:12):
So I'm really thrilled to have you on this podcast and I was trying to figure out exactly what it was that made it so compelling and the answer interestingly showed up on your website.
Baratunde Thurston (02:22):
Oh, good.
Ted Roosevelt (02:23):
In how you described yourself, and I'm going to quote you here back to you just to start this off, but you said: "When I'm forced to box myself in with nouns, I say I'm a writer, activist, and comedian. When I'm free to define myself more fully, however, I say I hold space for hard and complex conversations with a blend of humor, wisdom, and compassion. And I realized that it's the second part of that that makes you such a compelling guest for this podcast. You have approached a number of very complex topics from systemic racism to climate change, and you do it in a way—well, frankly, in the way that you describe: you allow for space for hard and complex conversations and you approach them with a sense of humor and a bit of optimism. And I wonder where that comes from.
Baratunde Thurston (03:16):
I have an ongoing prescription from my local pharmacy. I kid, my sense of optimism, I would define it as a grounded optimism. So my optimism isn't naive. Every once in a while I just humble myself before history and I'm like, I was born in the year 1977, I win! Like—disco, birth of hip hop, still face-to-face conversations with fellow human beings, not intermediated by a thousand screens and servers and ad tech. I win. I was born to Arnita Lorraine Thurston and Arnold Robinson. But Anita Lorraine did the work of raising me. I win. And my mother was a really great example of living life joyfully even with pain. And she survived a lot in her own household, in society and the time she was born into as a black woman, born in 1940 and she has a huge head, a huge smile. All the things I enjoy now, I enjoyed with my mother. She introduced me to computers, she introduced me to nature, she introduced me to political consciousness, to Afro-centrism, to grounded patriotism where you're willing to know the thing you claim to love, which is the only way to love something. Hello, America, I love you. I know you more than many of us are encouraged to. So the optimism is a composite. It's a big old recipe of genetic lottery victories and probably some dispositions and some recognitions. Yes, lots of challenge—individually, personally, also collectively. But damn, I'm just lucky.
Ted Roosevelt (05:09):
I always just think it's unbelievably courageous and it's certainly a challenge that I run into—and talk about winning the sort of lottery in life, I certainly can say things started out pretty well for me and continue pretty well for me. But it's easy to focus on other things in life. It's easy to focus on things and how things aren't working for you. And when you are looking at big, complicated, challenging issues, I am always amazed at the people who can stay optimistic, stay forward-looking, can look at systemic racism, for example, and not be overwhelmed by the gravity of it and allow for these open conversations. And it's in that space where a lot of that healing can happen, but I think it takes a special kind of person to be able to create that space.
Baratunde Thurston (06:04):
Are you calling me special?
Ted Roosevelt (06:05):
I'm calling you special. I am going to say it outright. I think it's unbelievable. And I guess I'd love to sort of understand a little bit more about Arnita and the environment that she created for you as a child, because I do think a lot of it starts there for people.
Baratunde Thurston (06:23):
We lived at 1522 Newton Street NW, Washington, DC 2 0 0 1 2. We had very heavy Black influence in that community, very heavy Latin influence in that community. We even had white people, Ted. My neighbors to the left was a Black family, the McCoy's. Neighbors immediately to the right was a Central American family of immigrants who had fled the Salvadoran Civil War. Neighbors to their right was a poor white family. And right across the street was St. Stephen's Episcopal Church. And adjacent to that was the urban village, low rise housing projects. I walked to school. As I walked to school, I collected friends. During the week, my mother was at work. She was a computer programmer for the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and she worked her way into that with no formal training or college degree, just figured some things out. And that enabled my sister Belinda and I to have a lot of things our neighbors didn't have, like a computer in the house, because my mom brought one from work.
(07:34):
So during the week I was at school. Right after school, my mom would come—I was in an afterschool program because she worked and they provided meals—and she and I would collect the leftovers from those meals into the back of the Datsun B210 station wagon, the family car. And we would drive them to a place called Martha's Table, which is a multi-decade operating renowned soup kitchen program, which had a regular route throughout the city stopping in public parks, giving food to free to anyone who needed it. And then on the weekends, I was enrolled in everything. I had the DC Youth Orchestra program, I had the Boy Scouts— with a twist, it was this all black troop, with a little Afrocentric sauce on top. And my mom was always keeping me occupied because right outside of that window were neighbors and friends and people all up in your business making sure you're not getting into trouble, but also trouble.
(08:32):
So there's stabbings, there's shootings, there's people getting jumped, there's all kinds of violence, there's all kinds of temptations. My friends' older brothers are becoming men, so they think, and so they're trying to earn money in the way that they think they need to or maybe the only way they know how to. And we move out of that neighborhood in 1990 to Tacoma Park, Maryland. And the year after we left, the block that I grew up on, there was a massive 400 plus person law enforcement operation raiding multiple buildings on that block, wrapping up every gang member, dozens and dozens of people, some of them still in prison for beheading folks, for dealing cocaine, for gang executions. These were my friend's brothers, some of them were my friends. And I just narrowly avoided all of that. So we would work community gardens together. We'd go downtown to the mall, to the American Folk Life Festival. We'd visit the museums. My mother would take me out to the Blue Ridge Mountains. So I traveled with her. Camping trips galore, computer nerd festivals, protests and cultural celebrations, and also Buddhist temples and meditation retreats. She was just like a lot of people in one.
Ted Roosevelt (09:51):
Wow. It certainly sounds like she is an amazing person and as a parent myself, it takes a lot of time and energy to find the right programs or events for your kids, and it's clear she was exposing you to this wide variety of things. I heard technology, community service, art, nature. But I'd love to dig a little deeper into your experience with nature. And you've talked about this a little bit in the past, but can you talk about what it was like being a Black man and whether you felt uncomfortable in the outdoors or the national parks? Candidly, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, only recently in the last few years come to realize that how so many Black Americans don't feel welcomed in a lot of outdoor spaces.
(10:42):
And on one level you think, well, it's nature. How can you not feel welcomed in nature? And yet when you hear the experiences of the sort of bait shop on the way or people sort of double take, when they see somebody of color in the national park. They pick up all these subliminal or not-so-subliminal signals. Did you ever have any of that? Did you have that sense or did your mother just make it such a natural thing for you right out of the gates that you didn't have time to process some of that stuff?
Baratunde Thurston (11:13):
It's both. She took me and my friend Reggie out camping somewhere in West Virginia and he and I went by ourselves down to a lake or river or pond, just having fun. And I wrote about this incident in my memoir, "How to Be Black," but there was a little white boy who's just yelling absurdly: "there's n-words in the water, there's n-words in the water!" And Reggie and I—we're not used to being called this, not in that way. There's a way that Black people say a version of that word. This was not that. This was a country-ass white boy and we're just like "where?" His sense of alarm was so— it was more shocking, it superseded the words he was saying. And I think it took— that hit our brains before the content did. And then things got really uncomfortable really quickly and we're like, do we go beat this kid up?
(12:11):
That's where we come from. That's what happens to this kid, but we aren't where we come from. We are where he comes from. We're out in the boonies, we don't know anything. We got to get back to the campground. My mom's waiting. So we did nothing, but we carried that experience and that was mildly scarring. That's not a foreign experience to Black people in nature in this country. We've got a lot of trauma associated with the outdoors here and also liberation. So I think that was at the moment, I didn't put all those pieces together, but now I can look at that and say it was another "welcome to America" moment. It's like, "the great outdoors is your inheritance! You don't belong here at all."
(12:52):
And I've had a few moments that are— you know, I remember going fishing as an adult in northern Minnesota with my wife, who's white, and her family, they're also white. They kind of stick together like that. And we went to go buy bait. You mentioned the bait shop. It was so negative. It had all the symbols first. Why is there a confederate flag? So there's that, and then there's the stares, and then there's the attitude, and then there's just the absolute clarity of communication, like what the hell are you doing here? And didn't go back to that shop and made a lot of the trip uncomfortable. But man, that's just really sours some of the experience on the outdoors.
Ted Roosevelt (13:37):
Maybe you borrowed it from somewhere and maybe it's yours, but in your TED talk that I think applies more broadly, but certainly this seems to me an example of it, the idea of "weaponized discomfort."
Baratunde Thurston (13:49):
I put those two words together. Yes, that was me.
Ted Roosevelt (13:52):
I love that. It's illustrative and it's sort of helped really synthesize a much more complex point into two words. And anytime you can do that, it's extremely powerful. And what you're talking about here, I think it's probably a small version of what weaponized discomfort means to you. But can you talk a little bit about that?
Baratunde Thurston (14:12):
Yeah, I mean that phrase emerged to me in the context of building this TED Talk about—the talk's titled "How to Deconstruct Racism, One Headline at a Time." And I was wrestling with how to process the phenomenon, well-publicized in media, of white people calling the police on black people doing nothing wrong. Barbecuing, selling water, walking down the street, entering their own homes, their own cars, their own businesses, and being treated as criminals and increasing the threat surface area for that person because law enforcement can be a little trigger happy or baton happy or disrespect happy. So one thread that emerged through the pattern of all these stories was just someone feeling uncomfortable. Like, there's a subject that takes an action against the target for some particular reason. Subject's white, action is call police, target's Black, activity is anything involving life. And all these subjects in this case, they leaned heavily toward women, almost always white, and they were afraid or they thought someone didn't belong. It's just some flavor under the umbrella of discomfort. I don't feel comfortable with these Black kids in this pool. I don't feel comfortable with that Black man entering that house. I don't feel comfortable with this little Black girl selling water over here. And so it's "them" problem.
(15:31):
They have an issue with their own discomfort and they didn't feel like they had any other tools to deal with it other than to invoke state power to resolve it for them, to the janitorial service of police. There's also—it's not just a weaponization against the target and the sentence of a Black person, it is a weaponization of policing. I have this app in my hand called a phone and I'm going to order armed power to manage my comfort for me. Maybe I'm not surprised. This is the country that has more guns than people. We are literally weaponized as a society. So we got a lot of practice in fearing each other and managing fear and discomfort through weaponry, through firearms, through walls, through state violence, through family separation. There is a ton of weaponization that has happened throughout the history of this land. And I was just poking at one recent expression of that kind of fractal pattern.
Ted Roosevelt (16:35):
One of the things that you're doing with your program on PBS, "America Outdoors," is presenting a Black American in the outdoors. How much of your decision to move forward was an awareness that having that image out there has a whole second order of positive effects?
Baratunde Thurston (16:57):
Huge. It was a huge component, but the power of all of us reclaiming that, birthright, that connection to the larger ecosystem of life that we come from, that we're a part of. Those benefits need to be broadly distributed. That awareness, the benefits, the upside of all that needs to be shared. That's how we save the planet and save the world. That's how we save ourselves. So every chance to feature someone who's not typically featured, and this goes so far beyond race too. We've got plus-sized bodies, we've got people with disabilities, we've got old women. When do you see old women on television? Generally speaking, that's the first people we take off the screen. And so I'm doing a cold dip in Maine with this female group and a lot of them are in their seventies and eighties and they're kicking my ass. And it's so beautiful and they're funny and they're still alive, they're still doing— and so we don't have to write people off and people who we say are not here anymore and they are, and so the Indigenous folks that we bring on. The kids—we have a lot more kids in this show. And we, in this upcoming season, for the first time, we deal with firearms on the show.
(18:15):
And I go on a turkey hunt. I train with an Olympic shotgun shooter, sport clay shooter in Arkansas. Never done that before. It's a powerful set of experiences. And so the chance to reframe that relationship with the outdoors from many angles. I have a presumption of what guns mean that's pretty negative based on my experience and the headlines I experience and just the absurdity of some of what's real. And also there are wonderful, thoughtful, safe, community-minded folks who have strong relationships with these tools and with the culture around them. And they are part of this country, right? They are part of the story that we're telling of ourselves. And so how do we include that in a way that is generative and sustainable and makes us all feel like we're part of the same story in the best way, in a good way, not just the frustrating or "we couldn't do this" way.
Ted Roosevelt (19:16):
Yeah, I love that It's something that you seem to do pretty consistently in all your projects, which is put yourself in the shoes of other people to understand both sides of the story. And I think as it relates to guns in particular and conservation, there's a long history and relationship between hunters and outdoorsmen and guns, outdoorsmen being some of the great conservationists. That's not the same story that people maybe hear or tell themselves in media around the role of guns in our country, particularly as they relate to crime. And I think being able to see it from both sides is critically important and I really commend you for doing that. And so that brings me to your podcast, "How to Citizen." What I love about it is this reframing of the word "citizen" from a noun to a verb. I think—well, I'll say this, I think "citizen" recently has become about in-groups and out-groups, rights that are owed to you, entitlements that are owed to you. And very little of the word's connotation today, at least as I hear it, is around your obligation to your community, to your country, and even more broadly. And I think your podcast kind of starts with that, flipping that on its head a little bit and saying, what is it to be an active citizen? And so let me just ask you that question. What does it mean to be an active and I'll add good citizen?
Baratunde Thurston (20:47):
Yeah. We have developed a simple four part definition of what "citizen" as a verb in the good way means, "we" being my wife Elizabeth and I. Number one of four: to "citizen" is to show up. You participate. That can look like physically going to a meeting and saying nothing but just being there. That can mean showing up for your kid's team. That can mean emotionally showing up for your community in a time of crisis and offering good wishes and offering condolences and offering help if needed. Just know that I'm here. So that commitment to presence, important. Number two is about relationships. To "citizen" is to invest in relationships with yourself, with others, and with the planet around you. We digest and inherit a story of loneliness and soloness, all kinds of propaganda about our individual rights and freedoms. That's not the whole story. We need each other be in community with someone, some other not you, and extend the definition of that community to non-human life, to plants and trees and animals because we need each other.
(22:05):
Number three, to "citizen" is to understand power and we're not often educated on what power is or what to do with it. And this interpretation says no, we all have power and as many ways to wield and generate it. There's money, there's physical force, there's sharing ideas like on a TED stage, there's gathering like you and I are doing right now. And then the fourth is kind of the conscience on the whole thing. To "citizen" is to do all these things valuing the collective self-interest, not just the individual self-interest. So you need the kind of communal collective intention around a lot of this for that selfishness to have an expanded sense of self, to be truly valuable to all of us.
Ted Roosevelt (22:52):
What's so interesting about that is one, you give a number of tasks or you have that four-step prescription to being a citizen that are all very obtainable things for people. This is not things that are out of reach. And I wonder about what's the downside? Is this idea of citizenship, in your mind, waning in our country? Is it something that it's a cyclical trend, it goes up and down. We're maybe in a trough right now. Maybe we're at a peak. I don't know. I hope we're not at a peak too. But you're somebody who could be focused on anything and you clearly are very talented, you're very charismatic, and one of the areas of your focus is around citizenship and being a good citizen. Why was that a priority for you?
Baratunde Thurston (23:45):
I have a tendency toward trying to fix things. My wife will tell you, I try too often to not just hear her stories but fix them. She's like, I'm not asking for help. I'm just complaining about something. I just complain, okay, I thought you could bring me a problem. I'm going to bring you a solution. That's just how this works. So that's just me, and really nothing to do with democracy. Then I get offended by abuse of power and hearing people stuck in a cycle of suffering. Can't get a job because you don't have a home, can't get a home because you don't have a job. Meanwhile, I see empty houses everywhere. Come on, we can do better than this. And so I hear what America says, and then I see how America behaves and there's a gap and I'm like, okay, the marketing is better than the product. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," "liberty and justice for all," "certain inalienable rights"— it's right there. So if you hadn't said it, I wouldn't be so upset. I honestly would've had less of a case to make. But you wrote it down and then you let me read.
(24:51):
So now we got a problem, because I like to fix shit. And I'm going to bring all my friends and I'm going to find the people who've already been fixing things and join them and say, okay, let me just talk about you. I don't actually have to fix it, but I do have the power of my communication skills to communicate what you're doing to others who may not know, who feel less alone, who feel like this gap can never be closed. And meanwhile there's all these people closing it, trying to make beautiful language lived reality, and that is so inspiring and I like inspiration. I so prefer it to the other thing. So I have ancestral rites of memory in this kingdom of the United States. My ancestors were enslaved here. There's been a lot given I'm a part of and woven into this place, I also know that there are many great nations. Every human has great capacity and every collective of humans. So we're special. We're maybe not the only special people on earth. We should be a little humble with that, but we do have an opportunity and we have a lot of power literally. And so what we do here affects not here. Even if you don't really care particularly much about this place and this land, if you care about some other land, there's probably a reason to have some investment in the United States and what happens here. Or "there" may not exist.
It seems to me that if there's a thread here that you're kind of focusing on, broadly, greater interconnectivity around people, and that is an elevating concept for humanity. Not to get too grandiose about it, but it's what I hear you saying. I think one of the great joys in life is to be able to talk to really thoughtful people, and you are clearly that. And so it's been an absolute joy for me to be able to sit down and have this conversation with you. And we ask our guests a question, but you've already answered it to a certain degree, but I'm going to give you a very quick chance to answer it, which is what is one action that you would encourage our listeners to take? It could be anything.
Baratunde Thurston (27:04):
Love. It'll be related to love. I'm going to borrow something from one of our How to Citizen guests and folks can dig deep into the catalog on that, the website, et cetera. But this comes from several of our guests, several of our women of color guests have come back to: ask yourself what you love about your community, about your city, your county, your country, your planet. And share that with someone and ask them: what do you love? It's a simple attention, focus-shifting exercise. It can be very micro and very self-focused, but it can ripple out and start to shift our attention and thus our capacity to create more love and less of the what do you fear? Who are you afraid of? Who's done you wrong? We get that in volumes we no longer require and it's choking us. So get yourself some breathing room. Focus on love.
Ted Roosevelt (28:09):
So good. Baratunde, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. This has been such a pleasure. Really.
Baratunde Thurston (28:15):
Pleasure to meet you.
Ted Roosevelt (28:16):
I could have gone on for another four hours here, but we do have to be respectful at a certain point, but thank you. I appreciate it.
Baratunde Thurston (28:24):
You are so welcome. Thank you. Thank you.
Ted Roosevelt (28:28):
Something I love is getting to make this podcast and talk to thought provoking leaders and creators like Baratunde Thurston. So thank you so much, Baratunde. There's a lot we weren't able to include due to time, and yet I could have kept this conversation going for hours more. If like me, you want to hear more from him, check out the podcast "How To Citizen with Baratunde" next. And make sure you're following our show Good Citizen so you don't miss more great conversations. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.