Citizen as a Verb with Baratunde

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With me now, writer, activist, and comedian, Baratunde Thurston. Maybe you know his book, How to Be Black. Maybe you know his TED Talk, How to deconstruct racism, one headline at a time. Maybe you know him from when he was a digital force behind The Daily Show and The Onion, or maybe you know his current podcast series called How to Citizen. That's right, he uses the word citizen as a verb. He's also about to receive the Social Impact Icon Award at the 2021 iHeart Media Podcast Awards. Hey, Baratunde, thanks so much for coming on again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Baratunde Thurston: It feels so good to be back, Brian. Thanks for having me. Happy Black History month to you and your crew and all your listeners. What's up?

Brian Lehrer: First day of. What's up is I want you to explain to our listeners how you use citizen as a verb. Can you do that?

Baratunde Thurston: I'll be happy to try to do that, Brian. I think we've all grown up with this idea that citizen is a legal status. That has increasingly been weaponized in the United States to separate people with certain types of paperwork from people without. It's bureaucratic and it's discriminatory in many ways. It's been heartlessly applied in the past few years. The more meaningful meaning of citizen is that we are all connected to each other, that we're all members of society. With our show, How to Citizen with Baratunde, we've chosen to interpret it as a verb, that it means active participation.

We have these four pillars that we've come up with to start the conversation and what that means. Throughout the show, we try to show people what it looks like to participate. It gives you something to look forward to in terms of being a member of society, and not just focused on all the things that are wrong. There are always many things that are wrong. There are many people working to make things more right, and so we wanted to celebrate that and then give our audience an opportunity to practice it and actually do things.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to say briefly what the four pillars of How to Citizen are?

Baratunde Thurston: I will do that, yes. The first is the basic, the most simple one is show up and participate. The second is that we invest in other people and we invest in ourselves and our relationships. Actually, your previous guest, Steve Hanson, was talking a lot about that power of relationships. The third is all about power and understanding our power. Understanding that it's more than just the power to vote or not vote, that there's power in how we spend our money, how we physically show up, how we share ideas.

The last brings all this together, that we apply all these for the benefit of the many and not just the few. There's an extraordinary level of individualism in our culture, which is across purposes with living in a society with other people. If we try to take these principles and apply them in many different ways, then we end up citizening a bit better.

Brian Lehrer: Citizening, the gerund form. I saw a quote from you on Yahoo News. It says you said, "I'm not saying everybody go adopt a Trump voter or radical right-wing racist, some of that is dangerous actually, and some of it is just emotionally exhausting. When we're dismissing people, writing them off, when we have a mutual interest in coexisting, that's literally counterproductive." Did you say that and what would the next line of How to Citizen-- What would the how to citizen activity be around that?

Baratunde Thurston: I did say that, thank you. I'm willing to confirm my statements to Yahoo News here on The Brian Lehrer Show, you got me. Those thoughts are inspired by the reality of history, which is, in the case, it's Black History month, oppressed people could not afford the luxury of just ignoring the feelings and the perceived reality of their oppressors. That's literally self-destructive. We have to be aware and account for what's going on in the minds of our fellow humans, our fellow citizens.

That thought is also inspired more recently by an author and a leader named Valarie Kaur, who's written this beautiful book called See No Stranger. She encourages us to embrace revolutionary love, to love ourselves, to love others and to even love our opponents. Not from a romantic or sentimental perspective, but from a perspective of curiosity. That's strategic to understand and it also keeps us connected to our own humanity. In a stranger, we should see a part of ourselves as she eloquently puts it, "That we do not yet know."

In the context of people who have aligned themselves with the former president, Donald Trump, there's a spectrum of folks who check that box and cast those ballots. Some are themselves victims of extraordinarily well-financed, highly profitable and convincing disinformation, manipulation, propaganda. Others had a slightly different prioritization of their values. Others are actively hateful. None of those describes the entire group, but it is incumbent upon some of us who have access to some of them to keep that work going.

I'm not going to put that on the undocumented immigrant to lead that charge from an ICE detention cell, but there are many people who are much more proximate to those alleged strangers that could express a bit more curiosity and vice versa. This is not just a burden for liberals to carry on their own. I expect that if we're all going to live in one country, that everyone actually does show up and participate.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest is Baratunde Thurston. His current podcast series is How to Citizen. Any Baratunde, pre-existing fans out there who want to call and talk to him but you never had him over to dinner to ask him the question you always wanted to ask him, or anything based on what he's saying today, if he's new to you, (646) 435-7280, (646) 435-7280.

You've got this whole how-to thread going in your career, your book, How to Be Black, a bestseller in 2012. Your TED Talk, How to deconstruct racism, from 2019, that's moving toward 5 million views last I checked. Now, your podcast is How to Citizen. Should we look for your stuff in the self-help section?

Baratunde Thurston: You know what? Yes, sure. Let's do it. I think I've implicitly considered myself both a student and a teacher, always cycling between those two as I learn, relearn, unlearn, and try to share what I've been experiencing along the way. Yes, put me in the self-help section, but collective self-help, Brian. This isn't just that individualistic self-help.

Brian Lehrer: That's such a great distinction, right? Because so much of self-help literature, not to get off on that tangent, is about people as individuals, as if they're disconnected from society.

Baratunde Thurston: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: You've always woven comedy and activism together in your work. If we look back to your book pub date of 2012 and say things were hardly perfect then, but they've gotten so much darker since, has it been harder to stay funny or to want to stay funny in the things that you create as an aspect of them?

Baratunde Thurston: I think I've become clearer over the past eight years. I've become more committed to the pursuit of liberty and justice for all people. I think my use of humor has become more discretionary and precise, as evidenced by me carefully choosing those words. Still, it's very useful. It's very useful for my own sanity to release a bit, and to try to connect with other people. I try to use it strategically. Even in the TED Talk, you mentioned, it's very much about racism in America. It's particularly about white people calling the cops on Black people in America, but I don't start the story there. I start with story of myself and revealing a bit of myself. I use some humorous tales to let people in, and then I slip the knife in, Brian. It's all about hiding the knife, and then you can just slowly insert it. People won't even notice the twist.

Brian Lehrer: In this case, knife equals truth.

Baratunde Thurston: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: On that TED Talk, How to deconstruct racism, then there's this one headline at a time component, can you take a sample and do it? Does it work that way?

Baratunde Thurston: It does. Let me explain the principle, which is, we've all lived in this country through a bombardment of state-sanctioned, extra judicial murders of our Black citizens. I was very understandably exhausted by this, but we also started seeing the videos of people calling the cops. Before the police showed up, oftentimes someone called them, and that someone was most often a white American, and the person who was being called upon was a Black American. I assembled all the news articles I could find. I worked with Color of Change and some volunteers to get a good sample size database and I just started looking for the pattern.

This pattern matching game that I came up with was looking at how the news covers a reality of people weaponizing access to state power through police forces for Black folks who aren't doing anything wrong other than existing. You have a headline like a white man calls police on a Black woman using a neighborhood pool, and it becomes the same as a white woman calls police on a Black man inspecting his own property. That structure reveals the structure and the system of the systemic racism underneath, which allows those systems to be at play.

I'll quickly tuck on that there was a New Yorker, Don Israel, who taught me more along this in the summer of 2020 as we were violently reminded of the structures that allow those sentences to be true, that grammar matters and I've known that, but he drove the point home. When we spoke of George Floyd, oftentimes, we speak and say, George Floyd was killed, George Floyd died. We just have no verbs. The George Floyd incident, the George Floyd moment, and all that metaphorically and linguistically puts a lot of weight on George Floyd, but the weight was applied by Derek Chauvin. By Derek Chauvin choices by Derek Chauvin's knee.

I go out of my way, headline style, to correct that and say Derek Chauvin slowly murdered George Floyd. That's an active choice. That is a subject taking an action against, in this case, a human target.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned the revolutionary love segment which I was going to ask you about, with Valarie Kaur. Let me ask you about another one. You had Eric Loo, founder of what he calls Citizen University. How does How to Citizen intersect with Ctizen U?

Baratunde Thurston: Eric Loo, all these people who we've had on our podcast are themselves model citizens. They're what Eric would call they're big citizening. You had big pimping back in the days is a way better version. This is big citizening and Eric has made it his mission. He's based in Seattle, he's got an organization called Citizen University and he's trying to up our civic skills, and as he would say, make civic sexy again. He is someone who I had heard about for years, I've met actually at the TED conference where I delivered that talk in 2019. He has such an eloquent, clear understanding and description of power and power is something we need to be literate in.

When you think about what our self-governing society is, it's people power, it's power to the people, it's power of, by, and for the people. It's power from the people, granted to government representatives and institutions. We need to understand our own power so that we can wield it appropriately, collectively, for our aims and our ends. Eric is just a great teacher of power literacy and undirtying that word.

A lot of us are like "Power's grimy, power's dirty. I don't know, you're power hungry. I don't want to be that," and Eric's like, "No, power is like a tool and it's the ability to get someone to do what you would have them do. What are you going to do with that power and do you understand the different ways you can access it?" It's a great episode. He's a great citizen.

Brian Lehrer: You're based in California. Want to tell the rest of the country a little bit about the Proposition 22 debate and your state last year. I see you wrote a newsletter item about the supermarket chain Albertsons converting home delivery to gig work and that ticked you off. I think this has national implications for labor rights even though it's a California story.

Baratunde Thurston: Thank you for that Brian and I'm still a recent Californian, so to my fellow New Yorkers, I love you, I miss you, but yes, now I'm coming at you from many hours away.

Brian Lehrer: I know, you used to come in studio with us in person.

Baratunde Thurston: I did. We all used to go indoors. Remember indoors, Brian?

Brian Lehrer: I do, once upon a time.

Baratunde Thurston: That was a magical timezone. Prop 22 was an attempt to, and successfully so, to help certain app delivery type businesses and gig operating businesses, your DoorDashes, your Ubers, evade regulation from another bill in California which would treat gig workers as actual employees and confer upon them the full rights of employee status, like benefits, healthcare, et cetera. The stuff we really restrict from each other in America because we like to cut the social safety net and then jump out the window. That's the American way.

These folks spent $200 million, these businesses. These hyper funded by venture capital, but still can't make a dollar a profit businesses came up with $200 million to lobby and convince the public and others that they should have an exception to this rule. They promised that we're still going to take care of our workers, we're going to give them an option as a third way, which has some reason to it, there is some soundness to that argument, but what also happened on the other end is places that had already been treating delivery drivers as employees took advantage of this and said, "Oh, we'll just make a deal with them."

Albertsons is a very large supermarket chain. They had full benefits for their delivery drivers. It was part of a customer loyalty, employee loyalty thing. After this has passed, they laid off all those workers and switched over to DoorDash to run all delivery. Now, it's not exactly a one to, people who want to dig into the full details, they'll say they were thinking about this already, but it's an indicator of what's likely to come, and it's not just about the folks currently employed in this gig economy, so to speak, it threatens the status of employment more broadly, and it shifts the burden further away from those who have more capital and more resources to individuals who already don't have much at all. The pandemic has only revealed that this is the exact wrong time to be stripping any form of benefit away from any human being right now.

Brian Lehrer: I was shocked that Proposition 22 went the way that it did in California and in the middle of the pandemic. I thought society was developing more and more sympathy for gig workers in how they're exploited, and yet it went in that other direction.

Baratunde Thurston: It did. I think shock is a good word, but also, they told a good story. I think it's something that's very important for all of us to remember, facts don't do work by themselves. They need delivery mechanisms known as human beings, known as narratives, known as stories, known as memes, and the folks who funded this operation to get that passed told a pretty good story. They employed, ironically, their gig workers to talk it up to their passengers. They scared folks and they made some arguments that were really compelling, and that's not the first time that has happened.

Obviously Donald Trump, received the second largest number of votes in American presidential election history, right after Joe Biden. He told a certain story. For those of us who are feeling a certain type of way about reality right now, know that the facts alone are not all that we have. We have power in many ways, and one of those is how we communicate and how we tell stories and how we try to connect with people and lure them into something good and not just scare them away from something bad. I think this Prop 22 was an example of storytelling playing out in a way that many of us didn't want, but it's not entirely surprising.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you'd like Baratunde Thurston's version of storytelling here, you can sign up for his podcast, which is called How to Citizen. Is that just the usual wherever you get your podcast, or do you want to say--

Baratunde Thurston: Wherever you get it. The rain gutters on the street, under that dirty snow bank, on your smartphone or your dumb phone, podcasts are just coming out of every speaker at this stage, you might stumble into it by accident

Brian Lehrer: Baratunde Thurston these days doing the podcast, How to Citizen. Always great to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Baratunde Thurston: You too, Brian. Thanks a lot.

 

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