Baratunde Thurston is an Emmy-nominated host who has advised the Obama White House, produced for ‘The Daily Show’ and written the New York Times bestseller ‘How To Be Black.’ His Ted talk was described by MSNBC’s Brian Williams as ‘one of the greatest TED talks of all time.’ Thurston has the ability to integrate and synthesize themes of race, culture, politics, and technology to explain where our nation is and where we can take it. And, he infuses this with a levity needed when discussing difficult topics.
Thurston is also the executive producer and host of ‘How To Citizen with Baratunde,’ where he talks about what it means to be a ‘citizen’ in the world today – reimagining the word as a verb, to help reclaim our collective power. The podcast was named one of Apple’s favorite podcasts of 2020 and winner of the Social Impact Award at the 2021 iHeartRadio Podcast Award. He’s also the host of a new podcast from Salesforce.org and iHeartMedia, ‘Force Multiplier: Action Meets.’
Thurston shares more on the importance of our words and how we can all drive change.
Create impact through storytelling
Baratunde Thurston: We see so much negativity in the news and I knew there was a different story happening out in the world. I’m surrounded by people working to make it better, taking action – even if they’re not solving the problems, they’re at least trying to address them. The news doesn’t seem set up to tell those stories. I felt frustrated by my inability to affect some of the things I cared about on top of the negativity of the news – so I thought, let’s make better news. Let’s speak with people who are working to make the world a better place. So with optimism, perseverance, and frustration bundled together, my wife and I created the show [‘How To Citizen with Baratunde’]. Walking the talk, we created a podcast where you can find the people doing the ‘citizen’ thing and give everyone listening something they can do, too.
What does it mean to be a ‘citizen’
BT: There are four principles involved: the first one is we show up and participate. The second is we invest in relationships with ourselves and with others. Increasingly, we see how ‘others’ are not just other people, but also include other forms of life like the environment. Democracy is a relational exercise. It’s about how we live with others, especially with others who are different from us. We gave ourselves a tool to manage that difference in a relatively peaceful, nonviolent, and constructive process that was better than the alternatives. The third is we understand our power – the power of voting, of our voice, of our money, of our attention. Lastly, we must do things to benefit the many, not just the few. We have to prioritize the collective.
My mother definitely planted some of these seeds of action in me. She was a citizen in the verb sense. She would go to community vigils, write letters, educate herself, and understand herself so she could understand the world better, and she expected her children to also do things to make the world a better place – a small task, like upholding democracy.
Can we choose to use technology to support, expand, and extend our democracy? Who is doing democracy better, and who is using tech to help us ‘citizen’?
Baratunde Thurston, POdcast host of ‘How to citizen’
We have to participate in our democracy in order to keep it
BT: We want to create an economy that helps us ‘citizen’ as opposed to the opposite. The news isn’t showing people doing the work. There’s so much we aren’t hearing, and if we heard more, we’d believe more in ourselves. The framework of our nation is capitalistic. The extreme way that we’ve explored this reality – with such unreckoned inequality, racism, and exclusion – has made it harder to do all the other things that were supposed to make our country great. The next questions we need to ask ourselves are, ‘Can we choose to use technology to support, expand, and extend our democracy? Or will we continue to be used by technology to lose our agency, our ability to collectively decide our future? Who is doing democracy better, and who is using tech to help us ‘citizen’?’
Your words matter
BT: Primarily, our experience of the world is through the media. We comprehend reality heavily through media. We don’t tangibly interact with reality – we hear things, we read about things, someone tells you a story – we aren’t present for most things we hear about the world, but we are aware of so many things because of what we’re told. Our values are also communicated through those stories.
We perceive the world through headlines, through stories, through words, and that puts so much weight on the words we…
