Democracy is something we do, not something we have, according to Baratunde Thurston, an Emmy-nominated storyteller who spoke at Illinois State University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Dinner February 15.
“(Democracy’s) biggest weakness is blind faith that it will always exist, that it is a thing that exists,” Thurston told the crowd of 575 students, faculty, staff, and community members gathered in the Bone Student Center’s Brown Ballroom.
“We are the things that exist—the organic matter that moves and breathes life into a practice and a process of democracy, which is a lot more than voting. It’s a lot of doing,” Thurston said.
The host of PBS TV’s America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, he is also the creator and host of Life with Machines (video podcast) and How To Citizen with Baratunde (podcast), and he is the author of the New York Times bestselling comedic memoir, How To Be Black.
Thurston began his talk Saturday evening by inviting attendees to share a series of collective deep breaths. “We are one. Our fates are intertwined. When I breathe, you breathe,” Thurston said.
“For most of us, we do much better when we work together.”
Baratunde Thurston
He then talked about growing up in Washington, D.C., where he and his older sister were raised by their mother, Arnita Lorraine Thurston.
“She was so many things woven into one form—a crunchy nature-loving hippie, Sierra Club card-carrying member. … She rode horses, and she fell in love with that connection to that other part of us. She became radicalized in the Black Power movement. … She was stirring up some good trouble,” Thurston said.
Born in 1940, “into an American story which had very little place for her,” Thurston’s mother was an artist, an activist, and a survivor of sexual assault who became a computer programmer for the federal government’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
When Thurston was about 12 years old, his mother asked him and his sister to “come up with the system we would live under after democracy and capitalism have failed.”
“I’m sorry, what? Capital-who?” Thurston remembered thinking.
“She foresaw the unsteadiness of the system,” Thurston said. “I regret to inform you, I don’t have the answer. It doesn’t work that way. But it did plant a seed, a seed of inquiry, which I’ve been on a journey, exploring through a lot of different projects.”
Thurston discussed the podcast he created with his wife, Elizabeth Stewart, called How To Citizen, which reconsiders “citizen” as a verb instead of a noun.
Through four seasons and nearly 60 episodes, they discerned four main principles. “To citizen,” they discovered, is: to understand power; to participate—“to assume there’s a role for you to play, and that it’s not always somebody else’s job to do it”; to commit to the collective, not just the individual self; and to invest in relationships—with oneself, with each other, and with the planet.
“For most of us, we do much better when we work together,” Thurston said.
Thurston shared his experience visiting Elaine, Arkansas, for an episode of America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, where in 1919, hundreds of Black people were slaughtered at the hands of an angry mob as sharecroppers pushed for fair pay from white plantation owners.
In 2022, Lisa Hicks-Gilbert, a surviving descendant of the Elaine Massacre, was elected as Elaine’s first Black and first female mayor. Now, she is leading efforts to raise awareness about the massacre and create economic opportunities for fellow surviving descendants.
A rails-to-trails project, for example, has transformed the former rail line, which once brought federal troops to assist the deadly mob, into a bike path explored by Bike.POC, an organization aiming to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in cycling.
“(On America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston) we decided to go on a bike ride with the town pastor, the town mayor, a historian, and a multiracial group of people, joyfully riding through this town,” Thurston said. “The mayor knows that all this tourism and people like me, but also more people in the region, are going to come through. Let those (tourism) dollars land in Elaine, and let that healing land in the bodies of the people for whom the land was a scene of a crime. So much crime with so much healing and purpose.
“It’s hard to put into words the experience of joyfully, multi-racially, ancestrally-powered bicycling on a previous path of destruction,” Thurston continued. “We need that too. We need great policies. We need thoughtful analysis, but we need embodied experiences of a different way of relating to each other. That’s not always about talking and debating and arguing.”
Thurston also highlighted The Great Law of Peace, the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, which contained Indigenous democratic ideals that, along with European influences, helped inspire the U.S. Constitution.
“Now, there are some key elements to this deeper, original, more embodied, traditional democracy that didn’t quite show up ours, such as an equal role for women,” Thurston said.
“I’m telling you about this for many reasons,” Thurston continued. “One, we should know it. Two, we’re in a season of celebrating history, and this is real American history. And three, we’re in a moment where my mother’s assignment to help come up with how we could live after democracy and capitalism have failed is feeling very timely and very urgent.”
Thurston said there is an opportunity, now, for us to ask, “How do we actually want to live? How do we want to be together?”
“In that metamorphic transition, there’s a magical opportunity and possibility to reconnect with the deeper potential that’s always been here; that’s always been in us,” Thurston said.
He ended by quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
“I think it’s pretty dark right now, and I see so many stars,” Thurston said.
“Only when it is darkest do we see us as we truly are, as we beautifully and essentially are, totally connected with everything and everyone else and every kind of being … and it is beauty for me to experience your light tonight.”
The Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Dinner was presented by Illinois State University’s Office of the President, University Housing Services, the Office of Equity and Inclusion, the Association of Residence Halls, the Association of Black Employees, and the Black Student Union.
