[Music]
BARATUNDE THURSTON: So if I had to tell someone to read one chapter, it would the chapter
called How To Be Black, which is the whole book!
Read the whole book!
[Music]
I wrote a book.
It's called How To Be Black and it's a book that I wrote with words on the inside, a cover
on the outside, and I polled a panel of black experts which is to say black people, that
I asked a series of questions about kind of what it means to be black and what they want
for the future of race in the United States especially.
In my questions to my black panel, I assembled seven people, seven questions and the last
question that each of them got was what do you want from the future of race or blackness
in America and I called this chapter The Future of Blackness and assembled my thoughts in
concert with theirs to a grand unified theory of blackness.
And it involved a couple of layers.
One was a new understanding of the role of black history and that that's really American
history in this attempt to separate black people and the black experience, most notably
in the case of President Obama.
The idea that he's not one of us.
Black people are the most of us.
Despite being denied your full humanity, they continue—we continue—to be a part of the
country.
To fight in wars, to sacrifice and all these things, so there's nothing more American than
that at the highest ideals.
There was a notion of shared sacrifice and sort of shared struggle and the idea that
for too long the ownness of ending oppression has landed on the shoulders of the oppressed.
It's like oh women have to be responsible for ending sexism, homosexuals have advocate
most loudly for ending homophobia, and minorities need to be most responsible for ending racial
oppression.
And that only goes so far.
First of all, I'm tired.
I've been doing this my whole life.
I want a vacation.
I'd like to take a little break from fighting racism all the time and really just hand the
baton and microphone over.
It's white people's turn.
But more specifically there was a notion espoused by one of the people I interviewed, W. Comeau
Bell, who has a TV show on called Totally Biased.
Anyway, he put forward this notion of every group working on the group one over from them.
And we might be more effective toward ending all kinds of -isms if homosexuals worked on
behalf of immigrants and immigrants worked on behalf of women and women worked on behalf
of black people and black people worked on behalf of latinos and that we could develop
a deeper level of empathy and more collectively solve our problems.
You can't end racism and make sexism worse was his very apt and very useful quote.
And then the last layer of the sort of future of blackness theory was the idea of experimental
blackness.
Of being positively unleashed from the cultural bounds established by commercial hip hop,
by maybe our ideas within he black community itself.
Go abroad, snorkel, do yoga, eat tofu.
Do all sorts of things.
Embrace the diverse experience of the world and don't fear that somehow restricts your
blackness.
It does quite the opposite and expands it because you're doing it.
Hey y'all, this is Baratunde Thurston.
I'm actually about to fly.
I do a lot of that—I'm lookin' at the wrong part of the camera—anyway, here's a chance
for you to ask me all kinds of questions you may have wanted to about the book, about what
you've seen in the video, about what you haven't seen in the video.
So what I'm asking you to do is drop some questions for me and I will get back to you
through some live, interactive technological phenomenon possibly involving computers and
video and audio and my voice and words.
Thanks!