Baratunde Reflects on Season Two

And uh, I decided to like look up my credits core. Oh dear lord. The amount of red that I saw it was there was this one card that I kind of forgot about because it was after my mom died, and I got very distracted and I was like, I don't pay bills anymore. I cried, That's what I do. And then when I stopped crying, I didn't remember to go pay the bills. I just I was like I moved forward as well. I don't look back. And I was ashamed because I was like, I got this college degree,

I'm twenty something years old. I am a full grown up, you know. I signed a lease rate I owned a car for a minute, I'm doing this adulting thing, and I felt really alone because I thought I was supposed to know. I thought I was supposed to be better and have done better until I've met a good friend of mine who also had a college degree and he had a terrible credit score too. Oh that was that was an interesting reunion. We're like, yo, you have terrible

credit who's embarrassing their family? This guy? Know? This guy? That's me. That's me who should have been better but isn't doing better. Oh that's YouTube. Wait, so we're not so alone in all these feelings. Well, that's actually pretty cool. We shared that shame, which made it feel less like shame, and we made some fun of it, and then we got to working on it together. My point is the economy we're living in makes us all feel alone, the

same way my credit score made me feel alone. So many of us feel ashamed and embarrassed, and sometimes we even feel like it's our neighbor's fault that things are so bad. In other words, isolation and shame lead to division. But the truth is we're not alone. That's what we made this season for. How do we bring a different story of this economy to life. I wanted to understand the forces that stop us from being able to show

up as citizens. This wealth and equality built on racial exclusion, fueled by a corporate consolidation of power, resulting and growing numbers of people who are overworked, underpaid, and undersupport with it. I wanted to understand all that and talk to the people who are moving us forward into a more united, equitable future where we could all pay the bills, where we can all citizens. And I think we did that. I know we missed many things. We couldn't cover everything.

We didn't talk about overseas tax shelters, we didn't talk about the massive economic impact of the climate crisis. But the point wasn't to gather every piece of the public. The point was to paint a bigger picture, to tell a bigger story of an economy that could work to benefit us all. And by pursuing this bigger story, I learned that this wealth and equality that's aparated in us

its roots run deep into our past. Our original economic model was stolen people, stolen land, and stolen labor, And in order to justify that within a Christian society, they had to make those people who were being stolen less than human back to what Heather McGee calls this zero sum worldview, this US versus them mentality that for one to win, another has gotta lose, and it's designed to keep everybody in their place. And the model was, I profit, you lose. You don't get to share any of the

games of your land, your effort, your labor, nothing. But even then this was the real like aha for me. Even then, that worst possible economic model only truly maximally benefited a narrow elite back then of white people. Wealthy white folks created a story, a story designed to exclude people of color and to distract the poor white folks

from what was really going on. And so that white slave owning, landowning elite had to convince the far more numerous, landless, indentured white folks who were sitting there in the you know, rocky fields alongside the black folks, that they were better than the person down the row, and that in fact, justice or freedom for black folks would be a threat to white folks period. The I of course, always knew our country is built on racism. I'm very much on

the record saying that. But I've got to say, I was surprised to hear from just about everybody that a major point in our country's history of racist economics was also this era that our history books tend to paint as a time of tremendous growth and prosperity for Americans. The New Deal, the New Deal, the New Deal. There was New Deal, policies of the New Deal, labor laws,

the Party of the New Deal for white Americans. The New Deal was the Democratic Party's response to the Great Depression in the nineteen thirties, where we put these foundational, sweeping policies and in place to try to reset and adjust our economy and our democracy for the next phase. Tens of millions of people made a working class into

the middle class through this massive economic expansion. It included protections for the right to organize a union, social security and other assistance for people on hard times, strong anti monopoly policies, subsidization of housing. We had these state funded colleges in every state. It was just sort of this period of time where everything kind of aligned to make the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. And it was social movements that created the context for that.

Workers everyday people organizing it sounds like the American dream. It sounds like the American dream. Ding ding ding, You got that's it, that was it, that was when we had it, you know. But the question is who was the week? And so much of what I just described was done from a federal policy level in an explicitly

racially exclusive way. This thing we celebrate should probably be called the New Deal for white Americans because a lot of us were deliberately excluded, which reinforced that us versus them worldview that started with the slave owning elite in the first place. So white people got to move up while people of color will. We remain stuck, but as we always have, we fought to be included. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the

victim of Americans. We don't see any American dreams. We've experienced, only the American night movie. We do not want our freedom graduate, but we want to be fret now all realization. It takes dedication, It takes the willingness to stand by and do what has to be done when it has to be done. We had the Civil rights movement pushing for everyone to get in on that American dream, on that liberty and justice for all. But they have always

been those resisting that progress. And you think that that pushback, that that racism would only hurt the intended targets a k a. Black people, But the crazy truth is white folks were so determined to exclude Black Americans that they actually sabotaged themselves. There's one wild example. I can't stop thinking about. The town's drained the public pools, rather than integrate them, took the water out, backed up trucks of dirt, dumped it in, paved it, over seated it with grass.

In my governery, Alabama, they closed the entire Parks and Recreation department. They sold off the animals in the zoo, all to avoid sharing it with black folks. And then this guy shows up, Ronald Reagan. Do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the

United States. Ronald Reagan, he was a Republican heavy hitter, the former governor of California, and he basically came in with a big business mentality rolling back the social programs of the New Deal, and he was very, very successful at doing that. The ideas essentially were bigger and bigger industries that are ever more efficient and can put out more stuff for less money. At the University of California, college was free for everyone. Why did that get rolled back?

Ronald Reagan was governor. He didn't like that they're all these protesters at Berkeley. He didn't like the beginning of the black power movement at Merritt College campus, and he said this, it shouldn't be subsidizing curiosity. I remember seeing evictions and plant closures and members of my family losing

jobs and benign neglect. That was when you started to see a lot of money and resources pulled out of urban cities, urban programs, and that is really what accelerated urban decline and the loss of value in urban communities. He cut all kinds of things. He cut policies that were designed to better resolve He cut urban programs creating this benign neglect, cut publicly funded higher education out of spite,

and changed our anti monopoly policies. Selling us this story, which is fitting for a man who never quite fully left Hollywood, selling us this bootstrap narrative that if you just try hard enough, if if you alone wanted bad enough, you alone can make it on your own that you already have everything you need to succeed. If you just want to succeed badly enough, and your failure to succeed,

that's yours alone. You shouldn't need anybody else's help. There is this moralism associated with poverty, where we believe in individuals who are poor are bad people, or they're not capable people, they're not as smart as we have not looked at or examined the systems, so that make it virtually impossible for individuals to move up the economic latter. So much of what we know today is tied up in what we've been taught for so long with somebody

else told us. When I first spoke with Jamila Medley, she told me we have to heal from individualism. M hmm, what a scrumptious and true statement. Individualism as an illness really stuck with me. We're told all our lives, get an education, find a well paying job, buy your house, start a family, do this, do that, And all I'm hearing is me, me, me, me, me, figure it out, do it all by yourself. And then I remember what Heather said, two people in a cold room, one's got

a coat, one doesn't. But if they just sort of joined together and like shouldered open the door, then walked out into the sun where it's seventy degrees. They both be good, you know, but it's the boss that keeps them in the cold room. Imagine if we dropped the individualism and work together, things could get a whole lot better for all of us. When some of us lose, we all lose. When we work together, we can all win. And you could say that this idea goes back way

earlier than Reagan, way earlier than the New Deal. We can take it all the way back to something Astra Taylor told me about the ancient Greeks. The word idiot actually comes from the ancient Greek as well. Idiotis and it didn't mean that you were dumb or uneducated. What it actually meant was that you were a private person. You're only concerned with yourself. So in ancient Athens, the

worst thing could be was an idiot. And once we change our mindset and stop looking just at this separate world of us and them, seeing ourselves as individuals instead see ourselves as part of a week that we benefit when everybody does by definition, that's when we can start to do some real cool stuff. We can have new models of business that served the many, not just the few. So this is a model for how to cement ourselves

as citizens. After the break we talk solutions. So clearly, our economy has some issues racism, division, all the money flowing right into the pockets of Mr Bezos, and this extreme wealth inequality that's been plaguing our nation for decades. But if there's one thing I learned this season, it's that people are coming out swinging. There are people working hard to citizen and to create new models that make

it possible for all of us to thrive. And as I started looking at some of these incredible new models, I noticed that they were accounting for something that feels very far away from capital e economics. They were focusing on human needs, on the fact that in order for the economy to thrive, people need to thrive too. First, you need space, like a space of your own, physical space, a mental space to feel like you belong, like you've

got room to grow. When you're tied down to debt, trust me, it's impossible to feel that sense of space. It's impossible to pay the rent or educational opportunities or health expenses when you are burdened by that lack of space. You don't have time to ground yourself, to plant yourself, to think about growing into something more. You're too busy surviving.

Nony Sessions saw firsthand what happens when people lose that sense of physical space called home, without land, without permanence, the path in the future go up and smoke, They disappear. There's nothing to connect you to before, and there's there's very little the ground YouTube after. Nony is a third generation West Oaklander, a community that's been assaulted by gentrification,

or what she calls accelerated racialized displacement. As she's watched countless evictions, the encampments of houseless Oaklanders get larger and larger, and big developers swarm their way in. She realized that the solution was ownership, and that her community was vulnerable because her community didn't own their land. So she created

eb PRECK, the East Bay Permanent real Estate Cooperative. This fights gentrification in West Oakland by buying up real estate and historically black and brown communities and then collectively owning and managing those properties democratically. So this is a model for how to cement ourselves as citizens structurally. So ownership permanent is critical for culture building, identity building, the building

of futures. Ownership gives us room to breathe. And there's this thing that I've felt through all of these conversations about the power of place and community, about being grounded somewhere and having a platform from which to launch, to become more, to become citizens, to citizens not just legally, but in a community sense, to feel connect did to other people, to feel valued with and buy other people

in a way that isn't captured by dollars. It's captured by something else, something Richer small business owner and distiller Maria Strada remembers that feeling so clearly. When the pandemic hit her community in Bushwick, I started realizing that people did love us in a way, which is something I didn't really recognize. When COVID hit Marie's distillery, Moto Spirits turned around and started making hand sanitizer to supply hospitals and to keep her community safe. And when Marie needed

her neighbors to show up, they did. Everyone was reaching back out to us, the relationships that we had initially fostered with random things like motorcycles and dogs, and they just came, you know, everyone just said okay, well we're

gonna do this. Or bartenders came and we did this bartending event once this competition, and they reached out and they said, hey, how about if we do you know, a special cocktail thing for you online and then we can you know, give that money to a certain organization. So that's that's how we've been doing things. Now, I gotta say hearing how Mri showed up for her community

in its time of need challenge. The way I often think about businesses, like our US concept of how a business works tends to involve the image of cost cutting and operating opportunistically, competitively and above all, capitalistically to maximize profits. I think about CEOs get the basils who make piles of money while workers fight for a livable minimum wage. But so many guests really elevated my idea of what a successful community centered business should and can look like.

Jamila Medley has seen the cooperative ownership model working for hundreds of years. But what exactly is a cooperative? Like? What's a co op? I thought I knew, but I really didn't. So a co op has two components. One is the association of people who come together. They identified that they have a shared need economic, social, cultural, and they determined that they want to democratically own an enterprise together, and so they create that business to fulfill the need

that they have. So co ops sound new ag, but really certain communities have been practicing cooperative economics on the d L for a long time. For black folks in Philadelphia, cooperative economic and mutual aid practices have been essential to survival. So we can think back to periods when black folks were enslaved and there were people who were running away from slavery who came to Philadelphia and created a rich and robust community of black folks here. But they survived

in many ways through cooperative economic practices. Here's the thing that resonates most with me about the cooperative model. It gives people a chance to make their voices heard. It gives people a choice. It's like this little place where democracy plays out. And as I started to explore these new models of business, it became clear that that sense of agency is key well beyond voting, well beyond business,

just in life. It's a lot easier to thrive when you have the space to make your own decisions rather than someone prescribing those decisions for you, giving you the feeling of choice while having pre selected a certain set of options that you're limited by now. Bruce Patterson saw that when he set out to bring a public option, a choice for broadband to the small town of amin Idaho. There's no way for you to invest in a different outcome unless you own it. That's the only way you

can invest in a different outcome. So as a community, people that decide to join AM and Fiber, they're invested in that. So when they call and we've got an issue, they know they're talking to somebody that lives in the same community. After the break public broadband and free money, I gotta say I am a total nerd. I said it before and I'll say it again that the Internet is a subject close to my heart and I feel

like something that doesn't get talked about enough. Is this connection that broadband has to our economy, our society, and our ability to show up as citizens. Without equal internet access, we don't have equal access to information, and in the pandemic, it means we don't have equal access to work, to school, even to vaccines, which is why I was so excited to talk to Bruce. How would we as a small town in idahobe competitive in attracting businesses and residents with broadband.

So the hardest part about this isn't the technology, but the absolute hardest thing is consensus. Bruce found that locals were paying for this essential need access to the Internet, which is like access to electricity or water or even air, but their needs were not getting met, not getting met by the private option. There are people in neighborhoods that want fiber, they want better connectivity, they want another choice. And here's the brilliant thing to me, Bruce didn't just

jam the option down people's throats. He knew that wouldn't go over well and conservative rural Idaho. No, he found those people where they were in their neighborhoods and gave them a space and opportunity to discover and voice their needs. These people came out of the woodwork and found us and said, if I talk to my neighbors, if I go knock on doors, can you give me anything to say?

So we started to call these folks fiber champions, and they did it am and Idaho now has the choice to opt into some of the cheapest, fastest, most public internet in the country. The Open Technology Institute did a cost of connectivity research program and found am and to have the cheapest gig internet in the world. I gin poos fight for domestic workers is about giving those workers

more choices. The choice to have health benefits comes to mind, but it's also about lending the care and support our society needs to open up choices for the rest of us. We think about infrastructures, bridges and tunnels and broadband, but what could be more fundamental infrastructure than the ability to make sure that our families are loved, ones are cared

for so that we can work. I call these jobs job enabling jobs because they make it possible for everything else to work and everyone else to work, space to live, access to internet, access to health care, and job options.

All of that equates to choice. But at the end of the day, so much choice in this economy comes right down to money, and giving poor black mother's choices is why Yandoro started the Magnolia Mother's Trust Magnolian Mother's Trust as the first and only guaranteed income project in this country that takes a racial and gender equity approach to our conversations about wealth and equities within this country. It provides a thousand dollars a month twelve months and

no strings attached extremely low income Black mothers. Yeah, that's right, a thousand dollars a month, no strings attached for a full year. Because you can't citizen when you can barely pay the bills, when you live in poverty and don't have savings. How that constantly holding your breath? Um, how stressful that is, and how that takes away your ability to plan and dream and hope. One of our moms went do in the pandemic and became a paramedic. She's like,

I always want to be a paramedic. They need paramedics now. I'm like, yes, they do need paramedics now. And by giving people money, Magnolia Mother's Trust is giving people options, giving them a chance to decide on their future, a chance two citizen. And that's exactly what Astra Taylor told me about ancient Greek society. Greece is this mythic birthplace of democracy in the US. And there's some parts of their society that definitely needed work. Women were excluded, and

you know they own slaves. But there's one thing they really did get right. They paid those who counted as citizens to participate in self government, and when it was your turn, you'd actually get called up to serve. It was like jury duty. But for Congress, they were thinking about these problems we're not thinking about, which is how do you create systems of equality? How do you compensate people so they can truly participate? Right? And this is

why I'm saying that we're stuck. We just aren't being very creative when you think about all the tools or disposal, and when we think democracy equals elections, I think we have to be honest that might be a contradiction in terms when we give ourselves room to citizen to really show up and invest in relationships and understand our power and benefit the many not the few. We give ourselves room to pursue things that some of us have deemed radical.

I'm talking public broadband and giving people money just to do with what they say they need. So many of these things were a pipe dream to so many of us until the pandemic. Right now, in particular, I think we are in this a new New Deal moment, honestly, where more deeper, impactful change is possible than my entire twenty five years of organizing. Yeah, that's right, I'm bringing

up the Rhona. Look, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you how great COVID nineteen has been for everybody, how good it was for society, because it's not, and it hasn't been. It caused us a lot of pain, a lot of distraction, a lot of agony. But it's also shown us how dire things have been and how much better they can be. And it's shown us that when pressed, we can rise to that opportunity. You know, we've kind of been here before. This happened with the

Great Depression. Our entire nation's economy crashed, and we responded. We were forced to respond with the New Deal. So what's gonna happen now. Adoption of a widespread guaranteed and come on a national scale. I think that that will look like as finally eradicating poverty. I think that will look like us having healthier families. I think that would look like us having healthier kids. I think that would look like us finally looking like the greatest nation in

the world. I think that would change the trajectory of our future, not just for some before an entire country, before the pandemic, universal basic income was this radical, relatively fringe idea. Now everyday Americans are cashing stimulus checks and enhance unemployment benefits, and we're starting to expect it. Maybe now we can create that new new deal that doesn't leave out people of color and explicitly exclude so many who we need to all move forward. Maybe we'll get

to be just go out and limb here free. Do you believe? Is you know a biblical term, right? It's this ancient term, uh, for the moment the deaths are canceled in the land is given back, the economy we get so out of whack, people would be selling themselves into debt servitude. And you know ancient Babylonia, and so periodically the king would say, jubilie, wiping up the slate. So that's been canceled, and now you're free. You can

go back home. What would it mean to be free of crushing debt, free of small mindedness, free of being penned in and not being able to show up as citizens? That excites me? Can you hear it in my voice? Oh my goodness, I'm getting a little excited. Okay, calm down here. Today. I am cautiously optimistic about this future. But I've also lived, and I know this is not going to be easy. It's never been easy. Literally, it's always hard. Doing good stuff is almost always hard to

do because there's gonna be pushed back. People will get impatient with the pace to change. Some of us will remain stuck in the zero sum us versus them mentality. And we're still struggling with how to grow through the systemic racism that's held us back so long. We're still struggling to accept all people as people, regardless of how they identify themselves versus our limited expectations of who they're supposed to be. We're still struggling with just really starting

to face the size of the climate crisis. Yeah, climates hanging out there like I see your plans? What? And still with all that, with all those real challenges that I've named and some that I haven't, I feel like something big could happen. I know something big could happen. And I know what's more likely to happen if we all do our part, if we show up right, if we participate, if we if we citizen, even in small ways, to help make those possible big changes, real, big realities.

That's the story we put together. But there is one more story to tell in this season. Next week we have a very special guest and a very special episode. Yeah, I get called like a professor doing comedy, which you know, it feels good in some way because it makes my parents feel good to hear the word professor next to my name. At the same time, it's I don't want to be teaching people. I want to be making them laugh, and I want to be able to make anybody laugh.

Next week, Harri Kondabolo, and now time for some action. Ask yourself, how did this season make you feel? How has it challenged you and what have you learned? And if you're comfortable sharing any of those reflections, please share them with us. Send an email to comments at how to Citizen, doctor m or leave a voice memo with feedback. In general, how do Citizen dot com slash voiceman. We know there's always more to learn, which is why we

set up a special bookshop just for you. Head over the bookshop dot org slash shop slash how to Citizen. We've got shelves with titles written by our guests, those recommended by our guests, and those we have learned to love as well. I am sure there's something on those shelves that will help you keep learning. I know we've asked you to do a lot this season, and if you've missed any of it, we got you head over to how the Citizen dot com for all those actions

plus more. There's some bonus thing happening over there where we've got personalized ways to get you going on your citizen journey. We know it's not always easy to know where to start, so we built something a little customized just for you. And lastly, just tell somebody about the show. If you've been with us this long, you know what we're up to was dope. We need you to tell the algorithms how dope we are with those five stars in those reviews. We need you to tell your friends,

your family members, and your colleagues. And if you go loud on social media, our hashtag is how to Citizen Now. I've got to thank some people for helping make this show possible. I want to thank all of our guests. It's pretty obvious I couldn't have done this without them. It would just be me talking to myself, which, trust me, has its limits. I want to thank the Economic Security Project,

who helped us find so many of these guests. To my producing team, Stephanie Cone, Ali Killed, Sam Paulson, Kelly Prime, thank you for your patience with me, for your creativity, and for your dedication. And a special thanks to Misha Yusuf, Tamka Adams, Arwin Nix, and Rachel Garcia all at dust Like Super Dope. Special extra thanks to this show's executive

producer and my wife, Elizabeth Stewart. I used the term we a lot when I'm describing this show, and sometimes I mean that generically, like we're all part of a collective find the week, but often I mean that very specifically, like me and Elizabeth. You hear my voice, but you're often experiencing her thinking, her brain, and her big picture vision. She's been a key to the architecture of this season,

helping us all connect these dots. So thank you, Bo. Finally, thank you for listening, for emailing and social media in and sharing your literal voice with us. Thank you for Citizen. We're in this together? How does Citizen? With Baritone Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and Dust Like Productions. Our executive producers are Me Barritton, Day, Thurston Elizabeth Stewart and Misha Yusa. Our producers are Stephanie Cone and Ali Kilts. Kelly Prime is our editor, Valentino Rivera

is our engineer, and Sam Paulson is our apprentice. Original music by Andrew Eaple. This episode was produced and sound designed by Stephanie Comb. Special thanks to Joel Smith from my Heart Radio