Root to Rise: Baratunde Thurston on Wellness, The Joy of Stretching, & Facing Resistance
This interview is part of the Root to Rise conversation series hosted by Jacy Cunningham in February 2021, which explores the role wellness plays in activists’ lives as they work to uplift their communities and make history. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity, but you can watch the full conversation below on YouTube.
Jacy
Today's guest is a beautiful friend of mine named Baratunde Thurston. We go way back. I've trained him many times before. We kind of come from the same community, and we're very like-minded, so I'm excited to have him on this conversation to speak on things about everything when it comes to wellness, when it comes to race relations, when it comes to how we navigate these uncomfortable conversations. How do we navigate these taboo topics, and how do we really create a place for it? Just pure discussion. We're not too busy in leaning upon trying to find opinions and dictate, but just like, "Hey, how can we come together and really find a resource in each other?" That's what this exciting conversation is about.
Baratunde is amazing. If you have never heard of him, he's been on many publications. He now can be seen on pretty much every channel that you can find, and he's very, very, very well-versed when it comes to understanding humanity, especially here in America.
I am so honored to always sit before you, to have this space to talk and discuss things with you. We have such a beautiful history. Just to give you guys a little insight into who Baratunde is, Baratunde's from D.C. I am also from D.C. Baratunde went to Sidwell Friends School, in the District of Columbia. I went to Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland.
Those schools are in the same conference, so we have a certain understanding of humanity through that experience. I think private school has been one of the greatest gifts and also challenges in my life, trying to understand the scope of humanity through that kind of lens. The first question I have to you is what prompted you to write the book that you did, How to Be Black?
Baratunde
The shortest possible answer is a publisher prompted me. Almost literally. I was speaking at a conference at the Javits Center, in New York, long ago, on a version of the internet called Web 2.0. It was literally a conference called The Web 2.0 Summit. Remember when you used to gather with hundreds or even thousands of other human beings in the same room? Remember those? Superspreader events. I was at a superspreader event, and on stage, making jokes and telling a story about the internet and racial justice and comedy and hashtags. Someone from HarperCollins was in the audience. Word got back to me through my people, which was just one of my homies. They were like, "Hey, somebody from Harper wants to talk to you about a book." They pursued me. That was the initial thing. They said, "What would you want to write a book about?"
I had been playing with ideas for a book before that, with a friend of mine, actually, Cheryl Contee. We had a Black political blog together called Jack and Jill Politics. I took the seed of that not-quite-followed-through idea and returned to this Harper conversation, saying, "I think I have a book in me, actually, come to think of it. Now that you mention it, I mean, I have been known to spin a word or two, or 10,000 on the internet, so why not murder a tree and put it in that instead." They said, "Oh, you're down with murdering trees?" I was like, "Yeah, for personal gain, sure."
There was actually a white guy in the room. I no longer remember his last name. It was Bob. I don't mean to sound generic. It was a white guy named Bob. This is a true story. We were talking about what the title of this could be, and I was like, "The Negropedia," but somebody had already taken that title. He's like, "What about How to Be Black?" I was like, "Bob, that's just so crazy. That's so crazy it might work." We did it, and so that's how the book was born. And then writing it is another story, but that's how it started.
Jacy
I've ready many pages of that book, and I've also been through the experience of just trying to navigate the world as a Black person, as a Black man, in society. Trying to be careful all the time. Trying to say the right things, do the right things, do just well enough to get by. That book sort of is, for me, a sort of manual to understanding how to not necessarily be too aggressive in society and really to understand how to form strategies around the ways in which you choose to express yourself. In today's day and age, as we exist right now, in 2021, with all the things that are happening, where do you see Black America now? Where do you see us going, and what do you think is a definitive kind of action plan to help us understand where we need to go?
Baratunde
You have asked a very significant question, and you shared something significant, as well, about managing and navigating in these spaces, and implied that there's a cost to that, which I will make explicit. There is a cost to that, and I am tired. I am wired to withhold some of my energy in reserve for self-protection, and that costs something. There is a cost in my body to that over years of stress management. As for where to Black people need to go, we're staying right here. Sorry, America. We built this so we ain't going nowhere. I want for us to continue to do what is required to survive, which is to speak the truth, which is to be resilient in the face of overwhelming disrespect and disparagement from the level of the system design of so much of this place, so I want us to continue to survive. I also want us to thrive and celebrate and express and experience joy.
There is a really powerful metaphor in the architecture of the National Museum of African American History in D.C. It's a visual...it's an immersive experience. There is order to the designs. You start in the bowels of the building, much like the bowels of a slave ship, and you work your way up. You're going in a circle, repeating trauma from Colonial to U.S. to various stages of that life here. By the time you get up to the ground level, it's like you just made it to the Obama stage. You're like, "Man, this story. This is really bumming me out, man. Really bumming me out."
I thought we were done, because we made it up, and then somebody's like, "Oh, have you gone upstairs yet?" I was like, "There's more? I don't know if I can take anymore African American history." But the upper floors are the culture. They've got a James Brown jacket up there. They've got all sorts of beautiful creativity and expression and life there. What I want for the specific plan for Black folk in America is to stay grounded in our reality, our contribution, and our belonging here, to stay strong and resilient and surviving, and to move further into thriving, celebrating, joyfully existing atop this powerful foundation of experiences we have lived or inherited from those who allowed us to live before we got here.
Jacy
That's real. One of the things that I focus on in my work is expressing joy.
Baratunde
That's why we're still connected, man. Jacy, you're the happiest causer of pain that I have ever had in my life. That's the real. This crew needs to understand that I met you in the mountains of Utah, in the least Black place I've ever been. "Oh, we have these training sessions with our in-house trainer, Jacy. He's a former footballer," blah blah blah blah blah. I'm just like, "Just chiseled. Just chiseled man. Like a statue come to life, moving like water." You look like a statue, but you move like water. And you are so joyfully instigating our bodies into movement. I've been through a lot of physical training, gyms, sport things, and you made it so much fun to put my body through stress that I kept coming back for more.
Jacy
That's a beautiful segue, even, because the whole point of these conversations was to connect wellness, because Alo Moves is a wellness app. It is a wellness platform, and to bring wellness back into the conversation of what it is as we discuss what it means to be Black, and how we exist as these very texturized and very traumatized, even, experiences. What are the ways in which you practice wellness? What are the ways in which you invite wellness into your life? Is it self-care? What are your practices that help you maintain your spirit to want to speak about these things and do the work?
Baratunde
That migration from New York to Los Angeles was part of a longer-term wellness practice, to get closer to dirt and trees. Not filth, dirt. That's very different. Soil, more specifically. New York's got plenty of dirt, and I love it. I've got mad love for you, New York. You helped make me who I am today, and you gave me the clear vision to decide I need to live somewhere else for a little bit, too. Always connected to New York, but my wellness required connection to trees and the sky and air, and, yes, squirrels and raccoons, which apparently they just live up in here. I'm the freeloader. I'm the third wheel in their love story, because these fruit trees, they're for them, and they allow me the privilege of claiming a few here and there. I'm sharecropping on squirrel land, is what's happening, right?
That's the first step, is just waking up in a different environment, and I walk every day. Just about every day I go for at least 15 minutes, but ideally, 45 to an hour. I just wander through these...well, not wander. I have a very prescribed path at this stage, but in the beginning, it was wandering. That was physically good. It gave me vitamin D, which is good. It connected me to the place that I live, which is good. I could wave to neighbors and say, "Don't call the police on me. Look at this smile. Look at this smile. Who's a good neighbor? This guy. He's not a threat. He's our neighbor."
Jacy
"He lives here."
Baratunde
Subtle mission also accomplished. And I meditate every day. I meditate twice a day, ideally. Most days I get at least one. Most days, actually, I get both in. But I notice the benefits in calming my heart rate and helping lower anxiety, and just feeling more rested. Even though I can sleep, there is something powerful about that high...it's like a sleep concentrate format. Like in the can, where you have to tap it and it slowly falls out. That's a 20-minute meditation for me in an afternoon.
Sleep is a part of my wellness practice. I used to disrespect sleep, think I didn't need it. Thought I was better than it. Saw it as my enemy. Tried to outwit it. Tried to outrun it. Tried to outlast it. Sleep always comes for you, and so I relented and decided to embrace it. My wife, she is really into sleep. She's professional in the game, and she's taught me to respect it a lot more, just by her example, in some ways. Don't tell her I said that. I usually complain about it.
But real talk, I've been more well because I've been more rested. That's the foundation. I've flirted with hyperactive versions of, "I'm going to join this specialty gym." There were all kinds of places that I flirted with, but ultimately, what I took from them is just to maintain the foundation, and then I explore options on top of that at will. I'm in the market for some new practices, because I think I've got a good foundation. This past year, just steady walking miles every day. Oh, and I plank. I plank. I do a three-minute plank.
I'm also big into stretching. I had a very stressful job at one point in the past. I don't know, five, six-ish years of my life. So stressful that my partner, she was like, "You should take up boxing, because you've got to work some things out." So I did. I took up heavy, heavy bags. A real fair fight, in my view. That helped with the stress relief, but it also created more tension in my body. That leads me to two things. Massage had become such an important part. I haven't had a massage since COVID, so I'm missing that tension release. But stretching...I hit that foam roller. I do stretches I've learned from yoga. I used to joke, "I want to become a professional stretcher." I was on the subway in New York, those bars and poles, that's a stretch gym right there. They charge money for that, you know? It just cost me, what, $2.50? $2.75? Whatever the fare. I'm like, "This is a gym." I'm doing the hanging low stretches, the little twists. Stretching is a really important part that I should return more to. I've got the walking down, but the stretching, I've got to bring that back more.
Jacy
I mean, I love hearing how much thought you put into your wellness practice because I think as we get older, especially, because I think you're...I'm not going to throw your age out there.
Baratunde
I'm 43. It's fine.
Jacy
All right, okay. 43. You know, people get all weird about their age, but you're 43. I'm 32, and as I've gotten older, I've recognized the more importance of self-care. Even being someone who is a trainer and in the industry of wellness, I still find myself pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. It's something that almost has been ingrained in me from the very beginning when I got here. I had to always push. I went to private school, and at private school, I had to push. This push mentality has allowed me to have the things that I have today and have the discipline and all the joy, even, but at the same time, I realize that the balance is always necessary.
We always talk about the great things, the highlights. What are some lowlights that you've gone through over the many years that you've been doing this work? What have been the moments where you're like, "Yo, I can't do that. I'm tired, yo. I can't. What? I don't know what to do with this."
Baratunde
Yeah. Low moments. When I learned that my father was murdered, when I was a young child. That was a very low moment. That was devastating sadness. Low moments, the end of my first marriage. That was a low moment. You don't get married to end it, you know? It's literally not part of the plan. I'm wiser and stronger and more capable of sharing and receiving love now, and that's been a gift in this new relationship. That knocked me down for a bit. The death of my mother, from colon cancer at age 65. Low moment. I mean, parents sequentially should probably die before their children, but that was just too soon. There were some particularly low moments where we both have the drive. You shared yours. I've got my version of that, and I'm relentless. I work very hard, and to whatever degree I have achieved something, I know it is, in significant part, due to my efforts, and also, in part, due to some fortune, some alignment, someone else's decision that affects my ability to achieve that outcome. There is still some humility in there, but I work my butt off.
When that's not rewarded, or when I feel like I'm just in a tough...no one's seeing it, that feels low. I had a position where I was doubting myself. "Am I capable of doing what I signed up to do? Is it me, or is it all of them?" Right? "Or is the lesson here in the difficulty, and the simple act of succeeding is not the value that I'm here to get?" I got a lot of value out of a very difficult place, where I did not feel like I succeeded, but I did gain. Yeah, those are a smattering, a random sampling of low moments in the life of Baratunde Thurston. Death, failure, abandonment.
Jacy
This hits home for everybody, you know? I lost my brother three years ago. I remember, still, how much of a space that is within me that I have to care for and I have to nurture and water every single day. It's almost like whenever someone goes, or is onto the next round, it's like we have a new plant inside of us that we have to water now. For me, every day, I take the opportunity in the morning to just water that plant.
My relationship ended a year ago, and I've been watering that plant. It's arrived at a place where I can be appreciative of my life and everything else that comes along with it, and appreciative of other people and their lives and whatever they have been going through, because that's the compassionate element that I think we miss out on a lot of the time.
What you do is you invite people into a deeper understanding and perspective of humanity, because at the end of the day, we all exist as humans in this large space called America, larger space called the globe, but we're all humans. We're all human beings. What ways in which have you found in your career or in your walk of life that you've been met with resistance? Not everybody's going to go, "Baratunde's amazing. Jacy's amazing." It's always a couple of people that are like, "Yo, forget this guy and what he's talking about." When you're met with resistance, which happens to many of us, especially in the social media realm, how do you handle it? What is a tool that you have in your toolkit that helps you manage your emotions when people are like, "Yo, man. Forget you, man. I'm not listening to you." Or, "What you're saying has no bearings in my life." Or, "I just don't like you. I don't like the way you look. I don't like the way you sound." How do you meet that?
Baratunde
I've got a big answer to this, but I'm going to start with the small answer, because it happened today. I got something showing up in my direct messages that hit me in a negative way. I felt myself getting riled up and feeling defensive, and feeling angry, and feeling my heartbeat accelerated. My blood pressure went up. I could feel my body getting warm. I'm noticing all these things. System check. The dials are moving, captain. I decided, "I don't want to feel like this. I don't need to feel like this. I don't know these people. It's, like, three people." I just breathed, and I thought to myself, "I'm not here to please anyone. I'm here to be myself. I'm here to learn what that means. That is not an act of perfection. It's an experiment in living. Experiments have all sorts of outcomes, but as I live, I get to experiment some more." I released them. I stopped holding onto whatever I had projected onto them in the first place, that maybe they didn't even intend in the way that I felt it. Breathing, so helpful. Breathing is free, always-on access to drugs. Nobody can take it away. If they can, it's a terrible day, of course, but in general, we have access to air, and when we don't, that's unjust. I breathe. When I'm feeling more enlightened, I choose to interpret the actions of the resistor as an expression of some wound in themselves, and not a reflection of my value. That is uncommon, for the record. When I'm feeling elevated, I choose that. I know I have that power.
The last answer is time. When you first said facing resistance, I was thinking about this period of my life. It was a year-and-a-half long period, or two-year period, roughly, where I made five television pilots. Five, for two different shows, for two different networks, and we are not, now, talking to the host of any of those shows. They didn't happen. I was working so hard. I made two pilots. I made three for one. Who makes three pilots? I'm like, "I could do it like this. I could do it like that. I gave everything and then some. I was like, "You see me now, right? Can I come in?" And then COVID happens, and everything shut down. I woke up one morning and I was like, "I'm going to make a show from right here. I'm going to call it Live on Lockdown."
“Looking back at that resistance, I’m like, ‘Oh, that might have been a gift.’”
I did that for weeks. I did 46 of them, here on IG, on Zoom and other places, and it was beautiful. It was more me than either of those things I was begging for someone to give me permission to do. Now, my free IG live show has not paid me any money, but it has given me a lot of value. It's connected me to people. I've had 46 hours of practice at self-producing a series and mixing media. I had to buy all this equipment. I learned so much. It kept me busy in a time where I might have just been twiddling my thumbs, getting sadder, more alone, more isolated, more depressed because of the way the world has been over the past 12 months.
Facing resistance, for me, doesn't always look like facing resistance. If I can see it after the fact that it's letting something go, it's releasing, it's breathing, it's experiencing time. Looking back at that resistance, I'm like, "Oh, that might have been a gift." I can still be mad at those executives. I can hold both at the same time. I'm not saying, "Thank you," but I might be grateful.
Jacy
In a sense, it's kind of similar to how, for instance, people in the Alo Moves community have no idea how I even got to Alo Moves. I sent a DM to Cody App in 2015. 2014, I think. No response. Over the years, I just kept doing my thing, as you see, and I just kept doing it, doing it, doing it. I just knew that around the corner was something coming. Something beautiful, something abundant. Alo Moves showed up. It's been one of my most wonderful experiences that I can say of my lifetime, having now had an experience of the globe and what they feel, what they share, how they receive it. How they receive joy. Joy is a common language spoken by all. No matter what you look like, no matter how tall or short you are, skin color, whatever, joy is a currency that we need to be operating on. I believe in it enough to know that that's what abundance means to me. Asking you in the same question, what does abundance mean to you?
“Abundance to me means recognizing that I have access to the whole universe — that I’m not actually separate from it.”
Baratunde
Abundance. Abundance to me means recognizing that I have access to the whole universe — that I'm not actually separate from it. I'm not doing battle with it. I'm not struggling to survive it. I am it, and it is me. Seeing that line disappear, between the self the universe, is a part of my journey. It's a beautiful thing to see. It's a hard thing to live. But when I think of abundance, deeply, purely, truly, it doesn't look like getting things. It doesn't look like mining or extracting, or even tapping into, which is a softer version of those things. It looks like being, belonging, breathing.
I want to recognize some people who helped me see that. One is my older sister, Belinda. Just B Yoga. The letter B Yoga. She is nine years ahead of me in human chronology. She's maybe a century ahead of me in spiritual evolution, and she created this yoga experience called Just B Yoga. It's donation-based. It's in Michigan. Watching her evolve that, and give access to some of these tools, has been really beautiful. I'm learning, right now, from another friend, a good friend of my wife's. Her name's Dr. Sam Rader. She talks about this stuff in a really beautiful way. I think she's one of those people that'll help you see the Matrix. Like, "Are you a Jedi?" Did I just mix Matrix and Star Wars universes? I did, because I am the universe and I can do that.
Some of it comes easily, and some of it goes away just as easily, too. I'm not pretending like I'm just in a state of oneness with the universe at all times. Like I never face resistance and only see pain as a teacher that I love. No. Things are hard, and people annoy me. God, I miss annoying people. Hard segue. I cannot wait to spend time with people I can't stand. I miss that. COVID took annoying people out of my life. I want to waste time in a DMV line, you know what I'm saying? I want to be unproductive with others.
Jacy
I'm just always in admiration of my peers, especially older Black men in my life, because growing up, I had wonderful examples of Black men. Wonderful. My father, my brothers, wonderful examples. Then I went to private school, and I didn't see any examples anymore. I was like, "I'm the only example I see. What is this?" You know? I had to go through the navigation of that world. The ups and downs of understanding identity. Understanding class. Really understand race and ethnicity, at that point, really.
It destroyed this concept of unity, for me, at a certain point, where I was like, "Well, this is clearly separate from where I am and where I'm from. Why does this exist in such glamor and such prestige? Why is Landon School so much more beautiful than Friendly High School?" Which is my neighborhood school. "Why would my mom send me there, but she had to send me here and pay 30 grand a year for me to go there?" Ending off with this question, because I think it's just one that's been sitting on my heart. For the humans of the world, what did private school do for you? How did private school equip you with getting to where you've gotten to today?
Baratunde
One, I learned that rich people have problems too. I had a very binary understanding. “If you have more money, less problems.” More money, different problems, actually. Sometimes worse, depending on what you're used to. You're like, "Oh, so you have a roof over your head and really nice shoes and all the food you could ever need, but you're lonely? Your parents don't show you love? They think they can buy it? Oh, shit. That must suck. Sorry." Yeah. That abuse knows no bounds. Money doesn't shield you from emotional and physical abuse. I saw some kids suffering some of that. That was humbling and eye-opening and connecting, and it made people who I could easily caricature human again, which is something I needed to learn, and need to continue to learn. I think we all do, to be human to each other.
I learned that money buys some nice stuff, though. I learned that there is a sport called lacrosse. I was like, "What? So it's like hockey but you throw the thing through the air? But you wear pads, so it's football, but you can't really see the...how do you follow this sport? I don't even know where the ball is." It seems dangerous in a way that even football isn't, because in football, you're not wielding a baton. Go for it. You do you. I am definitely not. I learned to love people who I thought I had nothing in common with when I accidentally joined the wrestling team. That's a story for another time, but these brothers were wild. Wrestlers are nuts. I loved them, and it was great. I did it just one year, the senior year. Don't start wrestling your senior year. That's what I learned, because everybody you are wrestling at that weight class has been in it for a minute, and you're up against state champions from Russia, and it doesn't end well. It literally doesn't end well for you, so rethink that. And I learned... And this is something I wrote about in my book, How to Be Black, but I am thinking about it now. I learned how to embrace entitlement.
There is a meme-type saying that's flying around like, "Act like a mediocre white man." Just if I could walk with the entitlement of a mediocre white man, my confidence would be through the roof. There's humor in it, there's reality in it, and there's truth, in my experience of many of these students. Most of the parents believed that these children deserved this education. "You deserve this. You deserve the best. You deserve real food at lunch time. You deserve small class size with real interaction. You deserve manicured lawns and community service programs that put you in touch with your city in a deeper way. You deserve greatness. You deserve it." How come it's only available to this few number of people? Why are we exceptions and not the rule? I want that sense of entitlement for everybody. I want that standard for all. It's a unique experience, and it's a bit sad that it's a unique experience.
Jacy
I share in that experience. I mean, private school was definitely a harsh place for me, at times. Trying to understand so much at such a young age, but also, it gave me the ability to understand how much compassion and love I have for my fellow human beings, regardless of what they have or what they don't have, or what I have or don't have. It's like...I just love people because of that experience. I had to really fall in love with myself, because when you're one of few in the room, you really start to realize how separate you really are. In the American context, you're like, "Wow." When you start learning history, you're like, "Oh, wow. Why are they asking me?" I remember this vividly, in class. He was like, "Well, Jacy. Hmm. We're about to embark upon the journey of discovering slavery. What do you think about it?" "What do you mean, what do I think about it? What am I supposed to think about it? I'm 14." You know? "What do you want me to say?"
Baratunde
I've been thinking about reparations and the different forms it could take, because when you say reparations, a lot of people get all tight in the face, and then, "So you mean to tell me you want to be compensated for uncompensated labor? That's crazy." So here's what. Instead, if you submit an invoice, it's different. I feel like every little Black kid that went to a private school and was conscripted into teaching without a contract, submit an invoice for helping educate your fellow students. For being that different experience. For helping that white teacher get off the hook in that awkward Huck Finn moment. Submit an invoice. Line by line, itemized. We can call it invoices instead of reparations if it makes you feel better. That's business. We do business in America. America's basically a nation of business people, ultimately, so let's do business, America. I'll submit my invoice, and it starts with young Jacy being asked, at 14 years old, what he thinks of slavery.
Jacy
I just want to thank you, my brother, for joining me today on this conversation. I think it's so important that we share more of our experience of life, of living, because one of the biggest things, or hurdles, that I've seen in culture and humanity is just ignorance. Just not knowing sometimes. Like when I was living in Utah, I realized that some people just didn't know. They just didn't want to know. I think this allows people to have a space where they can tap into wanting to know more about these types of topics, issues, and share and discuss them in their own communities, because that's the only way that the ball moves forward.