Read here the full transcript of award-winning journalist and podcast host Jenn White’s talk titled “Can Democracy Still Work?” at TEDxKC 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Importance of Free Press in a Democracy
I’m a journalist. Journalism requires a free society where we can pursue the truth and share with the public what we learn without fear of reprisal. And a free society requires a free press doing its job, putting checks on abuses of power. Each needs the other.
The enemy of both is authoritarianism. Neither a free society nor the free press that helps maintain it can exist in a dictatorship. A challenge for journalism is disinformation, which today flows as freely as facts and often leads to division, fear, and anger. Disinformation is a primary tool of authoritarians in centralizing power, politicizing independent institutions, scapegoating vulnerable populations, and corrupting elections.
These tools and others are used to install and uphold authoritarian regimes. That’s how fascism gets the job done. My maternal grandfather fought in World War II. He returned home to a country that, as a black man in 1940s Mississippi, well, it didn’t quite give him a hero’s welcome.
The Struggle for Equality
He faced down fascism abroad and returned home to face a steep climb toward basic equality. But he kept climbing, along with many others, putting one foot in front of the other in pursuit of equal rights. I believe he and many Americans post-war believed they protected something precious, and that here at home, slowly, imperfectly, but surely they were making progress toward a more perfect union. But are we still making progress?
Progress means becoming more like the country we want, more the country we aspire to be. We seem deeply divided on what exactly that is.
Think back to 2017, Charlottesville. The “Jews Will Not Replace Us” march, a car plowing through protesters.
Suddenly we were seeing Nazi salutes in public and unabashed white supremacists proud of themselves, celebrating what they saw as their moment of triumph after eight years of a black president’s administration. As Baratunde Thurston remarked in 2017, “How the eff are Nazis back?”
Threats to Democracy
January 6th, 2021, upped the ante by assaulting traditional democratic institutions, free elections, Congress, and the peaceful transfer of power. It’s easy to forget how shocking it was at the time, and since then, much effort has gone into making us believe it wasn’t that big of a deal.
These events, the threat of more events like them, the onslaught of misinformation and disinformation pouring into the coming election, all of it suggests, among some, a new willingness to accept or even embrace authoritarianism. We’ve seen it happen abroad, but can it really happen here? Surely this experiment of American democracy isn’t over. We haven’t even gotten the initial results back yet, have we?
And yet a recent Gallup poll suggests only 28% of Americans believe our democracy is working. That’s a record low. Another poll from the Harvard Kennedy School of Public Policy suggests only 9% of young Americans believe our country is headed in the right direction. And in truth, there are both historical and current reasons to support that lack of faith.
Challenges to Historical Education and Civil Rights
We all know about slavery, but will future Americans know about it? Since 2021, at least 44 states have introduced laws or made other efforts to limit how teachers include lessons about the history of racism in this country. President Roosevelt’s 1942 executive order allowed the forcible removal of people of Japanese descent from their homes. 120,000 people were detained in internment camps. Most of them were American citizens. It has happened here. It can happen here again.
Heather Tanana is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. She leads the Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities Initiative. Her research estimates 48% of Native American households on reservations don’t have access to sufficient sanitation or clean water. And according to the annual Point in Time survey, over 650,000 people in the U.S. were unhoused in 2023. That’s a 12% increase over the previous year.
As cities and towns grapple with the lack of affordable housing, the recent Supreme Court decision in Johnson v. Grants Pass criminalizes sleeping outdoors. The sobering truth about our democracy is that it is messy. It holds both hope and disappointment, justice and historical inequality. On more than one occasion, it has broken my heart. But democracy represents something authoritarianism does not: possibility.
A Personal Story of Progress
My father was born in 1938 in Macon, Georgia, to sharecroppers. He contracted polio at a young age and he was sent to a hospital many miles away from his family. He was separated for long enough that he was the youngest in his family when he left and he was old enough to have a younger brother who could stand on his own by the time he returned. The polio left my father with one leg that was severely atrophied and shorter than the other. He’d walk with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life.
The one school available to black children was several miles away, too far for him to walk. And my grandmother, his mother who was widowed, she worried about how my father would make his way in the world without the type of education that would allow him to do work that didn’t require heavy physical labor. But then a family friend told her about a school in Detroit for children with disabilities, a school where my father could get the education he needed. So my grandmother packed up the family and moved to Detroit so my father could attend that school.
Later he graduated from a special public high school in Detroit, Cass Tech, a school I’d later graduate from as well. And while he was there, he trained to be a drafter. Now drafters created the master drawings that outlined the design specifications for cars and back then it was done by hand. It was very intricate, detailed work.
While he was training to be a drafter, it was before the automotive companies hired black workers for these white and gray collar jobs. If you worked at the automotive companies, it was likely on the assembly line, work my father couldn’t do with the complications from his polio. But in 1964, the Civil Rights Act passed. It ended segregation in public spaces and it barred employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
That led to General Motors opening its drafting department to black workers and my father was one of the first black drafters hired by the company. He’d worked there for about 30 years until he retired. That job allowed my parents to buy a home, providing us with safe and secure housing. It provided an income that supported them in raising their seven children. It gave us access to healthcare. It helped pay for college educations for my siblings and me. In the space of a single generation, my family’s story was rewritten in so many ways.
The Power of Democracy
When I first took over the nationally syndicated radio show 1A, people asked me what I wanted the show to be. And I said, “I want it to be a place where America asks itself what it wants to be.” There are many answers to that question, but some answers allow more of us to feel like our stories are part of the American story. This not quite 250-year saga of progress and peril, forward movement and backward stumbling, division and union.
The story I return to when my faith in this country is shaken, when I feel democracy teetering on the brink, it’s my family’s story. My grandfather fighting for a country that had yet to recognize his humanity. The perseverance of my grandmother, moving her family across the country so my father could get an education. The fact that my father gained access to a public education that accommodated his needs as a student.
But in 1955, the polio vaccine was licensed in the U.S. thanks to a national effort to fight the disease, ensuring that the illness that had a profound effect on my father’s life would not affect the lives of his children. What the Civil Rights Act meant for my family’s prosperity, allowing my father with his skill and hard work alongside my mother’s partnership and vigilance that it allowed them to build something beautiful and enduring for our family.
The simple fact is I would not be on this stage talking about democracy if the power of democracy hadn’t been applied in creating greater equality for those of us to whom it had been previously denied. Our story shows what can happen at the intersection of choice, policy, and strong institutions. It shows that within a vibrant democracy, change is possible. Authoritarianism seeks to remove that possibility.
A Call to Action
If we allow our active participation in this democracy to be derailed by our disillusionment, we leave space for those with authoritarian proclivities to gain ground. If we support elected officials or those who hope to gain office as they scapegoat vulnerable groups or deny election results, that space for possibility contracts. And if we stand by or even cheer on those who promise to turn the power of their office against their supposed political enemies, that space for possibility narrows to a sliver. That’s how fascism gets the job done.
It comes down to what we want these United States of America as messy and as troubled as it has been, what we want it to be today and tomorrow and tomorrow. A place with the possibility for change and evolution, a place where we can make things better if we the people demand it. Or will we cede our democracy to those who would limit our ability to course correct when those course corrections are in service to our collective good?
That is the question. Who will we choose to be? Thank you.
