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Jose Antonio Vargas on the forefront of an emerging U.S.
by Gretchen Rachel Hammond
2016-10-05

This article shared 565 times since Wed Oct 5, 2016
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As part of Chicago Ideas Week, on Oct. 17 at Chicago's Cadillac Palace Theatre, six people—each renowned as among the most consummate in his or her respective field—will tackle Life's Big Questions.

Stanford's Product Design Executive Director Bill Burnett; author and journalist Sebastian Junger; game publishing giant Electronic Arts co-founder Dave Evans; international lawyer and think tank New America President/CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter; Olympic gold medalist and FIFA Women's World Cup soccer champion Abby Wambach; and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, filmmaker and entrepreneur Jose Antonio Vargas form an appropriately numbered panel for the sixth year of a festival which hosts a worldwide audience of 30,000 in an arena where innovative confrontations of global issues spur active solutions rather than agonized but ineffectual debate.

For the openly-gay, Philippine-born Vargas, the question of What Does it Mean to be an American? has been the cartographer of his life's journey whether as a 12-year-old undocumented immigrant to the United States who reached the highest steeple of what he called the "church" of journalism, his co-founding of the immigration advocacy nonprofit Define American, taking the fight for the DREAM Act to President Obama, the autobiographical film Documented in which Vargas outed his immigrant status, his highly publicized arrest by border patrol agents and, most recently, his creation of the media start-up #EmergingUS which presents America in a way that the news media is unwilling to do—as a country with an increasingly diverse human topography whose survival depends on seeing " each other, fully, humanely and with empathy."

Vargas spoke with Windy City Times by phone about #EmergingUS and the future, not only of the profession in which he was forged but of the country that he has loved deeply enough to explore for the past five years in search of each of the threads that weave us together in a beautiful but delicate fabric.

It is one that, particularly since the fight for 2016's succession of political power began, has shown outward signs of unraveling.

Windy City Times: How does #EmergingUS address the rhetoric in what has become such an increasingly divided country?

Jose Antonio Vargas: Since coming out as undocumented more than five-years-ago, I have done more than 850 events in 48 states and I have visited close to 300 college campuses. The rise of Donald Trump doesn't surprise me one bit. I can't think of another issue as politically toxic and as least understood as immigration. He took [that] issue and rallied people around it saying "you've been suffering, your jobs have been going overseas, here are the people to blame."

If there's one silver lining with what's happening with Donald Trump, it's that he's showing parts of us to ourselves that we don't want to see. There are people out there who don't believe that an emerging U.S. is happening—the country is only going to get more LGBTQ, more Asian, definitely Browner, definitely Blacker. Women of all backgrounds will break all the barriers they should and must break. So, in some ways, you could make the argument that what's at stake in America is the soul of white, heterosexual men and how much change they can handle.

We are facing an era of unprecedented demographic changes. For the first time in the history of this country, white people are an emerging racial minority. How are we dealing with that? Look at racism in the gay community which is something we don't really talk about that much but it's just as big a problem as racism in the straight community. Far too often, the way identity and marginalized groups are portrayed and reported on in the media is as marginalized minorities. We are all a majority of one. I'm tired of being at the peripheral.

The other thing [#EmergingUS] is going to do a lot of is the intersection of race and LGBT communities. There's not [been] as much in depth coverage of that and I think that's a mistake. The word intersectionality gets used a lot but, outside of academia, I'm not sure people understand what that is. I'm the living embodiment of it—being gay, undocumented and Asian with a Latino name. For me, #EmergingUS is a continuation of the work that I've been doing with Define American. How do we define all the changes that are happening in this country?

WCT: In the UK, the Brexit vote occurred for a lot of the same reasons you described. Are we underestimating Trump's base?

JAV: I've been saying this for more than a year now that we are absolutely underestimating his base. There are many people in my experience who are Donald Trump supporters who would never admit publicly that they are. So I would argue that he has much more support than what we are seeing.

The other thing that this has shown us is how much the political news media in many ways is irrelevant. No matter how many fact checks happen, or if the New York Times writes an indictment of Donald Trump, none of that matters. All of my travels in the past five years lead me to believe that Donald Trump may actually win this presidency. I have been to the America that we don't really get to see. What is at stake is really the question of how we, as a people, define who and what an American is.

WCT: You once described journalism as your "church." What would you say is that state of that church at the moment?

JAV: Our church is in crisis.

One of my favorite quotes about journalism is from the playwright Arthur Miller who said that "A good newspaper is a country talking to itself." I would argue that there's a whole lot of yelling; that we're not listening to each other. The two challenges in the news industry are technological and demographic. We are still grappling with the technological part and we are missing the demographic part. In this country, 88 percent of the top total overall population growth is going to come mostly from Latinos and Asians and yet, for the most part, we talk about America as if it's only Black and white. It almost seems like newsrooms now are less diverse than when I started in journalism in the late '90s.

It's important for us to hear, read and watch the news from as many different perspectives as possible so that we can actually have context, nuance and perspectives. For example, you can see the way the Black Lives Matter or the trans movements are covered. Look at immigration—the fact that [it] has become the province of reporters who report on it from the perspective of the politicians. Not the human toll. We have bought into Donald Trump's narrative and I don't know why. A few months ago, I was on the Bill O'Reilly show and at some point he says to me on air, "Jose, just so you know, you don't deserve to be here." I started thinking, "What did Bill O'Reilly ever do to deserve to be here?"

Twenty or 30 years from now, when we look back at the state of journalism when it comes to immigration, we are all going to have to apologize. We keep thinking of immigration as the border, the wall, Mexico when, really, it's us. Thankfully it is now culturally unacceptable in this county to be anti-gay. It is completely acceptable to be anti-immigrant.

WCT: And Immigration Customs Enforcement ( ICE ), especially in terms of the way it treats LGBTQ immigrants, does not seem to be regulated.

JAV: ICE is one of the biggest untold stories in investigative journalism. I'm waiting for the team to have the resources to figure out how ICE got to be as big and unregulated and uncontrollable it is. I don't think the American public knows that there's a congressional bed quota that more than 30,000 beds have to be filled every day. Who's paying for that? We are. Tax payers. I also find it really interesting that a lot of Americans believe that immigrants like me should earn out citizenship because it begs the question of what have Americans done to earn their citizenship? What does earning one's citizenship actually mean? It's not about papers. It's not about law. At a time of unprecedented demographic changes, that is the question we must all grapple with.

WCT: LGBTQ immigrants have particular problems whether it is with asylum, or coming out to officials. What is it going to take for us to see them?

JAV: It is facing the intersection of the issues and how these identities are connected. I am still haunted by this moment but the first Black president who oversaw the largest expansion of LGBTQ rights was having a celebration of the same-sex marriage decision in the East Wing of the White House. A trans immigrant woman Jennicet [Gutierrez] said "what about trans Latinas? Are you going to stop deporting us?" I think the President kicked her out of the room. Jennicet [told] me that most of the gay, white people around her were saying "This is not the time. This is not the place."

WCT: It seems to me #EmergingUS takes on a lot of the major issues we've discussed—telling raw stories of humanity as journalists should do and elevating those stories whether they are of a trans immigrant or a Native American.

JAV: In the past few decades, we, as journalists, have been forced to worship at the altar of objectivity. When I started reporting on HIV /AIDS in Washington DC. I remember an editor of mine, who I really liked, stopping by my desk and saying "Writing about AIDS is not really the way for you as a gay man to get ahead in this newsroom." I remember covering the '08 campaign for The Washington Post, there were two of us—me and this African-American reporter and it was almost like the editors doubted our objectivity. As people who are part of marginalized communities, objectivity belongs to people who don't have to fight for anything. I think of [#EmergingUS] as a necessary intervention, correction and liberation.

Visit Chicago Ideas for tickets to Jose Antonio Vargas and panelists answering Life's Big Questions.

Go to #EmergingUS for more information.


This article shared 565 times since Wed Oct 5, 2016
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