The other day, this tweet from storyteller and immigration rights activist Jose Antonio Vargas showed up in my feed: “What do you call immigrants who are anti-immigrants?”
I didn’t respond, although like a lot of the people who did, I was imagining conservative Asians and Latinos: Tweets like, “Lolo and Lola. Lol” “Pendejo/a/x” and “Toxic Titas.” Also, a number of references to Cuban Republicans. There were other tweets suggesting earlier waves of white immigrants, like “Ellis Island ship arrivals” and “Mayflower descendants” and “Settlers.” A few people responded, “Americans.”
Ever since Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former reporter for the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle, came out as undocumented in 2011, he has been publicly mining the question of what it means to be an American. In a book, a documentary and numerous articles, talks and interviews, he has told his own story of arriving here from the Philippines as a child and finding out as a teen that he was in legal jeopardy.
One of the first things Vargas did when he left journalism, was to found the nonprofit Define American to promote awareness of the experiences and contributions of undocumented people in this country but also to interrogate what “American” means to those of us born into it.
Full disclosure: I have known Jose since he was a junior at Mountain View High School and I was his editor at YO!, a monthly newspaper published by the now-defunct news service New America Media. I was his first professional editor. We graduated from mentorship to friendship a long time ago. I agonized with him over his decision to come forward with his immigration status and celebrated with him when Mountain View named an elementary school after him in 2019.
What was most interesting to me was the way his tweeted question about immigrants provoked so many to critique attitudes within their own groups. So I called him to see what he was thinking.
Jose told me he launched the tweet as research for “White Is Not a Country,” a book he is working on.
“The responses expose the complexity of race and immigration as they intersect with identity,” he said. “And it also speaks to the blind spots we have.”
Among the “blind spots” he noted were the problems with continuing to see America as existing in a “Black-white binary,” particularly as the country remains on track to become “majority minority” within the next couple of decades; failure to address bigotry, resentment and suspicion among Blacks, Asians and Latinos; and the narrative that “America is a nation of immigrants.”
On this last point, Jose got himself told at the historic 16th Street Baptist Church, the site of the Birmingham, Ala. bombing where white terrorists killed four Black schoolgirls.
“I learned a really, really hard lesson,” he said about the encounter he had while filming a documentary at the church more than a decade ago. “I said, ‘We’re a nation of immigrants’ and this gentleman who was the head of the local NAACP chapter got up and said, ‘No, we’re not, Mr. Vargas. We’re not a nation of immigrants. Be careful what you say. We didn’t choose to come here.”
The exchange helped him to understand that the “nation of immigrants” story neatly overlooks two of the oldest and most painful aspects of this country’s history: the experiences of the Native people who were already here and the African people who were forced to come here.
“I would argue that the pro-immigrant rights movement has been about talking to white people,” Jose said. “It has not been about talking to Black people, and I think that’s been a huge mistake because the history of this country shows that progress doesn’t happen without Black people.”
To be clear, this isn’t a post-“1619 Project” position. By my reckoning, Jose and I have been talking about his deep belief that Black people are America’s moral North Star for more than 20 years or at least since he was a Black Studies major at S.F. State and told me that he wanted to write the definitive biography of James Baldwin.
At first I thought that “White Is Not a Country” was a nod to Baldwin’s “Another Country,” but the title of the book he is working on refers to an exchange he had more than a decade ago with a student at the University of Georgia. When he asked the young man where he was from, he replied, “I’m white.” Jose responded, “But white is not a country.”
This got him thinking about something that I’ve encountered most of my life: White people who don’t see themselves as having an ethnicity or who never think of their Americanness as worth noting because for them “white” and “American” are interchangeable. A few years ago, a white childhood friend was describing the children of one of our old classmates, whose parentage is half white European and half Filipino. My friend said, “Her children don’t look like her. They look more American.” (The woman she was talking about was born here.) She quickly apologized when I asked her, “Do you mean American like you or American like me?”
Upon hearing that story, a white woman in San Francisco said to me, “You need to get new friends.” I rolled my eyes and pushed back. I wasn’t mad at my friend, a longtime, politically progressive resident of the “Berkeley” of a Southern state, because I knew she’d really heard and taken on the point I was making.
My old school friend and I are both still learning. I would much rather have this conversation with someone who can realize and own a problem than someone who deflects and pretends the problem has nothing to do with race and nothing to do with them. To cite one of Jose’s favorite Baldwin quotes: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Jose believes these conversations have to start among people who are already connected to each other. “If the real work needs to happen, it actually means that it happens within the family,” he said. “It’s great now that I have younger nieces and nephews who are the ones dealing with my cousins when they say something anti-
Black, right? They’re like, ‘Oh Mom, you can’t say that — this is why.’”
For him it is essential for African Americans and white Americans to know and understand immigrants’ perspectives, but perhaps even more essential for everyone to understand America through the experience of African Americans. Speaking to post-1965 immigrants like those in his family, he would say, “Do you understand that you would not have been able to get here on a visa if it wasn’t for Black people fighting for civil rights?”
“I think that Blackness and whiteness are more than physicalities, they’re ideologies,” he said. “The way we see the country and where the country is and where it needs to go, hopefully, as you read the book, you’re gonna realize that if the country is gonna survive, we have to align with the Blackness part of the country which has always been insisting on people being equal and wanting the country to live up to what it says it is, right?”
This sounds good except for that part that assumes all of us Black Americans are on the same team. Who wants to sit next to Cousin ‘Ye?
Teresa Moore is an Examiner columnist who reports on race and equity.
