 Good afternoon, everybody. So we're here to have a conversation about what it means to be an American. And a day where we've had, I think, some challenging conversations about American ideals and how maybe they don't apply equally in the ways that we would like to see them apply. That's what much of this afternoon has been about. And José Antonio has been challenging our notions of what it means to be an American, right? You created an organization called Define American. Yes. And you'll go check it out right now. Right? That's what I'm talking about here. So what was that about? Why an organization? What are you challenging us to do? Well, actually, that idea was born out of a conversation I had with Jake Brewer, who you and I both know. He worked at the White House. He was one of my best friends. I was working at the New Yorker at the time. I had profiled Zuckerberg for the New Yorker. It was the first profile of Zuckerberg. And then Jake Brewer and I always wanted to start our own media company together. And we were kind of at the time when we wanted to do that. And I had to tell him, wait, but there's this other thing I got to do before we do that. So I took him to the caribou on 14th and Rhode Island. It's not there anymore. It's a shake shack now. And I came out to him. So he was maybe the 11th person in my life at that point who knew that I was undocumented. I just told him, hey, remember when I was worried about getting on the Hillary Clinton campaign plane in 2008? This is why. Remember when you said we should go to Europe for a buddy trip? This is why I couldn't go? So I explained everything to him. And he just looked really confused. I guess at that point he hadn't met anybody who was undocumented, who had managed to just be under the radar but not be under the radar, because I was visible. So he was the one that came up with this idea of how do we challenge you're as American as I am, but you can't be American, so what is that about? So that's how we found a defined American. And our job at the organization is really how do we talk about this issue of immigration and citizenship? And if I can't be a citizen because I'm not born here, don't have the right papers, right? Born here, write papers or legalize myself, what is another definition of citizenship? And to me, especially now, there's American citizenship. I call it the lower casey, and then there's the upper casey, which is citizenship by participation, like what it means to participate and to exist outside of yourself. And even though I'm undocumented, immigration is not the only issue in America. There's all these other issues. So how does that intersect with all these other issues? That's kind of what we do. We just held this amazing film festival in Charlotte, North Carolina, a three-day film festival of films that define American. And we held it at an African-American museum. So a lot of black people came, and then a lot of undocumented people came. I actually met a woman opening night at the film festival. She's like, I have a two-month deportation order, but I wanted to come here to celebrate with you guys. And then we had all the Asian people coming because I'm Asian, so sometimes I get Asian people to come. So it's this wonderful diversity. And this old black woman after the film festival goes, young man, how did you get everybody to show up like this? And I said, well, because right now, this is what we have to be. So a number of us were part of a presentation yesterday. This is one of these things I've been chewing over in my head and having kind of a mental argument with the presenter. And one of his themes was this notion that we're in this moment where, as the country were divided, we're struggling with each other, and that we may have lost our common sense of what it means to be an American, what the American dream is, what this set of what is it that unites us. You have been delving into this question of what it means to be an American. Do you agree that we've lost our sense of a unifying thing that makes us American? The journalist in me, after I came out six years ago and nothing happened, I was like, well, I'm going to travel the country. So I've been, we've done a Defined American more than 850 events in 48 states in the past six years. So I actually push back when people say we're divided. I actually think we just don't know each other, right? Like we don't know each other. One anecdote. I remember being in Birmingham, Alabama, I was filming, and I was at Walmart because I like Walmart. So for me, Walmart is a really good test of who's in the community, right? So is there like a Mexican section? Is there an Asian section? So like that's my understanding of who lives in this community. So I went to Walmart and I remember this elderly white woman saying to her son, I don't understand why they just can't speak English. And she was referring to a young couple in another aisle. So of course I talked to her and I was like, hey, you know, I'm here. I'm visiting. She's like, and then when I told her I was an immigrant, well, but you know, you speak English really good. Like, yeah, I speak English well. Thank you for saying that. And then during the conversation, it was fascinating how the first sentence out of, you know, one of the first things she says is, why can't they just speak English? And the media, that's the kind of stuff that the media likes to kind of put out there. You know what the 20 minute conversation was? She goes, what if I can't learn Spanish? So all of a sudden it wasn't, I mean, the fear, like, which is always, to me, is underneath all the hate is the fear and the pain. So the fear and the pain didn't get until 20 minutes into the conversation. I would argue that so much of what we do in the news media, particularly in the Asala Express of news media that I used to be a part of, is just focus on the superficial fears and divisions instead of kind of really, you know, scalping and trying to understand surgically what the roots are. I actually think we are at this interesting moment where I feel like a civil war and a reconstruction is happening at once. And we have this opportunity to do something that's never been done, which is tell America's whole story. Like, I don't think we've done that. Like, immigrants like to say, oh, you know, we're a country of immigrants. And whenever we say that, the fight American is producing this video right now of African Americans and Native Americans looking directly to the camera saying, can you stop saying that? Because when you say that, you'll leave us out, right? I mean, that's again, that's another myth, right? And for me, what's been tough in the past six years is how I for many people perpetuate this good immigrant, bad immigrant thing, right? That I'm like a walking symbol of like a model minority. I don't know, because I'm Asian, I guess. I don't know. But just challenging that and not falling into the low-skilled, high-skilled, good immigrant, bad immigrant, dichotomy that I think President Trump and his administration has really seized upon, right? But we want the good ones. Who are the good ones? What makes them good? So you told me when we were preparing for this conversation that it was important to you to take the conversation away from politics and away from the border debate. So why is that and how do you accomplish that in a moment where the immigration questions is pretty political? How do you keep it out of politics and why? So again, part of my reporting, it shocked me, frankly, how many people that I talked to in like Alabama, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Florida, right? Well, there's so many Latinos and Latinos. Florida, where people just literally use the terms illegal and Mexican interchangeably. That really shocked me for a while. People assume I'm Mexican and then when they actually tell them that I'm not, and then they feel really comfortable hating on Mexicans in front of me. And then the language, right? This is where I kind of come from the Maya Angelou School of Language, where words matter. And words, they're things. They're in the air. And then they get into your clothes and then outside of your head and in your hair. And then before you know it, it's in your mind. And before you know it, what you say dictates how you talk and how you act, right? So the language around this, for me, having grown up in California with Mexican classmates, the fact that we have so single-handedly relegated this issue as an issue that Mexicans, there are 33 million Mexican-Americans in this country, 22 million of whom are US-born American citizens, many of whom will tell you that the border crossed them and they didn't cross the border. And yet, for the most part, I don't want to make this about Trump, but it was just so striking that when Trump as a candidate started talking about Mexicans, right, that we didn't have a collective reaction. Remember what happened after that? He was the host on Saturday Night Live. Jimmy Fallon played with his hair, right? Like all these questions, and I remember actually, I'm totally gonna out something now. I was wondering if I should do this. I remember when Chuck Todd, who I know because I was a political reporter, was about to interview Trump as a candidate, I remember emailing Chuck Todd saying, hey, Chuck, can I talk to you? And he was gracious enough to talk to me on the phone. And I said, hey, Chuck, you should know that the fastest growing and documented population in this country are Asians, not Latinos. And of course, I followed up and emailed him some independently sourced stats. Can you bring that up when you interview candidate Trump? He didn't. It doesn't fit the narrative, right? It's about Mexico. It's about these people who don't wanna be American. They don't wanna assimilate. They don't believe in the American dream, unlike the Irish and the Italians and the Germans. So the narrative that we have now been sold, right, the lie that in many ways his campaign was built on is now staring us to the face. And I feel like making it, trying to understand, there was a Pew reporter, so I think about a month ago that said that for the first time, Mexicans do not make the majority of the undocumented population, right? One out of seven Koreans in this country is here illegally. One out of seven. If I just counted all the undocumented white people that reach out to me and feel really guilty that whenever this issue comes up, they're not brought up, if I can only bring up all the undocumented black people, Africans and Caribbean's who face, because of the inherent systematic racism that we have in this country, detention and deportation rates, like why are they not a part of the conversation? So that's why I think broadening it is so important. And for us at Define American, our strategy now, in addition to a new strategy is an entertainment one. So for me as a gay man, like Ellen DeGeneres in the cover of Time Magazine was like an earthquake, right? Will and Grace being the number one show on television for five years was a tsunami. So right now, if you're a white person who lives in predominantly white town who only have white friends, the only way you get to know immigrants are the news and the television shows and movies that you watch. So at Define American, we've been very proactive at working with producers, writers and directors who want to integrate immigrant characters, documented or undocumented, into their shows. Have you seen Superstore, the show? So there's an undocumented character there. So we've been consulting with them now for like six months just to figure out the arc of that character. So for us, that's a really important creative disruption, right? So right now, the series regular on a primetime network show is an undocumented Asian character, right? We're proud to like have helped to like support that. So does it, does it in your work, does it go both ways, right? So it sounds like you're spending a lot of time talking about kind of helping familiarize people who we are, who we immigrants are, who undocumented immigrants are and maybe turning some of their stereo types on their heads. Do we need to understand the folks who don't understand us better? And how do we do that? So that's why I made White People. It's a film. It's not. What? I didn't make White People. I mean, I made a film. Because you know, I've been traveling early on when I would do these events and I would do Republican Tea Party events because it's really important that, you know, I'm not a Democrat or a progressive, you know, like I can't vote. Undocumented people can't vote. I don't know why this is a lie that's been like sold people. What are we gonna vote with? Are Bank of America debit cards? Like, what are we? So it was stunning when I would do events, particularly in the South and the Midwest and I'd talk about immigration and inevitably the Q and A's whenever I would do like an exchange was always about race. It was always about the fact that these people are coming in and this is not what it used to look like. And so I was really intrigued by that. And I grew up in the Bay Area, in San Francisco Bay Area. I was privileged to have grown up in that area. And I remember when I was a reporter for The Chronicle in San Francisco, in 2001 a study came out of Stanford University that said that the Bay Area was the first minority majority region in America. And I wrote a story about all the White students and predominantly people of color schools and how they felt about what it feels to be a minority. So I went back to that article and I ended up doing this film called White People. MTV did it, it's on YouTube, you can check it out. But what was interesting about that was I, there's this assumption that millennials of all races and ethnicities are quote unquote, leaning progressive. That was not what I found when we visited colleges, right? Nearly half of the White millennials we talked to feel, for example, that they're as much a victim of racial discrimination as people of color, nearly half. The lie, it's totally a lie, that people of color get scholarships more than White students is so widely circulated, right? That people think it's fact. So in doing that film, what was really interesting to me was, you know, I guess having grown up in the Bay Area and in cities, I'm so used to a crowd looking like this. And I've never been in situations where you are in a predominantly White area and people's conception of what it means to be American, which default means White, is something that is challenging for people. Remember now, we're only just, we're dealing with Black Lives Matter movement, which is so essential, right? Like we're in America that's been defined by a Black and White dynamic. In the next 50 years, according to the Pew Research Center, 88% of the population go through this country is gonna come from Latinos and Asians, 88%. So complicating the White and Black narrative to me and expanding that is kind of one of the biggest questions and trying to understand why many White people feel the way that they feel about not just the fact that the country's changing, but that these people are taking away something that's theirs. One more thing about this, I remember how shocked I was whenever I would ask young White people, because you know, people of color always get asked, where are you from, right? Hey, where are you from? Where are you from from? You know what I mean, right? And so I started turning that around and started asking young White people, where are they from? And I remember I was debating like the president of the College Republicans at the University of Georgia in Athens, really nice guy. And at one point in the conversation, I'm like, so where are you from? He's like, I'm American. No, no, no, no, where are you from? I'm White. Well, White is not a country. Where are you from? Do you know your own history? Like how dare people obsess about borders that they don't even understand? How dare people talk about immigration and not talk about its connection to race? Those issues are completely married, right? In this country, it wasn't until like the 1790s that we gave people U.S. citizenship and they had to be free White people of good moral character. We did not give Native Americans U.S. citizenship until the 1920s. Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter Movement, said to me once that, the Black Lives Matter Movement is about citizenship. Not about citizenship papers, but citizenship as dignity, right? So that's why for us, this has always been about citizenship. And but I gotta tell you, and I notice as a journalist, getting my former colleagues to understand the complexity of this has been for me, it feels like climbing some sort of a mountain. And I don't understand that. I don't understand, you know, the journalist's job is supposed to inform and contextualize what's happening, right? And in some ways, when it comes to immigration, journalists for the most part, especially on television, have been complicit to the lie. We don't even fully realize it yet. It's gonna take like a lot of research and thesis papers, 20, 30 years from now. So I think as any person who's a personal caller who operates in an environment where frequently you're the only one in the room or the only one at the table, right, you go through this exercise of how much is my job to be out there and how much of my job, I'd like to just speak my truth. To represent, yeah. And how much of my job is to find a way to say the things so that it can be heard because they're not always the same thing, right? So you are explicitly, you've made your life about challenging people, asking hard questions, being out there, with using your own, you've thrown yourself into the fray here. Are there times when it's better to find a way to be heard or are you being heard? Do you feel like you're being heard? I used to say Tucker Carlson a couple of weeks ago and I really regretted it. Because it takes a lot out of me to do Tucker Carlson and I told him that I want to do it face to face because I don't want to have to do this whole ear plug thing and then we're going to get mad at each other or whatever. And it was a good eight minute thing and I remember as I was sitting there, it was so funny too and again I'm going to out talk about this but we were on a studio here, somewhere around here and before we went on air, Tucker goes, I should have called ICE on you. That would have been good TV. And he knew what he was doing. My eyebrows did whatever I just did right now. And then I remember one of the producers, there was a water bottle next to me. The producer took the water bottle out because she probably thought that I may actually throw this water bottle at him. And of course the calculation in my head is I'm in DC, I have to get out of DC. If I throw something at him or hit him, what happens? It's Trump as president. So what do I do, right? So all these things are happening in my head. And when Tucker, it's theater. Actually it's not even theater, it's Hollywood because theater is actually like raw energy and idea. Hollywood is just like polish, shit, sorry. And I don't even know if Tucker believes what he says but hey, it's really good television. It sells a lot of books, right? He just signed like a big ass book deal about this stuff. And as I was sitting there, I was thinking, this is the last time I'm doing this because Tucker doesn't wanna hear me. He doesn't need to hear me. He just needs to point people to someone to say, hey, that's to blame. And people would say, oh, he's flaunting his illegality. Wait a second, your producer asked me to go on your show once a week and I'm flaunting it? You invited me here. You need me so you can have this Hollywood villain enemy thing that you want, right? For me, what's been more interesting is, as again, this is why I'm so privileged that my constitution as a person is as a journalist. Like that's how I've been a journalist since I was a teenager. And being a journalist, you do a lot of listening you're supposed to. For me, like listening and figuring out why people think what they think and feel and how they arrived there is what I find to be one of the biggest challenges right now. I'm working on a project, for example, another video project on anti-blackness in immigrant communities. So how do Latino and Asians learn to be anti-black and why? And what's the cross-generational pull on that? In some way, we're realizing that in working on this, it's actually, it's interesting when you take white people out of the equation physically. It kind of exposes what people think they're buying into. In addition to that, when it comes to listening, I'm doing a really provocative video series called, I'm calling it right now, Straight White Guys. Where we're talking to straight white men about what it's like to be a straight white male in America today. And when people say like, oh, you know, boring old white guy. You know all those like things that people say now, oh, you know, I'm so sorry, I'm a straight white guy. Or at least I hear that in progressive circles and conservative circles, it's more like, it's the end, they're coming for me. Right? And so like, I want to understand. No, seriously, people say that. And it's been fascinating. And you know, MTV likes like a young crowd, like they wanted a college crowd. But for this, I think it's really important to be cross-generational. So we're doing like people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, people who have been in the workforce. And you just made this comment Cecilia about like, what happens when there's a person of color in the room and especially women of color in the room and how that always changes the dynamic. We interviewed this one white guy in his 50s and he just had so much to say about how people earn being in their positions. And the fact that they don't have to earn it, they just have to be. I have to tell you, by the way, I'm working on this project and it's making me a little nervous because white people as a minority in this country, not only is it a demographic reality, it already is the reality. In public schools across America, from K to 12, white students for the first time are in the minority. But the language around what it means for white people who have always been at the center to now be decentralized, to now be part of the marginalized, is a provocative conversation. And I don't know if we have the language for it yet that is beyond left, right, identity politics or the usual DC words that they throw at you. I'm not interested in those words. I'm not interested in any politics. I'm not interested in Republican or Democrat. I'm interested in the root of how people identify and why. So what have you learned, right? So you've described a Tucker Carlson situation, sometimes when you're on screen, when you're on camera where there's a Hollywood dynamic. But you also travel around to places where there aren't necessarily cameras in the room. Well, you're trying to engage in a conversation with people who don't necessarily understand you and you may or may not understand them. Yeah. Do you, have you learned stuff? Oh yeah. I call it radical empathy. And you know, I have to say, by the way, I was so thankful for Roseanne when I was growing up in the Philippines. When I was, I came in when I was 12 and in the Philippines we would, they would dub Roseanne and Tagalog, right? And I remember one of the episodes that I saw when I was a kid was that family not having electricity. Do you remember this? There was an episode in Roseanne where the electricity fell off and they had an old episode about they had no power. And by the way, when I was in the Philippines, we didn't think of Americans as black or white. That was just not part of, we thought of Americans as Roseanne, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, but we never called them white or black. I didn't realize that they were white or black until I got to America, right? But I remember watching Roseanne and thinking, oh my God, Americans can't afford electricity too. I thought it was only us, right? And I'm referencing that because in my travels across the country, I remember when Trump announced he was running for president, I told all of my political reporter friends that don't underestimate him. I think he may actually win this thing. And everybody was like, oh, Posey, you're crazy. No, no, no, the Clinton machine. No, no, no, no, no. They got this. And I'm like, you said the same thing about Obama in 2008, but never mind. But, because people totally misunderestimated just the level of anxiety, confusion, fear that not all but many white people have. It's easier to just say Trumpland, which I find really disturbing, by the way. It's easier to just say, oh, you know, those ignorant, hateful people. How can you hate something you don't know? They don't even know us. So how can they hate us, right? So it's so funny, like some people on Twitter, whenever they hear about white people, they say I'm obsessed with white people. I don't think I am. I just wanna understand what that construction is about. And what I've learned is I remember James Baldwin, it's probably my biggest influence in life. Baldwin said when I was in high school, I would watch the movie with Baldwin and interview with Baldwin said, I'm only black if you think you're white. Let me repeat. I'm only black if you think you're white. And of course, Toni Morrison, you know, this whole idea that we have to construct blackness. I remember this interview that I saw with Charlie Rosen, I was a kid, I love PBS when I was a kid. And an interview and Toni Morrison said, you know, to make an American, if you think about it, when those Irish and the Germans, when they all came here, they were all Balkanized, right? So what tied them together? They weren't black. So they created that word, the N word, to say, oh, I'm not that, I'm this, right? So now I think about that in the context of this now changing America, this new America that we're now a part of. So when people say you're American, what are they buying into? And what is the racialized context of that? So I've learned to, for me, unpacking whiteness, not white people, because people take that very personally, but unpacking whiteness as a system, as a system that benefits people, is probably what I'm gonna be working on for a while. And are there, I mean, for people who are part of this struggle, who are struggling to understand, right? How do we come together as a country? How do we have, how do we get in the same room and have a conversation that isn't shouting at each other or talking past each other? Or isn't this thing we're seeing modeled on TV every day, which I can't even do anymore. I can't watch it anymore. Like, I think we know we don't wanna have that conversation. It's not, that's not a conversation. What have you learned about how to have a conversation? Oh. Can we? Is it possible? I did an interview, it was Megan Kelly who was still on Fox and they, without telling me ahead of time, they had an angel mom. So it was a mother of a U.S. citizen who got killed by an undocumented person. And I remember, this was at the convention. I knew she was gonna be there but I wasn't sure what was gonna happen. But I remember we were being interviewed, it was live TV and I was nervous about meeting her when I found out it was her. And I remember when she said to me something about her son and I looked her in the eye, I turned my chair and I'm like, I'm so sorry for your loss, you know? I am so sorry for your loss. But we don't all represent that person that you think we do. The most important thing for me to do when I get situations like that is to really make sure that people feel like they're being heard, right? It's amazing, maybe because we're so spoiled because we've always had the First Amendment that we take it for granted. Isn't it amazing? Like we are living at the most connected time in the U.S. and human history. And yet we seem so disconnected because I think what we do is we just talk at each other. And I guess, again maybe because it's a journalist, trying to understand where people are coming from and the hurt that they're coming from. Because underneath all of it is hurt and pain and I can't expect people to relate to mine if I can't relate to theirs. It's probably the first thing I do is do that. And do you feel like there's times that you break through? And are there times when you're surprised by what you get out of the conversation? Well, the thing that never fails to surprise me is just how the level of ignorance on this issue is so, it's oceanic. It's like the Atlantic Ocean, right? People ask you questions like, why haven't they deported you? I don't know. So you have to ask the government that. But why can't you just get legal? It's like the number one thing. I did Bill Maher actually about a month ago in backstage, Bill goes, I don't understand why you can't just fix this thing. And I'm like, Bill Maher is pretty smart, right? Very smart. And yet he doesn't. So that never seems to surprise me. But I guess what, for me, what I find the most encouraging is whenever I meet people, white people, black people, who identify as conservative or Republican and they have a personal relationship with someone who's undocumented and they talk about them in such a personal way, you know? What's up, Siri? Right, like they talk about them in such like a personal way. Like there's a farmer, Lawrence Calvert in Alabama, who talks about his friend Paco, like he was his son. And I remember telling Lawrence, sir, can we just get you in front of a television? And can you just say that to like all of, you know, all of Alabama? But of course he doesn't want to do that, right? So that always amazes me. And just at the end of the day, when you get to know somebody, it's not about the tight, it's not about politics, it's not about the stereotypes, it's about that human being in front of you. So that never, I never lose that. So you're using media as a tool, right? And you could make the argument, and I frequently do that media is part of the problem here. Oh, absolutely. So how do you flip that? How do you make it a tool? Actually, I think the three things we do is we challenge media. So for example, when you go to defineamerican.com, I know you will, we have a facts matter sheet that we have literally emailed to every journalist in DC. I actually delivered it to Tucker Carlson myself. These are the six facts on immigration. Before you say anything about immigration, can you like read it? And then let's talk. And then he was like, well, you know, this is from Progressive Left Wing, no, no, no. These are individually sourced, like these are independently sourced facts that you should know, right? So we challenge media, we create media, so we did this film festival in North Carolina, and because of what's happening in North Carolina, I wanted to feature a film about undocumented trans people. We couldn't find a film, so we made it. So I sent my production team, they found this group of five undocumented trans Latinas in Durham, North Carolina. Actually really incredible. So we create media, but this to me is really important. We curate it too, meaning how do you, again, like how do you exist outside of your own issue, right? Immigrant rights is a women's rights issue. Immigrant rights is a Black Lives Matter issue. Immigrant rights is an LGBTQ issue. Immigrant rights is a working class issue, right? So it's really important, I think, especially now that we put intersectionality in action. Like what does it look like physically, right? Like one of our goals this year is to really insist on immigrant rights as a women's rights issue, right? That's a big one, that's a big one. And the stories of the women, for example, being sexually assaulted, you know, assaulted as they make the trek here. The stories, you know, there's been reports since after the election that 35% of Latinos, the drop off of actually reporting domestic abuse because they fear that they report domestic abuse before you know it, they're getting detained and deported. That's a women's rights issue. So connecting those for me is really important. But I have to say, you know, it's easy to just blame the media. So what are we doing to proactively create our own media and find distribution platforms for it? Distribution to me is like a really, really big question, right? We're working right now with Now This, which is one of the biggest video publishers on Facebook. So we're about to do some projects with them that I'm really excited about. So I'm looking to see if there's microphones around the room so that we can open a conversation to questions. Are there microphones around the room? My new American colleagues? I see scurrying, so I'm hoping that that's true. So questions, I'll ask one more as folks are thinking, but hands up if you wanna ask a question. Right, we've been also thinking and talking a lot about technology, right? Is this something that you're trying to leverage? Absolutely, I'm glad you asked that question. I came out, frankly, because of a woman named Gabby Pacheco. I was a reporter, I was an editor at The Huffington Post and then I remember reading an article in The New York Times about these four people who decided to walk from Miami to DC to advocate for the Dream Act and I just didn't understand why would people be out? Like why would you ever wanna tell anybody that you're illegally? They'll find you. So I remember Googling Gabby Pacheco then finding her on YouTube and then when I saw this interview with Gabby, I started seeing all these young people on YouTube. If you type undocumented on YouTube, you would see these videos dating back as far as 2006. Young people, mostly, coming out on YouTube saying I'm here, I'm undocumented, I'm afraid and unapologetic. I remember going like, wait, I'm totally afraid. I'm totally sorry. What is this unapologetic stuff? I was totally confused by that. But I just remember how amazed I was that young people were using technology to fight against the narrative, right? So technology, I think, has always had a very anthropological impact and usage when it comes to this. The question now, though, is how do you connect people, right, like outside of just quote unquote the undocumented population? That's the challenge. How do we connect it with other people who don't identify with that? So there are mics. Yes, Elizabeth. Hello. Hi. I recently came to understand a little bit more about what it means to be undocumented through an experience in New York, a leadership experience that I was very fortunate to be able to interact with what people are going through right now. And through that process, I learned that it's actually a civil offense. Yeah. Sorry, why am I laughing? It's nothing. I'm a well-educated individual and had no idea that it's literally the equivalent of not paying a parking ticket, right? Like this is, it's not a criminal offense. And yet all we're hearing about in the media is the fact that being here without papers, you are a criminal, right? Like that is how it's being talked about constantly. So I'm just curious in the work that you're doing around narrative, if how, or if you're seeing people try to address that. I mean, I was shocked and also, I guess finding that out made me wonder if that was on purpose, given that you also don't need representation if it is, if you're facing a civil suit versus a criminal suit, if you, and so I would love if you could do that. I'm sorry, this is the journalism. I'm just curious. So once that clicked in your head, what did you think? That things are really, really screwed up. I mean, we have even more so than I already felt, but it just gave me more language to describe how we are conflating these issues in a way that is obviously serving, certain folks' agendas. I really implore you when you get a chance if you want uncomfortable conversations. So we have this fact sheet that you can download from our website. It's like a perfect way to break the ice with people. With your parents, with your grandparents, with your pseudo racist uncle. Maybe just give them the fact sheet, have a drink and boom, right? For me, that is what this is gonna require. It's gonna require conversations family to family, water coolers to water coolers, right? Because the lie has been sold, has been cemented. Roger Ailes just died. And I believe in the sanctity of a human being's life and I'm sorry that he died, but he sold us a lie. He built a network all around it. Bill Moyer just did an event with us a couple of months ago and I remember he said that it's really dangerous what happens when people organize around a lie. Washington D.C., Tink Tanks in Washington D.C. have organized itself around a lie that people are criminals. And it's gonna take day-to-day conversation and interactions to change that. Right now, actually for us, we have a college chapter program. For me, the Gay-Straight Alliance, when I was growing up, was a big thing. I came out, my first coming out was in high school when I came out as gay. And after I came out, I guess they started the Gay-Straight Alliance of my high school and I was shocked when I found out that it was like 20 students but only one was gay. So the rest of the members were straight. So we need to create that system for immigration. So right now we have about 31 defined American college chapters across the country who I think of them as like the Gay-Straight alliances of their campuses where it's mostly U.S. citizens talking about immigration and immigrants, right? So those kind of things really need to happen and information is so crucial in this. And thank you for having that moment. There's a question over here. So this is a question also for you Cecilia so I'm hoping both of you can weigh in on it. There's an argument that's gaining a lot of resonance in the wake of the failure of the Clinton campaign which is that identity politics are the downfall of the left. And we saw this debate sort of take over some of the discussions around the women's march. It happened again with the March for Science and there were factions of people saying let's leave the identity politics out of this. We need to build a larger umbrella that's just about science or just about women. How do you both think about that issue and that sort of diagnosis? How do you respond to that when you're making a point like the one I think that you made that is so important that immigrant rights are women's rights, immigrant rights are about evidence-based policy, immigrant rights are all of these things. You go first. No, I said already once I've been stewing about this because it came up at a session that we did yesterday and I was frustrated during the conversation and I was struggling for the words. So I think of what gets framed as identity politics which feels very reductive to me. To me looks like people of color, women, asserting themselves as part of the American ideal and embracing the American ideal because we have the audacity to think that it should apply to us. That to me feels like an act of patriotism and an act of, if the question is are there things which define us as Americans, is there still a set of values that we share at this moment when we're so divided? The thing which gets framed as identity politics is us saying yes, there is a set of principles that we agree to and we believe they should apply to us equally. The notion that we are equals in the society is one of those principles and that's the thing that we're asserting. So I don't think it's the downfall for that reason but I do think, and this was sort of was kind of behind my question about sort of what are you hearing and what are you learning? I also think we gotta listen, like that it is important to me for you to understand me as a Latina, me as a daughter of immigrants, me as a woman, me as a short person, like whatever it is, that's a thing. But it's also important if you're gonna get there and I've been the person in this room a lot, I also have to have enough empathy to understand where you are and to understand how to articulate my piece so that you can hear it. And I don't think that that is a compromise of my values, I think it's essential to you understanding my values. And sometimes it's really hard and it's painful and there were times and many times when I've sat in the room and I could not find the words that could allow me to be heard, which means I just have to double down and try harder. That was really good. I think of identity politics as like pseudo-intellectual psychobabble, like I don't under, I just, and I'm saying this as somebody who looks Asian, who has a Latino name, who's gay, who's undocumented, who majored in African-American studies in college. Is that all? Who is obsessed with white people? So I don't really know. I want to marry a Native American just to complete the whole thing. I actually, I was, sincerely I'm so glad you said this because the language around this, right? The language around this. I did this event a few months ago and I was getting really frustrated with this panel that was happening. And I remember when we were making white people, this young white woman said, when I was asking, what does being white mean to you? And she said, we're the default. It's the norm, right? And where empathy comes in. I remember thinking, man, that must be such a burden to walk around thinking you're the default, you're the norm, right? So I actually think when we do critical identity, we're actually helping white people out. We're basically saying, wait, you're not the center of the world. You never were. You just centered everything around you. So then all of us have to be explained. The marginalized, by the way, who's putting us in the margins? Right, all of the language around what it means to be a minority, what it means to be marginalized, what does it mean to be disenfranchised? So now that we've gained, to think of ourselves as the center, all of a sudden that's identity politics? Mind you, this is a global conversation, right? According to the United Nations, there's about 240 million migrants in the world, more than any other in the history of this world. And when I found out this fact that was really interesting, most of us are migrating to countries that previously colonized or imperialized us. Why is it that when white people move, it's manifest destiny? It's white man's burden. When we move, is it a crime? So to me, the language around that, right, is incredibly, but I have to tell you though, this is why I'm so happy to have been invited here, because I feel that the New America Foundation is one of those institutions in DC that's trying to really break through this red, blue, Republican, Democrat. There is one America. There isn't Trump land. It's one America, right? And trying to understand what that is and the pain that that's gonna take, right? Like the language that we need to have about what it means to be marginalized, because I could talk to a lot of white people who feel that they're incredibly marginalized, right? And acknowledge that, but at the same time, go away to set game. What are the systems in place? What does it benefit, right? It to me is incredibly important. Another question? Yes. Okay. I'm curious in your work how, whether you've come across any answers or hints of an answer as to what it means to be American and, American and anything else. And even though that sort of feels like a very focused question, I mean like, I'm American and gonna answer. It's not, I'm not asking for me, but I think that the answer to that could be very helpful in the future because increasingly, I think Americans are finding regional identities or other kinds of identities. I'm a New Yorker, I'm a Bostonian, whatever, and so the answer to how to be American and something else applies for all or many of us. To me, but part of the basis of that question is why is it not okay? Why is it not to say I'm American and Filipino? Like I'm really proud to be Filipino, you know? Like I'm proud of where I come from. But for some people, it becomes, I remember I did this Tea Party event, I think it was in Nebraska. And this man who saw me on Fox News was very angry because he was saying if only these people can assimilate, they don't really wanna be in America, they don't wanna assimilate. And then when I asked him, well what does assimilate mean to you? And he goes, you know, food. I really like mashed potatoes. Like I think it's awesome. It's like my favorite thing in Thanksgiving. I'm like asking my Lola and my grandmother, hey can you make sure and she doesn't know how to make my, it's like, so food was his big thing. And the other thing was language, right? Like why can't people just speak English? That's a big one. And, but there's an assumption to that, that people don't wanna speak English. When I made White People for MTV, the last section is Folkism Bensonhurst, New York, that used to be predominantly Italian that's now predominantly Asian, right? And we found an Italian American family and this man, Angelo, said I moved here from Italy when I was five and I learned English and these people, they don't even wanna talk to us, they don't even approach us in the street. So when I asked them, well, you know, how long did it take you to learn English? Oh, it took me 20 years. Oh, so you want the Asian people to just boom, speak English perfectly now and it took you 20 years, right? So to me, trying to look at the end, like I'm Filipino and this, I'm American and this, I think moving from thinking of that as something that's taking away from America and to perspective that's adding to America, right, is the big shift that needs to happen. And that's why I think asking White people about their own identity, that White, you were something else before you're White. Are you Irish, are you German, are you Italian, are you Dutch? And when people say to me, oh, but my great-great-grandfather did it the right way. Well, when was that? 1868, you mean when everybody could just show up? Was that the right way? So all the myths around that, and this is why I think for me, when focusing on Whiteness has always been about, Toni Morrison said, in America, American means White, everybody else has to hyphenate, right? So breaking that away and making American Asian, to be American is to be Chinese, to be American is to be Portuguese, right? Like all of that is something we celebrate. It doesn't take away from it, it actually adds to it. So I see a bunch of hands up, but Ann Marie, your hand was up. All right, okay, and I'm trying to be respectful to both sides of the room, even though on my side. But you know, the panel next to me is the better one. It's gonna be awesome. Shimamanda is like coming here. Sorry, I'm totally, totally fan-girling about that. I can't believe, I'm so sorry if I'm making her wait. Thank you Jose, and thank you for your leadership. And I wanna point that out, and I'm right here. Oh, hey. I'm one of the short people too. So my question is more about what are useful interventions in these situations? Because often I have a lot of friends, and because I know them personally, I know they're good people, and they're big fans of that narrative of make America great again. And facts don't matter to them, right? It doesn't matter how accurate your fact is, they believe in climate change because the dominant, oh, sorry, they believe that climate change is a hoax, because the dominant narrative that they feel has been oppressive to them adopts climate change. So it is a power dynamic between the elites and the non-elites, those who don't have access. But what is it? It's not elite to know stuff, right? No, but the point, Jose, is that knowledge is power, and those people understand that very well, and when they see DC being the gatekeeper of knowledge and what is true, they understand that the only access to power they have is to deny that fact. So the question becomes, how do we reach these people without talking facts, right? How do we come to them so that they can reauthor America with us, as opposed to moving ahead with a multicultural America that looks much more different than America of the 50s, the one that they know, and make them move away from, or understand that it's not a zero sum game. How do we include them in this conversation in a way that's not factual? Because of course America is going to become more diverse. They realize that and they continue to deny it because it's an uncomfortable truth. It's an inconvenient truth. So how do we reach them? That's the question. What are the useful interventions that have worked for you? Thank you. So that's why for us, by the way, so one other thing before I say that, Clay Scherke, an amazing writer about internet culture, said to me once, Jose, you don't bring facts to a cultural war, man. You don't bring facts to a culture war. And I get what he's getting at. As somebody who wears multiple identities, I totally understand that, right? I did an event once at a church and the priest was like all about immigration and he goes, but I don't approve of the homosexual thing. And I was like, oh, father, but I didn't ask for your approval, but thank you for saying that. So that's why the cultural part of what we do is really important, right? Like that's why working on narrative change and trying to understand where people are coming from. That's why for me, for example, that's why I'm investing as much as I am on white people content, right? Like I can't ask them to see us if we don't see them. So what does seeing them actually look like, right? And where is that defiance of facts, which to me is incredibly troubling. It's just troubling, right? But it's the reality, as you said. But where do I meet them where it hurts? Where's the hurt coming from? What's the pain, right? Where's the zero sum? Like a lot of people, for example, keep telling me on Twitter, because I get a lot of hatred on Twitter, like hey, you took away someone's job. Actually, I create jobs. I employ like 15 people right now. Many of them are white, by the way. I like white people so much, I actually hire them. You know, it's like, and I don't want to have to like show that, but it's true, like, but underneath all of that kind of push, underneath a lot of the pushback is really this pain that someone is going through. Like, we're all walking around dealing with our own pains, and how do I get that out of somebody, right? Whether it's economic anxiety, whether it's a woman thinking, what if I don't learn Spanish? That was coming from a very fearful, painful place. She was like, I'm 65, and maybe I won't learn this fast enough. And here I am thinking, they're afraid that we won't learn English when really she's thinking, when is she gonna learn, right? Like, so that, like, I'm interested in that. Now, I have to say however, there are people, Dr. Carlson included, who you're never gonna convince, because it's just, this is convenient, right? Like, DC, if you haven't read Meg Greenfield, used to be the op-ed editor at the Washington Post. She wrote one of the best books about DC is called Washington. Hemremar is called Washington. And I remember reading that book when I was in college, and she was all about, the problem with DC is people here, it's convenient for people to have to stand in the corner of 15th and K, and they're not moving. That's where I stand, 15th and K. For me, the past six years is like, what do I know? What am I wrong about? And how do I move myself? That, to me, has been much more challenging. So I think the immigration topic has been largely colorized and criminalized. And to your earlier point, it's been further narrowed to be more of a Latino issue, which it, of course, has not. And I agree with your point about it being a water cooler conversation, the fact sheet, within families. But I do think there's a role for a larger campaign, right? And I think about, I can't remember what the impetus was, but there was this wonderful video posted on YouTube of I Am Muslim. And it had all the different faces and genders, like it's not this one image that had been put out into the media, but it is such a diverse, has a diverse look, if you will. And I think there's a role for that on this topic of immigration and undocumented workers. So I'd love for you to respond to that, in addition to your fascination with white people that you think about leveraging your voice and your tools to help. But do you agree or disagree with that? I totally agree. What I will say, can you help me raise money? That would be good, because we need some money. So I call it the holy trinity of anti-immigrants in DC. The Center for Immigration Studies, numbers USA, and FAIR. Those are the three groups that you cannot read the New York Times article or an NPR episode in which they need an opposite side and they go to those. Many of those groups have been branded by the Southern Pave Law Center as hate groups, funded by white nationalists. And yet, reporters looking to balance their stories rely on them. Their budget, when it comes to actually creating this dynamic that were criminals and were lawbreakers, their budget is what, about maybe $30 million a year. They have so much money that they can run an ad on the Super Bowl, talking about immigrants featuring a black congresswoman, right? We don't have that kind of money. We don't have that kind of money. And when we do produce these videos, like forward.us, for example, they find America in other groups, like next month is immigrant heritage month, so there's gonna be a lot of videos. They just don't get the kind of distribution that they should. So I totally agree with you that a massive campaign is needed, we just haven't had the money to do it. I have to say, back to our gentleman's point though, if you remember when the Muslim bad happened and everybody rushed to the airports, you're not seeing that happening when people are getting deported or detained, right? You're not seeing that happening when people are dying in ice custody. There's been two in the past week now, right? When the Mayday Rally happened, I thought it was gonna be the largest Mayday Rally this country has ever seen. That didn't happen. So there's still this block in people's mind about immigrants. And I think maybe because it's our own history and we don't really understand it either. So I think it's harder. For me, the toughest thing is, how do I get the LGBT community to really embrace immigrant rights as an LGBTQ issue, right? That's something that we're still working on. Other question, I'm trying to switch sides of the room. You got one here? Oh. Oh, thank you. Oh, I think he was asking a question over there. Then maybe we'll go ahead. Oh, thank you for complicating this already very complicated conversation. I wanted to go just one step further. So I'm an Indian Muslim immigrant and to say this, as in, my family is both documented and undocumented. And we still all hang out together. And when we do, there's still a sad narrative around my legally, like the ones that came here with, you know, waited for 10 years, that family member still has this, who's an immigrant, has an idea around undocumented immigrant. That's very negative. And we have, like, those are also my family members. So it's been interesting to, yes, I know you're obsessed with white people. I'm kind of obsessed with my own family to think about my own family, who's almost all of them are immigrants, are themselves talking negatively about other immigrants. So like that, this is where naturally white people should celebrate in the sense that Indians and Pakistanis are not like, I know the numbers look like they're gonna be in our favor, but it's not like, have you ever had a meal with the Pakistani and an Indian Hindu and listened to the conversation? They're not all on the same page about anything, or a Korean and a Japanese family. Like, it's gonna take us a long time. So maybe wait it out. The question for you is, how do you engage with immigrants themselves, either call it self-hate or whatever, however the word would be, who are engaging with this inter-generationally with their own family members, or within their churches, synagogues, mosques? Thank you so much for complicating it even more. Actually, after the election, I did my own calculation of my family, so I have 34 Filipino-American relatives in America. There's 35 of us. Out of 35, I'm the only person who's undocumented, so I'm one of the mixed, it's called the mixed status family, right? And I did a survey, out of the 34 people, 18 were eligible to vote. Only five voted. So I wanted to understand why, right? So kind of in the same vein of, wait a second, so I'm the illegal one of the family, but I'm the most politically kind of awake, and yet you guys have an American citizenship that you're not even taking advantage of, right? Like, that's why for me, I talk to my aunt, my aunt Rosie, she's my favorite aunt, and she goes, I sent your cousins to school, I have the car, I buy the house, I'm done. So America to her is something you buy, something you wear, something you eat, it's not something you participate in, right? So that is an uncomfortable conversation within Latino, Asian communities where, and you hear this a lot about how we talk about Latinos and Black people within Asian communities, right? That there's this feeling of, oh, we did it the right way, we spent too, it's not our fault that we have all that time to study, why can't they, right? So really getting at that, for me, part of this is why I'm doing the anti-Blackness project, because it really exposes a lot of that, right, in terms of what people are buying into. But to your specific question, I think people talk a lot about uncomfortable conversations, I really wonder how many of them are actually having them. So can we make a promise right now that when you go with your family members, you're actually gonna poke them a little bit more, and you know, right? Because I think that's what it's gonna take. And I actually found it interesting that if you look at the immigrant community, the fact that you now have an entire movement of young undocumented people who are awake, who participate, who engage, I think that's really interesting, right? So what's the, and the fact that they're working with Black Lives Matter activists is I find incredibly beautiful. There's something happening there that I think is really special, and figuring out how we support that, I think is gonna be, is a big question. Yep, yes, sir. Hi, thank you. I spent a lot of time in Central Valley in California, which is traditionally red, and I thought during this election that because of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, for the first time there was a chance that these people wouldn't vote against their own pocketbooks because they were so dependent on immigrant labor in the agricultural fields. I was shocked that it made no difference, despite it being such a sensitive and direct relationship that these people that traditionally vote and sort of have with undocumented immigrants, similar to the example you gave about Alabama. And I'd like you to maybe try and explain how you vote against your own pocketbook in this situation. Well, I mean, I think a lot of it, I guess is the fear part of it, right? Kind of related to your question. I have to say, journalistically, and I'm working on this now. We have a partner, we're gonna announce it pretty soon. We're working on really something that we should have done a long time ago, which is follow the money. It's like one of the cardinal rules in journalism, you follow the money. When it comes to immigration, we haven't really done that. We haven't really followed the money in terms of what undocumented immigrants contribute to Social Security and taxes and why is it that I can get a letter from the Social Security Administration telling me that apparently, since I was 18, I paid like 140,000 into the fund. So I called them and I'm like, hey, I'm here illegally, do I get any of that back? And they're like, no. And then of course, you find out that we have paid collectively undocumented workers $100 billion into the Social Security Fund. According to the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, undocumented workers have kept, have helped to keep Social Security solvent. That's a fact. A fact that you will never hear on CNN, MSNBC or Fox News any day. It just, it doesn't fit the narrative, right? So people voting against that and the fact, so my bigger point I'm trying to make is, you know how they like to say that the immigration system is broken? When you break something, it feels like it's an accident. This seems deliberate. It seems that what we have here is a system that is deliberately the way that it is because it benefits people. And trying to understand that, I think, is I don't think we have an understanding of it quite yet, right? You look at the state of California, 51% of Californians aged 25 and under, all Californians aged 25 and under is Latino or Latina, 51%. Right? And you know like California gave us yoga, soy milk, almond milk. So it starts in California and it spreads all across the country, right? And the fact that when you're talking about the Latino population in California, like Latinos and Asians make the majority in the state of California. Let me repeat this. Latinos and Asians make the majority in the state of California, right? And yeah, what work is happening to really do intentional collaboration between those two groups of people? Not a lot. So I think it's just a lot of work in terms of what community building looks like it means. Although I would say with respect to the growers, which is a policy area I've worked on for a really long time, there's an even simpler explanation, which is that they don't believe they're gonna be subject to immigration enforcement. So they can vote how they wanna vote because God forbid if the immigration authorities ever get anywhere near the fields, they're calling up the very same Congress members who you see on TV saying what they say about immigrants and saying, don't let them near my fields because I need these workers because I gotta harvest my crops. And usually they respond. So they're totally having it both ways. And the immigration authorities, I've sort of witnessed them be responsive and I have gotten the phone calls myself from members of Congress who again, say terrible things on television about immigrants, but they have the audacity to then call up the administration and say, but please don't send the authorities into the fields. How many people here are from Texas by the way? Can you raise your hand? Like what is happening in Texas right now is just atrocious, right? 1.8 million undocumented people in the state of Texas. Like the construction business of Texas couldn't survive with un-documented workers. So if you really wanted to enforce laws, you would have to really get at all these, all these US citizen employers who take advantage of that. So back to your point, we can't have it both ways. We can't put up a sign outside of the US-Mexico border and say and keep out, then 10 yards in say help wanted, right? We can't, oh, I don't want the immigrants but I really want cheap produce. I really want a cheap babysitter. I really wanna make sure someone is mowing my lawn babysitting my kids and serving me drinks. So and on that moment of highlighting hypocrisy, we will bring this portion to a close with many, many thanks to us here today. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. Yay, Chimamanda. I'm gonna be sitting here.