A sense of urgency at national conference on race

THE TIMING couldn't be more perfect. A new sense of urgency will permeate a conference planned long before Donald Trump stunned the nation with his victory over Hillary Clinton.

With Clinton's stunning defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, whose main calling card was to attack minorities and turn them into this election cycle's election boogeyman in order to draw out the white vote, especially those voters who have stopped voting because they felt that it was a useless exercise.

"This coming weekend, the Race Forward board and staff are grateful to be gathering more than 2,000 of our people at our Facing Race National Conference. It will be a space for healing, listening, working together, and strengthening our commitment to racial justice in the face of great obstacles," reads a press release.

"Let us channel our anger and grief toward constructive and innovative strategizing. Yes, this is a crisis, and it is clear that business as usual cannot continue in the racial justice movement or anywhere else."

Nov. 8 was the result of that race-baiting - what I called the GOP's new Southern Strategy in which Republicans attracted disaffected southern Democrats because they felt betrayed by a the signing of the Democrat-driven Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the mid-sixties.

A national conference, Facing Race 2016, will convene in Atlanta, GA Nov. 10-12. Sponsored by  Race Forward: The Center For Racial Justice Innovation, a major conversation topic will be the results of the presidential election and what the next four years might look like for people of color.

Race Forward: The Center For Racial Justice Innovation announced today the program guide and workshop content forFacing Race 2016, to be held in Atlanta, GA, on November 10-12, 2016. For 3 days, attendees will have access to a transformative experience that will feature 80 individual workshops. Press passes may be requested by contacting media@raceforward.com. General registration for the conference, as well as various packages are now available; full details atFacing Race 2016 registration.

Opening this year’s Facing Race conference will be an electrifying plenary entitled, “Multiracial Movement for Black Lives” that will feature as moderator Michelle Alexander, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law professor, civil rights advocate and writer. Panelists will include: Chris Crass, Author, Educator, and advocate; Judith LeBlanc, Native Organizers Alliance; Isa Noyola, Transgender Law Center; Zon Moua, Freedom, Inc; and Alicia Garza, Founder of #BlackLivesMatter.

Garza stated, “If we are going to forge a strong movement for social transformation, no community can do that on its own. A strong movement can only be built with the active participation of all of us, connected in our resistance to anti-Blackness and the systems that keep our communities divided. Join us to explore the challenges and opportunities emerge as we commit to forging a new way forward--together.”

With a focus on continuing its legacy as being the largest multiracial, multigenerational conference for racial justice advocates in the United States, Facing Race 2016 will feature two keynote speakers at this years conference:

• Roxane Gay, writer, professor, commentator, editor, and author of “Bad Feminist” and 
• Jose Antonio Vargas, founder and CEO of Define American, Founder and Editor of #EmergingUS. 

Jointly, Race Forward is proud to have two keynotes that support authentic activism and have a clear vision in the fight for racial justice that honors and respects every voice. This year's Facing Race’s program will also offer 80 workshops.

The attendees of Facing Race will have one thing in common: they are committed to racial equity and racial justice. However, the individuals who attend this conference do their work in a variety of ways; some are organizers, prominent scholars, advocates, journalist, artists, and they do work in for-profit and nonprofit sectors, representing organizations of all sizes. 

As issues of race have come to the forefront of our national public and private conversations, this multi-disciplinary approach is key.

According to a press release, Race Forward advances racial justice through research, media and practice. Founded in 1981, Race Forward brings systemic analysis and an innovative approach to complex race issues to help people take effective action toward racial equity. Race Forward publishes the daily news site Colorlines and presents Facing Race, the country’s largest multiracial conference on racial justice.

For more information and to register, click here.

400,000 undocumented Asian immigrants in California may be impacted by Supreme Court ruling

Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas,was among the hundreds of immigration activists demonstrating outside the Supreme Court as the justices heard arguments in the case challenging President Obama's executive actions on immigration.

LAST MONDAY (April 18) at the U.S. Supreme Court, the eight justices heard oral arguments for and against President Obama's executive actions on immigration: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) and the expansion of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

Based on questions from the Supreme Court justices, it appears to court-watchers that the case will end in a 4-4 tie based on party lines. That would be bad news for the White House. The high court has been operating one justice short since the death of Antonin Scalia in February.

If SCOTUS remains deadlocked in the U.S. vs. Texas, the lower court ruling that said the president went too far in his executive actions would stand, voiding Obama's effort on  immigration reform.

“We know that DAPA and expanded DACA stand on the right side of the law,” said Stewart Kwoh, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles. “In the last five decades, Presidents from both sides of the aisle have taken executive action to shape immigration priorities.”

RELATED: Asians are part of the immigration debate

The decision could impact about 4 million undocumented immigrants; 400,000 of whom are from Asia. Asian immigrants have surpassed immigrants coming from Latin America.

In California, an estimated 15 percent of the state’s undocumented residents are Asian, comprising approximately 416,000 people. Of those, 130,000 are in Los Angeles County and 52,000 are in Orange County. Statewide, Advancing Justice-LA estimates that the largest groups of undocumented Asians are: Filipinos (143,000), Chinese (76,000), Koreans (71,000), Vietnamese (60,000), and Asian Indian (46,000).

RELATED: Dreaming with the American dreamers

"For the average person, what's at stake is: What are you going to do with all of these millions of undocumented people?" asked Jose Antonio Vargas in an interview with Rolling Stone. Vargas is a Filipino/American immigration advocate who himself is undocumented.

"It's been perpetual limbo for them. Nothing is getting done. Congress is saying the president is overreaching, but I would argue that Congress has been irresponsible in not doing anything," said Vargas.

RELATED: Jose Antonio Vargas - an undocumented American

“While the legal battle ensues and anti-immigrant campaigns on the state and national level continue, we must remember that these actions have a real human cost,” said Anthony Ng, immigrant rights policy advocate at Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles (Advancing Justice-LA). “A ruling against DAPA won’t just impact undocumented immigrants; it will impact their families, as well as our neighborhoods and communities.”

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For more news about Asian/Americans & Pacific Americans, read AsAm News.

A new journalism needed for a new America

Jose Antonio Vargas launches a crowdfunding campaign for a new kind of media - #EmergingUS.

AS THE United States makes the rocky transition to a minority majority country we see the great institutions - political, judicial, educational, entertainment and others struggle to adjust to the new demographic because they know if they don't, they will quickly lose their usefulness and their credibility.

One of those institutions having trouble is the news media - from the way they view what makes the news down to the composition of its work force. Right in the middle is Jose Antonio Vargas, a Filipino/American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who happens to be undocumented.

Besides becoming one of the most outspoken advocates for immigration reform because of his immigration status, he is using his journalistic skills to force the news industry to change the way they perceive the news and especially how they cover communities of color.

Recently Vargas launched a crowdfunding campaign for #EmergingUS, a news agency he believes can fill the void in covering troublesome issues usually covered by the traditional media giants. All he needs is a million dollars.

RELATED: Jose Vargas will make you uncomfortable

“I cannot talk about Black Lives Matter and not talk about the immigrant rights movement, and not talk about the LGBTQ movement and not talk about income inequality, and not talk about working-class white people," Vargas said in an interview with The Huffington Post. "All of those issues are interconnected, yet for the most part in newsrooms, they’re thought of as separate.”

"The way most of the East Coast-based news organizations talk about these issues," he added, "doesn't reflect the reality that is happening across the country."

Recently he created #JournalismSoWhite when he challenged the major newspapers to assign reporters of color to cover the presidential campaigns, especially since race and immigration are such huge issues.

"Asian people in this country are actually more immigrant than Latinos are," said Vargas, who now lives in L.A. "But how do we cover immigration? Is it because we think Mexican, we automatically think Latino, and then we automatically think the border, and then we automatically think illegal?"

RELATED: #JournalismSoWhite challenges news media

#EmergingUS was born in the L.A. Times newsroom, but after publisher Austin Beutner was fired in September, Vargas was forced to seek other sources of revenue in order for #EmergingUS to continue as a video-heavy independent news service.

The other big issue is the demographic shift in the country's population where census experts predict that Euro Americans will become less than 50 percent by mid-century. How Whites adjust to their new status is a major story that is already showing up in the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders candidacies, both of whom draw heavily from working class whites who feel their privileges and entitlement slipping away.

From the #EmergingUS website, these are some stories that will be covered:

• Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the co-founders of #BlackLivesMatter, who appear together on camera to describe the origins of this modern-day civil rights movement 
• Americans who explain their complex relationships to the race categories on the U.S. Census – who has a box and who doesn’t? Are the boxes we check accurate? 
• Immigrants who respond to Donald Trump’s policy of re-admitting the “good immigrants” to America after his proposed mass deportation. Who gets to be a “good immigrant,” and who gets to decide? 
• White Americans are an emerging racial minority in many parts of the country; White students became a minority in K-12 public schools for the first time during the 2014-2015 school year.

RELATED: America's challenge is learning to live with itself

Since the crowdfunding campaign was launched 15 days ago, #EmergingUS has raised 13 percent of their goal, or over $136,180. If you would like to help, click here.

For Vargas and the rest of the journalists of #EmergingUS, diversity is not just a goal, nor is it a side issue that is covered in Black History Month or Asian/American Pacific Islander Heritage Month - it's life in the new America every day. And that's what mainstream media is missing in their story selection and news judgements.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution, this article is news laced with opinion. Readers are encouraged to seek multiple news sources to formulate their own positions. 

 

#JournalismSoWhite: Oscars' dilemma shared by the news media

THE LACK of diversity among Oscar's acting nominations has provided a lot of tsk-tsking and wagging fingers and plenty of grist for journalists and media watchers, but it has also prompted other professions to take a cold, hard look in the mirror.

Journalism has been wrestling with the lack of diversity among its own ranks for decades with little improvement to show for all its lofty intentions. The discussion about hiring more minorities in the media has been an on going  conversation limited to the industry but #JournalismSoWhite, launched by Asian/American journalist and immigration advocate Jose Antonio Vargas, has pushed the profession's ugly little secret to spill out of the newsroom and into the public realm.

I have often been the lone journalist of color in thousands of editorial meetings throughout my 28-year journalism career, which involved an ethnic community newspaper and four (or was it five?) different mainstream newsrooms under a similar number of ownership groups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The only exception was my time spent at the Oakland Tribune under the late Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Robert Maynard, one of the country's strongest advocates for diversity in American newsrooms. He was the first African/American owner of a newspaper in a major city and he practiced what he preached. The Trib had one of the most diverse news staff in the profession. Editorial board meetings always had a wide range of perspectives where sometimes, there would be only one straight, white male in a room of 10 editors.

In the other newsrooms, most of the editors I worked with were Euro/Americans. It was hard not to notice my minority status in those meetings. Knowing that my experiences in my circuitous route to a journalism career was unlike the other writers and editors in the room, I always made it a point to offer news angles or assign stories that other editors might not have thought of. 

In news meetings, as we evaluated stories and their placement in the print newspapers, I always offered value judgements of stories that they might have passed over but which I thought might be of interest or importance to minority communities. In the diverse Bay Area, this perspective was invaluable from a business standpoint because our readership is as diverse as they come in the United States. 

It was a balancing act because I didn't want to be the "representative" of all minorities in those meetings. At the same time, I could not stand by and stay silent. "Uh, excuse me but with all due respect, ..." Kowtowing? I don't know, I thought I was being polite.

I'm not sure how the work environment is in television or radio, but in print, my minority status was hard to ignore. Being Asian in a leadership position was rare back then. Funny thing, the more management talked about increasing minority representation, compared to my time at the Maynard Tribune, the number of minorities in journalism seems to have declined as time passed. 

I hope it is different in the big city newspapers but newspapers in the suburbs, which until relatively recent have been the domain - or, should I say, refuge - of Euro/Americans remain largely white even as the suburban demographics are shifting with minorities seeking the American dream of home ownership. Today, the Beaver Cleaver neighborhoods - at least in the San Francisco Bay Area - are harder and harder to find and increasing the number of journalists of color becomes even more critical.

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, probably the best-known undocumented immigrant in the country, opened up a can of worms recently when he tweeted the following.

Vargas, who started the organization Define American in his quest for citizenship, is a Filipino/American who came to this country at age 13. It wasn't until he was in his late teens that he discovered he was undocumented. 

He won a Pulitzer while working with the Washington Post. He revealed his immigration status in a Huffington Post confessional. Since then, he has been in the forefront advocating for immigration reform, including a documentary about his situation and a TV doc "Dear White America." 

RELATED: Jose Vargas, an undocumented American

Continuing the #JournalistsSoWhite conversation, he tweeted these queries:

When candidates for the U.S. presidency are spewing anti-immigrant hate and hurling racist  statements against Asians, Latinos, African/Americans, Syrians, Muslims, etc. It becomes critical that our voices are heard amidst all the mischaracterizations and stereotypes but sometimes - like me - one can get tired of holding up the banner for diversity.

Maybe it becomes a case of burnout when journalists of color get tired of trying to explain themselves and the communities they came from to editors and management who -- despite their best intentions to diversify their staff -- still preferred to hang out with people who look like them, go golfing with them, joke with them, and share the same values and perspective that they hold. In other words, it was never a meeting in the middle. One always had to move into their enclave, talk like them, dress like them and let the everyday slights slide off one's shoulders. 

According to the American Society of News Editors' census released last summer, the percentage of racial minorities at newspapers was at 12.76 percent in 2014. With minorities making up 37.02 percent of the U.S. population, our newsrooms are not representative of the society we live in.

For every 100 employees in the media industry, 2.8 are of Asian descent according to the ASNE survey. 

RELATED: Find out how diverse the American newspaper industry is with our interactive.

Sadly, my anecdotal observation is also true, minority percentage of newsroom employment is on a downward track, falling to 12.76 percent in 2014. A year earlier it was 13.34 percent. ASNE president Chris Peck in a press release, hailed this as good news saying the stats shows employment of minorities as holding steady. I don't know about that; to me it looks like its is getting worse.

It may be too late for the newspaper industry. Minority journalists are finding a place for themselves in the new media platforms which have younger and more daring owners who are more open to the diverse ideas those journalists bring with them. There is a fear that newspapers are the dinosaurs of media. Their inability to change and adapt to the changing demographics and technology may be its undoing.

The tech industry has been under heavy fire for its lack of diversity and opportunities for minorities and women but compared to the print media, they are light years ahead. Google, for example, said this year that 60 percent of its overall staff is Euro/American. At Facebook, only 55 percent of the overall staff is white. Euro/Americans at Microsoft make up 59.5 percent of its overall staff. (Of course those numbers are misleading because the inequities come in the board room with minorities clustered in the lower paying jobs and women in supporting roles.) 

RELATED: Asians hit a bamboo ceiling in Silicon Valley

BuzzFeed founder and chief executive Jonah Peretti says that diversity is a priority for the company. “We care about diversity for moral reasons,” explains Peretti in not to employees “but we also know a diverse staff is a competitive advantage that allows us to recruit from the broadest possible pool of talent and have team members with a wide range of experiences and perspectives.”

The cynic in me says "I've heard this song before," but maybe the online news sites may be the proving ground for minority journalists in the future. The news outlets on the Internet have the advantage of not having the historic template that perpetuates the old boys' networks. 

I like to think that there will always be a place for good journalists. Computer skills don't automatically translate to good story telling. Digging for information, getting the facts straight and writing compelling stories are skills that will always be in demand, no matter the medium.

The Poynter Institute's Kristen Hale, whose article inspired this discussion, wrote: 

"Journalists love holding people and institutions accountable — we speak truth to power. That is our job. But given our own power, are we holding ourselves accountable? #JournalismSoWhite is meant to spark conversations, uncomfortable as they may be. I would like to think, and I hope, that the conversation that was started online can move to offline conversations in newsrooms across the country (and also in journalism schools, where the new generation of journalists are being trained). One of my favorite quotes about journalism came from the playwright Arthur Miller: 'A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.' Since #JournalismSoWhite, we are nowhere close to hearing everyone."

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REVIEW: Documentary explores the pros and cons of being white in America

Besides plenty of tears, there were plenty of a-ha moments in MTV's "White People."

WHITE PEOPLE,  the MTV-produced documentary by Jose Antonio Vargas created a bit of stir - for a little while, anyway.

There were those that hated it and those who loved it.

Critics said that the 40-minute documentary that explored what it is like to be a white in America, circa 2015 was simplistic in its approach and didn't go far enough.

Those who loved it, loved that the white subjects found themselves in an uncomfortable situation confronting their biases, expectations and the privilege built into our society.

As expected, the show generated a lot of response on the Internet. (Here is another article.) As one tweeter-of-color wrote: (I'm paraphrasing) "They were uncomfortable for an hour, I'm uncomfortable all my life."

To watch the entire episode of White People, click here.

Many of the issues addressed in the documentary are familiar to people of color. That's because people of color are always talking about race issues and race relations. The issue of race is woven into their everyday lives and impossible for them to ignore.

Pulitzer Prize winner Jose Antonio Vargas was the "White People" host.

To many of the young white people in documentary, the concept of race was an unfamiliar  topic - something they just didn't talk about much - and they were clearly uncomfortable when confronted with the advantages and privileges that they had never considered.

The show was at its best when it debunked white beliefs of minority advantages.

Katie, a young woman from Scottsdale, Arizona, complained about minorities winning all the scholarships was chagrined when she learned that whites in fact, win 75% of all merit=based scholarships and have a 40% greater chance of getting a scholarship than students of color. 

UPDATE: Jose Antonio Vargas responds to the critics

In another segment, an Italian American family who believed Asians were "taking over" Bensonhurst, a neighborhood in Brooklyn that was once an exclusively Italian enclave, was made to realize that the new immigrants were doing what all their own immigrant forefathers did  - "transitioning" not only neighborhoods, but themselves as well.

The host, Filipino/American Vargas, to his credit, took great pains to not  attack his subjects but only to tell them the facts. 

White People - the show - shouldn't be viewed as a standalone. MTV has provided a website - lookdifferent.org -where one can explore the topic further, what they can do, how to counter one's own biases, listen to the celebrities and personalities express their thoughts on the subject.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the key to the future of America's race relations, is not how people of color or immigrants integrate themselves into society, but how white Americans adjust to being another ethnic group among many. Will the latter be willing to share the benefits that our country offers, or will there be more Trumps, Dylann Roofs and O'Reilly's to rile up the white (soon-to-be) minority.

In a way, White People, is asking that question. And to MTV's credit, they know who their audience is - the young people, teenagers and people in their 20s - the so-called Millennial generation. Even the young people interviewed in the documentary, despite their awkwardness talking about race, seemed to realize the inevitability of the demographic changes that is occurring. 

RELATED: America's challenge is learning to live with itself

Numerous studies have concluded that the Millennials are - despite the Roofs of the world - are more tolerant of different lifestyles, different religions and different races.

White People is far from perfect. There was no way 40 minutes, no matter how well crafted, could convincingly address the complex issue of race relations in the United States., especially from the perspective of European Americans.

Yeah, White People didn't get as complex as some may have wanted and there it would have been easy to get bogged down in the historical, psychological and sociological factors that makes race such a difficult subject to tackle for a single television documentary. What MTV and Vargas did succeed in was to make the topic more accessible to its young target demographic. I hope there are follow-ups especially addressing MTV's audience, (cliche' it may be) who will eventually decide which direction the discussion on race will go; and which direction America will go.

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Dear White America: Jose Antonio Vargas will make you squirm

YOU HAVE to hand it to Jose Antonio Vargas. The Filipino/American journalist knows how to get your attention. He isn't afraid to make people uncomfortable - very uncomfortable - especially when it comes to racial issues.

Race is an issue many people are uncomfortable talking about especially across cultural lines.

He has two projects coming up that will make a lot of people of all races confront some of the racial issues facing contemporary America: one with the youth-oriented MTV and one for a broader audience with the  Los Angeles Times. .

The Times' #EmergingUS campaign that will be launched this fall may be the forum that Starbucks tried to be in its failed attempt to start conversations about race earlier this year. Reading about these issues over a morning cup of coffee in the privacy of your own home will give people a chance to soak in these issues and maybe give it a second thought.

Jose Antonio Vargas

Social media will give readers a chance to engage with others on these topics.

Of course, none of this matters if no one reads the articles or bothers to engage. EmergingUS will be a new digital magazine.

In a July 3 oped that he wrote for the Los Angeles Times, he explained why the newspaper is embarking on the EmergingUS project. 

As we celebrate our country's birthday, let us also acknowledge that the country that declared independence in 1776 does not look like the country we live in today.

In fact, America today is not even the 1960s version of America that we study in history books, when the country was 85 percent white and 10% black. Today, Asian and Pacific Islander are the fastest growing racial and immigrant groups, according to the Pew Research Center. (Almost three-quarters of all Asian American adults are foreign-born.) In the last few decades, the growth of the Latino population has been so robust that 51 percent of all Californians under age 25 are Latino, according to the U.S. census.

America’s demographics are shifting to resemble the minority-majority reality in California, with Los Angeles as the country’s most diverse metropolis. Almost 200 languages and dialects are spoken daily in L.A., which is home to the largest communities of 25 nationalities (including Mexican, Filipino, Persian, Korean, Guatemalan, Armenian and Vietnamese) outside of their native countries. Forty percent of Angelenos are foreign-born, including me.

For MTV, Vargas will speak with white teenagers and young adults about their experience with topics such as affirmative action, white privilege, frustration, guilt and racial identity.

The documentary White People focuses on five main characters, "All with the goal of starting some real and honest conversations in a thoughtful, judgment-free environment," according to MTV.com.

When some young people walked out of a roundtable discussion, Vargas exhorts them, "This is good! Let's all get uncomfortable together."

The film is part of the network's Look Different campaign. Viewers can log onto the initiative's site to further explore racial bias and whitness. "Whiteness often remains unexamined in conversations about race in this country, even as it acts as the implicit norm against which other racial identities are judged. By shining a spotlight on whiteness, we hope White People will serve as a powerful conversation starter that encourages our audience to address racial bias through honest, judgment-free dialogue," says MTV's president Stephen Friedman.

RELATED: Define American urges undocumented to come out

America's challege is learning to live with itself

The discussions in White People are bound to make some viewers uncomfortable. The tension involved in racial dialogues is apparent even in the trailer. The documentary promises to change the way you think about white history, white privilege, and white frustration. 

These young people had to grapple with the role race plays in their lives — something that can be difficult when it’s something you don’t have to think about it a lot. Vargas said that speaking with young Native American students in one segment helped provide a bit more perspective on what being white represents from the outside.

“That was really overwhelming to experience, when you talk to the young people, the young Native Americans, of that high school, they don’t necessarily think the European settlers are settlers who saved this country,” Vargas said. “They are the ones who invaded. They are the ones who took.”

Be sure to check out White People when it airs on Wednesday, July 22 at 8/7 c. on MTV. OR you can also check it out on MTV.com, the MTV App, MTV’s Facebook page or YouTube channel. And , if you miss that, you can still get it Thursday (July 23) morning on iTunes, Amazon and MTV’s Video On Demand services. It’s a must-see, y’all.

As one of our country's most outspoken advocates for immigration reform in regards to undocumented Americans, Vargas revealed his own undocumented status in 2011 after he won a Pulitzer Prize-winning as a Washington Post reporter. The Filipino/American also launched another campaign last month called Define American, in which he encouraged undocumented Americans to "come out" online to humanize the plight of undocumented immigrants, many of whom - like Vargas - did not know of their immigration status until they were adults.

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Undocumented Americans urged to open up and tell their stories online

Jose Antionio Vargas, seated in front, and some of the participants who told their stories to Define American. 

JUST IN TIME for the July 4th weekend when Americans will celebrate our nation's birthday, Jose Antonio Vargas, perhaps one of the best well-known undocumented Americans, is calling for all of the undocumented, their friends and families to tell their stories - borrowing the parlance of the LGBT community - to come out.

In an unprecedented national effort to improve the perception of undocumented immigrants, Define American launched its Coming Out campaign yesterday - calling on undocumented immigrants to empower themselves by publicly announcing their immigration status to friends, family and their communities.

Define American is a media and culture campaign using the power of story to transcend politics and shift conversation around immigration, identity, and citizenship in America.

Whatever your background or beliefs, the campaign is about asking how we define what it means to be American, and elevating the conversation about how we engage as citizens, says Vargas, who came to the United States from the Philippines when he was 12-years old.

To start, the conversation is about immigration.

Our immigration system is broken, and fixing it requires a conversation that's bigger and more effective than the one that we've become accustomed to.

"I've come out twice in my life - first, as a teenager, to tell my classmates that I am gay; second, as an adult, to tell the country I grew up in that I am an undocumented American. While both risky in their own ways, each resulted in a kind of personal liberation that changed the perceptions of my friends, co-workers, and those close to me. We ‘come out’ to let people in,” said Vargas, Define American founder and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

On the heels of last week’s landmark ruling on marriage equality, the campaign draws inspiration from Harvey Milk’s call on closeted LGBT Americans to come out, as well as the courageous coming out of undocumented youth (also known as DREAMers) across the country in the past few years. The effort aims to empower undocumented Americans by joining a broad online community and owning their immigration stories. 

The campaign will be centered around an innovative online platform that gives those coming out the opportunity to record their personal story and share it through Define American’s website. For those concerned about the risks of coming out, the site includes legal resources provided by the National Immigration Law Center. 

In addition to the storytelling tool, Define American has created a video featuring undocumented Americans of diverse ages and ethnic backgrounds declaring their immigration status publicly.

RELATED: Jose Antonio Vargas: An undocumented American  

Asians are part of the immigration debate

Define American is a media and culture campaign using the power of story to transcend politics and shift conversation around immigration, identity, and citizenship in America.

Whatever your background or beliefs, our campaign is about asking how we define what it means to be American, and elevating the conversation about how we engage as citizens.

To start, the conversation is about immigration.

Our immigration system is broken, and fixing it requires a conversation that's bigger and more effective than the one that we've become accustomed to.

Learn more about the Define American team.
The request from Define American is simple: Let's talk

For more stories, click here.

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Executive Action: Good news for 5 million

Audience members react to President Obama's speech
on his use of executive action.

WELL, President Obama did what he said he would do and used his power of executive action to provide necessary changes to America's policies towards undocumented immigrants.

And also, not surprisingly, the Republicans had a heart attack of a reaction: from impeachment threats to treason charges.

The president had to use executive action in order to  bypass the House of Representatives' inaction on  on a tough immigration bill passed by the Senate but Speaker Boehner refused to allow it to come to a vote in the GOP-controlled House even though it doubled the number of Border Patrol agents, increased their budget, extend the border fence  by 700 miles - all the things Republicans wanted.

Jose Antonio Vargas

One of the approximately 5 million beneficiaries of Obama's action last week is Jose Antonio Vargas, one of the most outspoken undocumented Americans. 

The Filipino American became an outspoken advocate of immigration reform when in 2011,  he revealed his undocumented status in an article in The New York Times Magazine.

Obama's 2012 deferred action plan for Dreamers didn't include the 33-year- old Vargas because he missed the age limitations by a few months. On Thursday, Obama announced he was removing the age limit. 

"It's one of those things where I've been thinking about it all day, and it hasn't really sunk in," he told CNN's Anderson Cooper. "I have been here since I was 12 -- 21 years. For somebody to just say, OK, now it is OK. You can get a work permit. You can get a driver's license. You can travel outside the country. ... It's a great night."

He said he'll finally be able to leave the U.S. to visit his mother in the Philippines, whom he hasn't seen for 21 years.

Although often perceived as a Latino issue, immigration reform will impact the Asian-American community. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that 1.3 million Asians are undocumented and over 60 percent of the Asian American community first-generation immigrants.

Unfortunately, the television networks didn't think Obama's speech was important enough to interrupt their regular prime-time programming so most of us missed it. (Heaven forbid we miss some of our favorite TV shows.) If you missed it, here it is.

Despite what Fox News insists on saying - and repeating over and over - Obama's plan is NOT amnesty. It also doesn't do anything for the remaining 6 million undocumented.

President Obama was late in delivering his campaign promise, but he's now made the leap despite the huge political risks. Now, get set for the fireworks as opponents prepare an all-out attack on anything -- I mean anything -- supported by the President. 

But wait, aren't they doing that already?

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Message to President Obama

IN JUST a few hours, President Obama is going to take executive action on immigration.

Although most of the focus has been on immigrants from South of the Border, and a lot of the fear has been generated against Latino Americans, Asian immigrants - which has surpassed Latinos in the number of immigrants coming here - will be greatly impacted by the immigration reform measures that will be proposed by the President.

One of the most outspoken undocumented immigrants is Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who came out of the shadows in 2011. The video is from Balita, a Philippine/American broadcast agency.

"I think the president is saying inaction is not acceptable anymore and he's saying the status quo can't remain," said Vargas. "The House Republicans can supersede the president, what the president does, by actually passing immigration rearm, but if all they want to do is point fingers and say, 'Mr. President, you can't do it.' I think the American public. poll after poll, has shown the Amerian people want a solution."

"I think our job is to get it out of both of these parties and make it a civil right, human rights issue,"said Vargas, "that people what's happening and people know we must act on."

The President is taking this action because:

"Give me your tired, ..."

One - he is on perfectly legal grounds and there's lots of precedence. Every American president since 1957 - Republican and Democrat - have used executive action on immigration reform.

Two - The U.S. Senate passed an immigration reform measure last year and the ROP-dominated House of Representatives have been sitting on it all this time, preferring no action than to grant any legislative victory to President Obama. This measure included elements to double our border patrol, the construction of a 700-mile fence along the Mexico-U.S. border, increased use of drones and other measures to assuage the ultra-conservative House members. No dice, was their response, thus necessitating the President's use of executive action.

What he proposes won't be a cave-in to most immigrant reform advocates. In fact, it may downright piss off the more liberal forces. Nevertheless, something is better than nothing. Nothing is what the country will get in the next two years when the GOP take over both Houses.

In his last two year's in office, here's hoping that the President stops catering to the conservatives and return to values and strategies he cultivated as a community activist on the streets of Chicago. To hell with compromise.

Of course, as President, Obama won't do that ... but, here's wising ...

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