Changing the Face of the Conversation

An upcoming club hopes to spark discussion on identity in america

 This story originally appeared in Ethos Magazine in April 2018. 

By Brittany Norton

Rachel Alm had just picked up her keys for her new apartment. She remembers it as a normal fall day in Oregon: slightly chilly, overcast.

 “Nothing should have been out of the ordinary,” she says.

But as she walked out of the rental office with her mom, an older white man walked past them and slurred the words, “Fucking Japs.” Alm and her mom walked to her new apartment in silence.

Alm says at the time she felt disbelief at the words she heard, but today, they would probably be met with anger. She has spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a Japanese-American in the mainland United States. This was a moment that resonated with her and one she’s discussed with family members many times to help her understand what it meant.

“It’s one puzzle piece of me trying to understand the bigger picture of what it means to be Asian in Oregon,” Alm says.

The Hawaiian native, who says her high school was 90 percent Asian, had never experienced this type of blatant discrimination before.

“And being from Hawaii, I didn’t necessarily see myself as Asian. I saw myself as mixed-race, because I’m exactly half and half,” she says, referring to her Scandinavian and Japanese heritage. “I didn’t feel like I ever had to pick something. Mostly, I was happy to say I was ‘hapa,’ which is half. And then when I got here I realized that people want to put you in a box, and I wasn’t ready to be put in a box.”

Experiences like these play a part in her decision to start a University of Oregon chapter for Define American, a non-profit media organization with the mission to foster dialogue surrounding identity and immigration in the United States. The advocacy organization was created by Jose Antonio Vargas, a former Washington Post reporter who publicly identified as an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines in “The New York Times Magazine” in 2011.

Define American curates and creates media surrounding social issues. It also creates campaigns like #WordsMatter, which encourages media outlets to stop using the term “illegal” when referring to undocumented immigrants. In addition, there are nearly 50 Define American college chapters on campuses across the nation.

“It’s a story-based approach,” says Mariko Plescia, who is part of the campus chapter and taught a Define American class connected to the organization in the fall of 2017. “If we can tell these stories people will become more humanized to these issues.”  

Vargas currently occupies the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics, and he visited the University of Oregon in October 2017, which is where he met Alm for the first time and encouraged her to start the chapter for UO. The organization is currently undergoing the process to become recognized by Associated Students of the University of Oregon and is holding preliminary meetings.

“This issue of defining American is something that affected my family for a long time,” Alm says. Her grandfather was in the 442nd Infantry Regiment in World War II. According to Public Broadcasting Service, this was a segregated unit in the U.S. Armed Forces composed almost entirely of Japanese-Americans. Japanese-Americans were only allowed to serve in the military after 1943, two years after the federal government started detaining them in internment camps.

“Despite being from the territory of Hawaii, from this small island, he went and served his country because he saw what was happening as unjust, and wanted to show that Asian-Americans were just as American as everyone else,” she said.

Define American operates at a time when the national conversation around American identity is fraught with conflict: with a contentious 2016 election and heated debates surrounding immigration. In September 2017 the Trump Administration acted to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program that promised to delay deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, given that they met certain requirements. According to an article published in “The New York Times” that reported the ending of DACA, protests broke out in front of the White House shortly after the announcement.

Since that announcement, many people have spoken out against the Trump Administration’s decision. In October 2017, President Michael Schill co-authoredwrote an opinion editorial in The Oregonian supporting DACA students, also known as “Dreamers,” and condemning the politics of the issue. He wrote that Dreamers live similarly to children born in the States, “with one big exception – they lack the certainty of knowing that they can remain in the only nation they have ever known.”

Multiple U.S. district courts have also  blocked the administration’s decision, which allows people to continue to renew their DACA status.

Plescia mentions a moment in her class where a student asked rhetorically—“Who are you to tell me that I’m not American?”—that caused her to reflect on who creates the definition.

“We’re the ones that get to decide in a day-to-day basis what American means. And that goes for very small things, like being more aware of they way we interact with other people, to voting and to being more aware of what’s going on around us,” she says.

Although the issue is nuanced and complex, both Alm and Plescia have expressed hope that the Define American chapter at the University of Oregon can help raise awareness of social issues and facilitate difficult discussions about identity.

“I think it’s a key conversation, and I think it that it needs to happen in many different ways,” says Plescia. “I think it will happen through film screenings, I think it will happen through—hopefully—creative expressions, creative production of media like videos produced by students asking other students ‘How do you define American?’ I think it will happen by building coalitions with community groups.”

The Define American Chapter at UO is sending out surveys to students to get a sense of what conversations they want to happen on campus, and if they think they are necessary. And while the design of the club is still being prescribed, it will likely happen in the form of meetings and events. Alm also hopes to receive a service grant from the Holden Center so the organization can take part in community service.

“I’m hoping that our members will see that as much as we really want to have these critical dialogues, we also want to help people, and a part of that is this service work that will be our second step — and something we’ll probably launch more in the fall,” she says.

The first major event for the chapter will happen in the spring, and it is a screening of “Human Flow,” a documentary created by Ai Weiwei that follows people around the world who are displaced from their homes because of environmental or conflict reasons. The chapter is collaborating with No Lost Generation, another student group on campus that raises awareness of the refugee crisis, to show the film. Plescia says the screening will likely happen at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and that it will be followed by a discussion.

Plescia stresses that the Define American class, and the organization, is about learning the history of the nation, how U.S. policies affect people and keeping an eye open to the struggles of others. Alm is able to put that fall day in greater historical context now. She says: “I don’t have answers, and our club is never going to purport to have the answers either. I feel like a very gray question mark most of the time, and if other people feel that way — this is our chance to talk.”