Filipino - Journalist | February 3, 1981 -
I'm a journalist, and I'm a filmmaker. I have an organization that's all about telling stories.
Jose Antonio Vargas
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I wasn't supposed to be walking with Mark Zuckerberg. I wasn't supposed to be interviewing Romney's sons. Why was I doing it? Because I wanted to survive. I wanted to live. I wanted to earn what it means to be an American.
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You have to do what you have to do. I wanted to work. I wanted to prove that I was worthy of being here... and I was gonna do whatever it took to prove that.
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I think everyone deserves dignity.
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When you're undocumented, you're supposed to keep your head down and be quiet and pay taxes, social security - even though people don't know that we do those things - and not say anything.
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As a gay man, I think the role of culture is central to how you change politics - culture is politics.
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When I was a kid, I resented my grandparents not speaking the perfect English I wanted to speak.
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I guess, as a reporter, I always thought that my biggest strength was that I could get anybody to talk to me. I wasn't the best writer, but I could get people to talk to me.
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It's not my job to worry about how Left, Right will react to something. My job is, am I creating something that connects people? That's my job.
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Demographically speaking, young white people are not in the majority in this country; they're in the minority. My question is, if they're not the majority anymore, then what happens? How do things change? Or do they change at all?
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Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.
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When people saw that the film was called 'White People,' many got very defensive. I've been getting some very interesting emails - and I'm used to hate mail, believe me. I think this idea that we grouped white people together is offensive to people.
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