Salisbury Forum speaker speculates on country’s future

FALLS VILLAGE — The message of a recent Salisbury Forum lecture was that big changes in the country are inevitable; some populations are not reacting well to it; but history may ultimately offer the opportunity to resolve things in a good way.

Renowned journalist Ray Suarez recently gave a talk entitled “Getting Ready for the Next America: The Fight Over Who We’ll Be” at Housatonic Valley Regional High School’s auditorium to about 350 attendees.

“The U.S. Census says that as early as 2043 the country will have passed a significant threshold,” Suarez told the audience at the lecture. “The number of Americans who trace their ancestry to Europe will be outnumbered by those from other countries.”

Suarez said the country’s “majority-minority” ratio will be switched for the first time in U.S. history.

During the hour long lecture, followed by a halfhour question-and-answer period, Suarez, 61, talked about the current battle over the U.S.’s ethnic future and how the respective presidential elections pointed to divergent directions taken by citizens of the country. Suarez, who has covered Washington for 30 years as a reporter for CNN and ABC, currently serves as the John J. McCloy visiting professor of American studies at Amherst College in Amherst, Mass.

Suarez pointed to two national events following the elections of Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. In Chicago’s Grant Park in 2007 following Obama’s election, newscasters broadcast that with the election of the first black president, the country “had gotten over a big historical hump, with a close-up of Reverend Jesse Jackson with tears streaming down his face.”

Suarez said, “Fast forward to Charlottesville, home to the statue of a white Confederate general, (Robert E.) Lee, and young men carrying torches bought at Home Depot saying, ‘You will not replace us,’ and ‘Jews will not replace us.’ Suarez referred to a violent white-supremacy march in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017.

Suarez said that the election of Obama, with his mixed ancestry and blended family, represented “a man who told us something about how the century was going to go. People were not afraid of what Obama represented. The crowd in Charlottesville, meanwhile, was worried in the 21st century about being replaced.”

Suarez said something he has always paid attention to is how minorities appear in U.S. culture. He said that on television, only white people appear in advertising for products that people of all colors use.

He explained, “There were no black people in commercials. (The Cubanborn) Desi Arnaz was playing a fictionalized version of himself on a TV show (“I Love Lucy”).” He added, “Even with the latest movie about Zorro (a Mexican swashbuckler character), Antonio Banderas, himself not a Mexican, only plays the protégé to the older Zorro — played by Anthony Hopkins.” Hopkins is a Welsh actor.

Suarez said a significant milestone in changing U.S. culture was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which overturned earlier restrictive immigration legislation. The Act, proposed and sponsored by New York Rep. Emanuel Celler, Michigan Sen. Philip Hart, and Mass. Sen. Edward Kennedy, opened U.S. immigration to people other than from European nations. Suarez said, “People came from the Caribbean, from Nigeria. Buddhist temples sprung up. Catholics got a shot in the arm with all the immigrants from Latin America.”

He added, “We are now living in Teddy Kennedy’s America, and not everyone is happy.”

“A Congressman recently said a DACA recipient would be more likely to be a ‘drug mule’ than a class valedictorian,” he said. “They say they are undermining our culture and civilization.” DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is an immigration policy that allows individuals brought to the U.S. illegally as children to receive a renewable twoyear period deferring deportation and offering eligibility for a work permit.

“This congressman says, ‘You can’t rebuild civilization using someone else’s children.’ ” Suarez then stated, “The head of Chobani yogurt, NASA’s Frankie Chang (Diaz) — we have been rebuilding civilization with other people’s children for 175 years.”

Suarez said, “I understand but do not sympathize with the unease with the next America. With Grant Park (and the election of Obama), it seemed it would be a lot easier.”

Suarez said recent events, including the election of a divisive U.S. president and the rise in nativism, point to a bumpy road for America’s ethnic future. “Trump implies that much of American crime is caused by illegal immigrants.”

Suarez’s 30-year news resume includes working as a correspondent for “The PBS News Hour” (he left that 14-year job in 2013 due to feeling his contributions were being increasingly marginalized); hosted the show “Talk of the Nation” on National Public Radio; and helmed “Inside Story” on Al Jazeera America Story until the network closed in 2016.

Suarez’s examinations of demographics, religion, and race have fueled his books, including, “The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999,” “The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America,” and “Latino Americans,” the companion book to the PBS documentary series of the same name.

Suarez said that the juxtaposition of U.S. idealization of Ellis Island, where citizens’ ancestors were once welcomed, along with the current proposed restrictions on immigration and who is welcome, is “just weird.”

During a question-andanswer period with a mostly white and mature audience, Suarez was asked what the role of a downturned economy was in some U.S. citizens’ attitude toward immigration. Suarez dismissed this and said that instead of work in general being valued, he said in recent decades only certain types of work are valued, like stock trading.

He said the current economic climate was shaped by legislation and tax codes that favor wealthy people. He also pointed out that it was not the often-reported downtrodden coal miners who helped elect Trump but was mostly people who on the average make $70,000 to $100,000 per year or more.