Should we give protesters the mic? A podcast with two ‘disrupters’

The progressive conference Netroots Nation was home to an unexpected type of political conversation last weekend. During Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley’s town hall meeting, protesters began chanting and interrupted his session.

Instead of asking security to evict the protesters, moderator Jose Antonio Vargas gave them a microphone and invited them onstage to speak. Later, another Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, was also interrupted.

In a podcast interview, Vargas explains why he allowed the protesters to interrupt the candidates. He also talks about who has the right to speak at a political debate, and what “mainstream” really means. Vargas is a partner with the Los Angeles Times in #EmergingUS, a new venture that will explore race, immigration and multicultural issues.

In another interview, Tia Oso, the woman who stepped onstage during O’Malley’s session, speaks about why she got onstage (she didn’t mean to initially), and why she would interrupt candidates who are trying to court black voters.

Some (edited) highlights from both conversations:

JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS: I’m undocumented, I’m gay, I’m Filipino.
[If I hadn’t given them the microphone] I would not have been able to look at myself in the mirror, to be accountable to my friends. I couldn’t not give her space. If the Netroots organizers had not allowed them to speak, I think I would have walked off the stage.

TIA OSO: We wanted our question about police brutality answered first.
That is the most important question. The candidates did get an opportunity to respond. To say that we stopped them from talking isn’t valid. I also hadn’t heard either candidate address Black Lives Matter explicitly, or what they would do about systematic racism as president. We wanted an answer to that question.

VARGAS: Yes, there were Black Lives Matter protesters.
But there were a lot of Latino organizers, Asian organizers and LGBT organizers. And that coalition that’s happening right now is something to behold. It is something that most of the political press are not paying attention to because they still see minority issues in very siloed ways. But with millennial activists of color, we’re seeing a kind of intersectionality that is pathbreaking.

OSO: I think the candidates got a wake-up call.
The Democratic Party has taken black votes for granted, but there is new leadership, and a new generation, that they will need to be accountable to. We are changing the conversation. We’re talking about how to answer these issues directly.

VARGAS: Don’t we hear candidates speak all the time?
What if candidates actually listened? For those protesters, their concerns are personal and urgent and mainstream. Sandra Bland dying is a mainstream story. That is not a fringe story. When people who don’t often have a voice want to be heard, what is our job as journalists? That’s a question I would love to pose to moderators in the future.

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