Desa

desa's discoveries in pursuit of opportunities

by Azra Isakovic

Desa Philadelphia is an immigrant from Guyana, whose long list of credentials includes being an author and a former journalist at PBS Newshour and Time Magazine.  She’s covered policy, politics, education, and entertainment among other poignant topics. After moving to LA, she got her Masters in Public Diplomacy at USC. Currently, she is the head writer for the USC Film School. In 2015, she published 111 Shops in Los Angeles That You Must Not Miss, which is a beautiful exploration of LA. In the book, Desa covers a wide range of LA's rare finds, some of which include The Last Bookstore, Homegirl Cafe, and the Rose Bowl Flea Market. She writes, “However you define it- by ethnicity, environment, or economics- L.A. is one of the most diverse places on the planet and Angelenos are extremely proud of their differences, as well as their contradictions."

In my interview with Desa, we discuss her immigrant experience, her views on American culture and journalism, and what it was like to pursue her dreams as a black female immigrant.

Where are you from?

I'm from Georgetown, Guyana, South America. I was born and grew up there and left after high school to attend college in the United States.

What was your life like there?

I have four siblings, three older sisters and a younger brother. We grew up with my parents. I would say we were middle working class, meaning my parents had to work to support us, but they both had good jobs. My father was Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health.  My mother was an administrative assistant. Education in Guyana is mostly free and I went to the best high school, one of the best elementary schools. My parents were from a very poor, rural upbringing but my father went to University of the West Indies and also the University of London and my mother went to secretarial school.  So the upbringing I had was very different from theirs because they grew up in the countryside. I grew up very much in the city and I would say had access to members of the elite.

Where did you go to college?

There's only one university in Guyana: University of Guyana, and I took classes there when I was in high school. For undergraduate I went to City College of New York. I went to grad school at USC. I always knew that I wanted to be a journalist, I think from since when I was about 11, 12 years old and I also knew that in Guyana journalism wasn't really a respected profession. I mean it doesn't pay very well anywhere, but there particularly it didn't. I knew I wanted to train in the United States to be a journalist.  So I decided I would try to come through a US university and my parents really didn't know anything about the US education system, so I kind of had to figure it out on my own.

What were your first impressions of America and did you have any prior media influences?

I had visited the US before I moved here, as a kid growing up. My impression of the United States, it was aspirational in terms of my career objectives because I thought that, at the time in terms of what was happening in journalism, the US was producing the best work. 

What would you say is most beautiful about America?

My good friend Raye, who I grew up with in Guyana, moved to Trinidad and we kind of lost track in the later years of high school. And I was getting off the subway in New York when I was a freshman in college and the door opened and she was standing on the other side and we were so happy to see each other.

She ended up falling in love with a Korean American guy and she's a black woman from the Caribbean. At her wedding I gave a toast where I talked about our years hanging out as singletons in New York. And I said “We had such a great time hanging out in New York. But the thing that we appreciated most about it was that we were able to meet people from countries and cultures who we never would've encountered in Guyana or Trinidad.” We come to the US to find career or economic success but it’s the people we find here who end up making a difference in our lives. And that’s still what’s great about America for me.

How do you feel about LA?

It’s the concentrated version of what I love about America. You can experience all of the world in Los Angeles. That is an amazing thing when you think about it.  I've got friends who are from everywhere and so I'm just so proud of that, that I continuously step out of my box and try to see what else is out there. It’s the reason why I live in the neighborhood I live in. It's the reason why I've been here in LA for so long. It’s the reason why I'm reluctant to leave. So I love that. You can experience the world in one city. It's great. And it’s authentic. People come from around the world and can be their authentic selves here.

Tell me about your journalism career after school.

I started my journalism career with an internship at the PBS Newshour in 1995.  After six months they hired me full time and I started off as a production assistant working with producers who are creating visual storytelling, little mini docs that they call essays. And so I worked on those and then I became a political reporter. I loved it there, and I learned a lot. I still have fantasies about going back. But at the time I thought I would be moving back to the Caribbean so I wanted to have both TV and magazine experience before I left.

One day there was a Columbia Journalism Review on my friend’s desk and there was a woman on the cover that resembled my mother and she was an editor at Time magazine and I thought, “this is an omen, I'm going to call this woman.”  I just called her a couple of times and she said they were not hiring. And I called a couple more times and finally she goes, “but I'll give your resume to a recruiter for the company.” The recruiter was a brilliant editor named Jose Ferrer, who died recently. He called me in for an interview and told me on the spot that he could get me a job at any other Time Inc. magazine because Time wasn’t hiring. I said “thanks but no thanks, I’m going to try Newsweek.” The next day he called me back in and arranged for interviews at Time, and I was there for eight years. I covered politics, business, and education. And then they asked me to come to LA to cover the movie business, which I did reluctantly and only because I asked them to sponsor me for a green card, which they did. I had a job offer from ESPN magazine at the time so I thought “hey, I’ll just ask about a green card. Worse case scenario they say no, and I go to ESPN.” But they said yes and I came out to LA to cover the movie business and now that’s been the focus of my career.

Since you started your career in journalism in the US, how has it changed?

Well, it's been a pretty drastic change. Going from the PBS Newshour to somewhere like Time magazine, which is very much focused on mass communication and on profit communications, I struggled with that because the writing style was very snarky and I really fought against that. I think that was because I had been trained in a different approach and also it has to do with the fact that I came from a place where journalism wasn't taken as seriously as I wanted it to be, so I really wanted to be serious. When I was growing up a lot of journalism in Guyana was really propaganda. And even though people didn't really take it seriously the idea that so much effort was spent on producing crap, that could have been spent on really producing excellent work— that was something that kind of angered and motivated me. When I was about 11, I read a magazine article that I found in the library at school about a journalist who had gone undercover at a youth detention center. He exposed all the ways that the children who were incarcerated there were being mistreated. And so I started thinking about journalism as one of the most noble things you could do. And I still think in terms of having a democratic society,  a strong press corps is very necessary.

In my career journalism went from information to infotainment and so it became more about entertaining and keeping people entertained than providing the information that citizens need in order to perform their civic duty. The press were falling down on their duties in order to make money. What's happened in political circles is a direct result of that because voters here in the US aren't fully informed. They base their vote on things like who they like or who they don't. If you ask voters to talk about policy, very few people can. At the NewsHour, there was very much a separation between politics and policy. Politics was the shenanigans behind bills being passed. Policy is what's actually in the bill. I think that separation is lacking at a lot of other news organizations. So that's what I think has changed in a way. But I always say right now we're in the best and worst of times for journalism because it's like we're starting over from scratch again and so there's a renewed drive at a lot of organizations to be good.

What are the dangers of the state our media audience is in and what can we do to regain our identity of integrity and be more curious about truth?

The thing we can do is seek out a wide range of information about the things we care about. People don't know how to go back to source material anymore. If I read an article in the New York Times that talks about a report, I should go find that report. It's online now. We can find anything we want. And so go look at the report. Did it line up with what they say in the New York Times or do you think something different? But now what happens is the New York Times will write something about a report, another publication will write something about what the New York Times wrote. And then somebody else will write up something about the report based on what the two of them wrote about. If someone gives a speech, we're watching clips of the speech rather than going to hear the speech and making our own decisions about whether or not we agree with what's being said.

Tell me about your experience as a black female immigrant pursuing your dream in a country that has had and continues to have issues with racism.

I always say that my journey as a black person in America has been transitioning from being black to being African American. Because being a black person who came of age outside the United States is totally different from the assumed experience when you hear the term “African American.” So I am not a black person whose ideology was initially shaped in the American context of racism. So looking back, there were so many things, for example, in my career at Time that I look back on now through the prism of race in America and I only now fully understand what was going on. For example, I would pitch stories and my editors would be like, “Oh, OK, you know, that's a good idea”, but then nothing. And then two weeks later, some white guy there was doing the story and everybody had forgotten that it was my idea. Back then I thought of it more about job titles or favoritism or sexism rather than race. Like I didn't understand that as a black woman, my opinion didn't matter as much. Because where I grew up, my opinion always mattered.

Back then I also had so many people ask me why I was so confident and I didn't understand what that meant in the context of American racism; that I'm not supposed to be confident in my ability. And I thought I had a knack for bumping into stupid people, you know, people who'd be like, “Oh, do you live here? Do you live in this building? You work in this building?” And I'm like, “you see me here! I must belong here. There must be a reason why I'm here.” I just didn't understand for a long time.  And now sometimes when I look back and remember things and now I get it, it's hard, you know? Sometimes I feel a little stupid myself that I didn’t fully understand the context. But I was so sure of myself and my potential, and it was a beautiful feeling. I hope everyone gets to experience that.

Was there a moment you recall when you realized it was racism?

I would say there was a period of time where I just got it, you know, I just got it. And then it can be very depressing once you get it. If you're someone who is not conditioned to think that way, and then suddenly you understand that you have no control over your destiny in some respects. I mean on some level that's true for people everywhere; you have less control than you think you do. And the thing is, and this is the hardest part, it's not that the people I encountered are overtly racist. I know there are people who treated me terribly who probably haven’t had a second thought about it. It's just that they were conditioned to not have to care about my opinions.

What role do you think the media should play in helping to bridge the empathy gap?

The media needs to be a platform for all voices. Journalistic entities think they are covering  every angle of a story. You hear them congratulate themselves for covering both sides of an issue, but those are still [their] angles. They think they can come up with every angle of the story without being inclusive and you can't because if you are an American talking about immigration from Mexico, a Mexican journalist will have totally different angles that you didn't even know existed. So it’s not about presenting different perspectives, it's about recognizing that those perspectives have to come from different voices. So I really feel like the media should recognize its limitations and work on truly being inclusive.