In between all of the silly fedoras, there is journalist Joe Dennis. His experiences within his culture have helped him shape him who he is today.
”When someone sneezes, you throw a party,” Dennis said. “Family gatherings are everything [In Filipino households].”
Dennis grew up in Chicago. During his youth, one of the ways his family expressed their culture was through food. He faced hardships, such as discrimination, as a child. Regardless of those hardships faced during his childhood, he’s proud of his heritage and continues to celebrate his heritage with his family through different traditions today.
While growing up, there were many different communities of different cultures. But the community he grew up in was predominately one race, and his family was Filipino. He has written opinion columns culture from a perspective of being some of the only people of color in his neighborhood.
“But I do think that I have written stuff in the past from a perspective of growing up as someone who was different,” Dennis said. “I mean, it was very segregated like that. And we lived in a white neighborhood.”
Throughout his time in Chicago during his youth, he faced the unimaginable.
“And even growing up in the 80s, I was discriminated against a lot, interestingly,” Dennis said. “People thinking I was Mexican and calling me [slur] It’s really hard. How do you deal with that when someone is yelling a racial thing at you that isn’t even applicable to you? It’s kind of like, what?”
Regardless of the adversities in his childhood, he continued displaying his culture with his family through cooking.
“During the pandemic, I really got into cooking and trying to resurrect some of the Filipino dishes that I grew up eating. And now I’m pretty darn good at it, cooking Filipino food. I cook a coconut adobo,” Dennis said. “When I was trying to get the recipes from my mom, my mom, of course, nothing was ever written down for her. So I’m like, mom, okay, so how much soy sauce do I put in? She’s like, enough. I’m like, how much is enough? Enough. So I really had to kind of figure it out.”
Today, Joe Dennis continues to share the meaningfulness of being Filipino with his son. Showing how he takes pride in being Filipino and his culture
“And on my son’s [Jaydon] 21st birthday, we got matching tattoos,” Dennis said. “So this is the tattoos that we both got. And that is the Filipino flag has a sun and three stars around it. So we got those matching tattoos. So when my son asked me, he said, we should do this. That was maybe one of the most meaningful things my kids, any of my kids have ever said because it was totally unexpected.”
Although Joe faced adversities during his childhood growing up in Chicago, he has continued to embrace his culture. Throughout his time being a journalist and professor, he has made it known for his students apart of different groups that he is there for them.
“But the day after the election, I had, and I write this in the column, I had students in my office. I had an openly bisexual student. I had an illegal immigrant in my office. I had a feminist, basically a self-identified feminist in my office. And I had someone who was severe like anxiety and mental disabilities in my office and an African-American student. And they were all, they just all were devastated, ” Dennis said. “They just needed someone to talk to. They just needed someone to vent, right? They needed to know they weren’t alone, that I was there and people are there to support them.”
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