By Josh Hughes
On January 16 at 7 p.m., educator, writer, public scholar and spoken word artist Walidah Imarisha gave a talk at Western.
Entitled “Why Aren’t There More Black People in Oregon? A Hidden History,” her hour and a half long lecture touched on the darker side of the PNW’s racial history. Bringing in discussion about gentrification, ingrained racism, and “long memory”, as she called it, Imarisha explained why it’s not only important, but necessary to talk about race in contemporary culture.
Associate English Professor Allison Giffen opened up the evening by addressing President Trump’s most recent racist remarks, this time directed at Haiti. She intended not to single out Trump as an outlier to American presidency, but to establish a lineage of racism that has persisted since the formation of the country.
“I’d like to offer some more racist remarks from Thomas Jefferson,” said Giffen.
She then recited a disturbing statement in which the third President of the United States described African Americans as “inferior in faculties of reason”. She then went on to quote equally hateful excerpts from the likes of Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge. The message was loud and clear: white supremacy has been deeply ingrained in the American government and Presidency since its inception.
Giffen also talked about how faculty need to listen to the student body to be able to change racial issues that exist at Western. She concluded her introduction to Imarisha’s lecture by calling for action and change in a culture that oftentimes merely voices opinions and beliefs about racial injustice over social media.
After a performance by WWU Student A Capella Club, Imarisha took the stage to roaring applause.
She introduced her lecture by explaining that we can’t begin to understand the places that we live in without original context.
As a specialist in the history of race, identity and power relations in Oregon, Imarisha showed a statistic that in 2015, black babies in Oregon were 35 percent more likely to die as infants than white babies. She also pulled up an article from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) stating that racism can cause PTSD similar to that of soldiers after war.
She prefaced with these tragic realities of the contemporary world to explain the significance of accepting the ugly parts of our history. She talked about how, to truly eradicate injustice, as a culture we need to address this “long memory” and its implications for race relations today.
“Racism is an American condition. Even though it looks different in different places, the brutal mechanisms of control are often the same,” Imarisha said.
This forwarded a historical analysis of Oregon territory as a racist, white utopian state. While Oregon never adopted slavery, Imarisha pointed out that its origin is just as hateful as anywhere in the South. Government acts such as the Black Exclusion Laws, Peter Burnett’s Lash Law and the advent of “Sundown Towns” position the inception of Oregon as inherently and malevolently racist.
“We tell so many simplistic racial myths in history,” she said, talking about the important distinction between anti-slavery and anti-black. While Oregon territory was certainly the former, didn’t mean it was the latter.
In fact, when Oregon became a state in 1859, it was the only state in the union with a black exclusion law in its constitution. Imarisha pointed out that it wasn’t until 2001 that the racist language of the constitution was amended (though the law had obviously changed much earlier).
This blunt, ugly history of Oregon territory (the PNW) served as a backdrop for Imarisha to talk about the current state of racism in the Northwest. She talked about the dreaded g-word (gentrification) by suggesting that it is an inevitable component of a capitalist system.
She also talked about the longstanding absence of people of color living in Oregon, which can be traced back to the black exclusion laws. These multi-generations-old laws provided a basis for gentrification in Portland, suggesting that gentrification is not an isolated system that has occurred in the last few decades.
“Over-policing and gentrification go hand in hand,” said Imarisha, explaining that cities attempt to “clean up” areas undergoing gentrification by taking people off the streets.
She talked about how Portland is talked about as both a “model for urban planning, and a model for gentrification in the country.” She suggested that it’s only in Portland’s second wave of gentrification, where middle class white people are pushed out by upper class white people, that the topic gets taken seriously.
Imarisha ended her lecture by saying that we mustn’t give up hope in ending racial injustice, but that we must be educated of the unglorified past to make a difference going onward. It’s the centuries-old iterations of racism that allow for institutional racism to take place today, so we must look to the past to find ways to sustain a better future.
“I think it’s important to talk about black history, especially up here because we often hear about the South or the East, but not from the aspect of the Northwest,” said Western student Shaneen Walter-Edwards, responding to the lecture.
To Imarisha, it’s necessary to uncover nationwide racism and its various mechanisms of control that have created such an atmosphere for people of color in America today.
