Street roots
D ec. 21, 2012
SA A D A T, from page 4
it sound like a program where all you had to
do was be a person of color and you’d get a
job. And I would challenge them and say,
well why aren’t all of us working? Why is the
unemployment rate among blacks and
Latinos so high if it’s that way?
Also, people have used affirmative action
to say that it’s a special right given to
people. People who say that are people who
have so little understanding of history, so
little knowledge of history that they don’t
know that Thomas Jefferson, while an
advocate for freedom, also had a slave as his
mistress and had several children by her
and never set her free. This advocate for
freedom owned people. They don’t know
that the government
had a policy of non-
integrated
neighborhoods, so
But there's a piece that we
when the men came
don't touch very w ell, and
back from World Wai
that's the personal piece, BRft
II and wanted to get
That's the piece that requires loans for housing,
the government
that I do some sort of
policy was that they
acceptance of the re a lity of
wouldn’t grant those
the history of this country as loans in places
it has treated people of color where there would
be integrated living.
and women as it has treated
When you don’t
the m enta lly i l l and the
know that, it’s easy
to have a knee-jerk
physically disabled. There is
a history there that we refuse reaction to
something like
to acknowledge because we
affirmative action.
absolve ourselves of any
Again, it’s a tool.
It’s a tool by which
responsibility.
you measure the
extent to which the
institution or the
agency has been
able to try and equalize its workforce, not
only in terms of people of color and women.
It’s never been people of color who have
been the biggest beneficiaries, it’s always
been white women, not black women. So
when you look at where those people are
placed in the hierarchy of any place, you
should be able to see some sort of
reasonable disbursement of color and
gender or ethnicity in the dimensions of
that organization. You use it as a tool.
J . T.: So affirmative action is a m easuring
tool?
K. S.: It’s a monitoring tool.
know very much. The standard has to do
with the availability of people in a particular
field. Let’s see if you can follow this. If the
city wants to hire engineers, and we find
that we don’t have any American Indian
engineers we need to find out how many are
available to us. What if there aren’t any
coming out of engineering school? But when
we do find out that there is an American
Indian engineering society we can find out
how many are available to us, and we can go
to universities and go all around and find
out how many are coming on the
marketplace and make some focused efforts
to recruit. The standards are what is
available in the area. It could be the local
area. It could be the region, the state, the
country. It could be international. What are
the standards has to do with what’s
available.
J . T.: Because affirmative action has become
such a loaded term, should we use different
language?
K. S.: No. We can’t keep changing the
language and think that will solve the
problem. It just means you’ll have a new set
of words with a negative load. We don’t need
to change the language. Let’s get educated
about what it really means.
J . T.: So how is the city doing?
K. S.: The city’s doing pretty good. We
still have some places we need to look and
work harder, but we have internal
discussions and we have an affirmative
action plan. We have an Office of Equity that
will look at those plans and look at those
agencies and look at their internal processes
and procedures to see if they can be either
support or obstacles for equity in the work
place.
J. T.: W h a t c o u ld i t he d o in g better?
K. S.: [Pause] It could be doing a better
job of promoting itself as an employer
interested in issues of equity and equal
opportunity. It could have signs on the sides
of buses saying, your city: the place to work.
J . T.: 1 was hoping we could reminisce a
little bit. You say a lot o f people are ignorant o f
history. Portland is regarded as a relatively
friendly place fo r gay rights, but long ago it
w asn’t. You were involved with the campaign
against M easure 9 and helped organize
Portland’s first gay rights march. What was
that like?
J . T.: What sort o f standard should it be
used to meet?
K. S.: That’s a really complicated issue
and that’s another place where people don’t
K. S.: Scary. The march was less than 200
people, and we marched in downtown
Portland and we were scared to death. The
religious right was there with a big sign
saying, turn or burn. And they came and
they stood in the midst of the group
celebrating gay rights.
While it’s been, in some ways, a haven for
gay and lesbian people, it hasn’t been all
sweetness. Ballot Measure 9 and before it
Ballot Measure 8 rescinded then Governor
Neil Goldschmidt’s executive order for
nondiscrimination in state government.
Ballot Measure 9 was an amazing piece of
work to be presented to the people in this
state about what people’s rights are. It said
that you couldn’t even be friends with or
support someone who was gay. That’s pretty
awful.
I believe that the people who do this are
as adamant about their beliefs as I am about
mine. But I believe, ultimately, the problem
is that each of us in a marginalized group
has to fight our way into the human race via
the courts, etc. That should not be. There
should be no vote on whether or not I get to
have equal rights. All that does is allow
people to vote their existing prejudices. If I
am a citizen here and I pay my taxes and
vote, and I do vote, what is the issue? Who
gets to say that I don’t get to have what
other people have? How does that happen?
Well go back to the Constitution. Have a
look. The constitution of South Africa
protects me as a black person, as a lesbian
person, as a woman. How come that isn’t
true in the U.S.?
J . T.: 77ow come?
K. S.: Go back to the Constitution. It was
written biased. Derrick Bell, who is now
dead, who was the dean of the University of
Oregon law school, raised that issue. Our
Constitution was written for straight, white,
land-owning men. It wasn’t written for even
poor white men. But everybody who has
wanted full participation in our country has
had to fight their way into legitimacy
because we were not included in the first
place. That’s why.
Why would this ridiculous conversation
with women getting raped, and legitimate
rape happen? How the hell did that happen?
And it’s not the women talking about it, it’s
the men deciding. And it’s the men deciding
about what men do to women. It’s insane. It
should make everybody in this country
crazy. Why the hell do we have to vote on
whether or not women get to have an
abortion? That’s not anyone’s business but
her’s.
J . T.: What are you going to do in
retirement?
Looking forward,
Saadat says she
hopes to address
the crimes of
human trafficking.
“It is abominable. It
is slavery. It is the
abuse of children,”
she says.
K. S.: Raise hell.
THE MAGIC IS IN THE HOLE!
22 SW 3RD
& BURNSIDE
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