November 20, 2019
Page 9
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O PINION
Death and Dying as a Black Studies Professor
The toxicity
of racism at
Portland State
e than J ohnson
While some might
think it hyperbole to
begin a paper claiming
a relationship between
death and dying and be-
ing a tenured professor at
a large public university, I think it
is a valid claim. It is just a fact that
many of the Black people, most of
them men and some of whom were
and are my friends, at Portland
State are sick, dying or dead.
After the PSU Board of Trust-
ees, an unelected group of over-
whelmingly white men, voted to
arm PSU security, the first person
campus police shot and killed was
Jason Washington, a Black per-
son, married and a father of two.
A fight broke out in front of a bar
on campus and he was carrying a
gun which he was permitted to car-
ry. It fell out in the fight and when
he tried to grab it the cops shot and
killed him. As is usually the case,
the rule of impunity prevailed here
and no one was held accountable in
any substantive way. The struggle
against arming the police force was
strong and overwhelmingly stu-
dents and faculty expressed they
did not want an armed police force
on campus. We already have one,
the Portland Police Bureau, who
have a long history of killing Black
and poor people with impunity.
I have taught in the Black Stud-
ies Department for 15 years at
PSU. One of the courses I teach
is called Racism. For years I have
used a video in this class called
Unnatural Causes, which has a sec-
tion in it called “When the Bough
Breaks.” This part of the documen-
tary makes the case that racism not
only maintains inequality across
institutions, it also makes us sick.
The literature is well established
here with many peer reviewed ar-
ticles demonstrating how the stress
of daily racism gets into our bodies
and over works us causing break-
by
downs in our hearts, reproductive
systems and other areas of our bod-
ies. I remember one young Black
women student realizing after see-
ing the video that if she wanted
to have children she should have
them young because if she did
not, the compounded stress of
racism on her reproductive
system could very likely en-
danger her child. This is pre-
meditated murder.
Mainstream white society
has the facts to show that racism
makes us sick and causes premature
death, but does nothing to change
the conditions. A very frustrating
part about this is we Black people
can sometimes and often do blame
ourselves for our failing physical
and/or mental health. However, as
When I first arrived to PSU, I
was hired to fill the position of a
young Black man from South Af-
rica. As I understood it, he was
popular among his students. The
then chair of the Black Studies De-
partment did not recommend him
for tenure. When I walked into his
office, which became mine, what I
could not take my eyes off of was
a plaster sculpture of a white man
almost life size with a removable
stick up his butt. I didn’t know
what to think when I saw this and it
quickly disappeared. In hindsight,
what it probably indicated was his
upfront resistance to anti-Black
racism, which was why he was pop-
ular with his students. The chair of
the department who did not support
his tenure and rarely uttered the
struggle just to walk the streets of
Portland. The Portland metro area
is the whitest large city in America,
which is no accident. Oregon is the
only state in the Union to have in
its original constitution of 1857 an
exclusion clause that made it illegal
for Black and other people of col-
or to live here. Today, Oregon has
the highest pushout/dropout rate in
the country for Black high school
students, most of whom live in the
Portland area. Furthermore, the
homicide and incarceration rates
in the Portland area are higher than
national averages for Black peo-
ple. The original state constitution
of exclusion helped pave the way
for a white homeland, and while
removed from the constitution in
1926, the injustice is nevertheless
I argue, as Vargas does, that the immediate
death by police/vigilantes and/or the slow death by
sickness and stress are interconnected. Anti-Black
racism justifies them as the fault of Black people who
are deemed criminal, lazy and without restraint.
Joao Acosta Vargas shows in his
article “The Liberation Imperative
of Black Genocide,” it is society
built on white supremacy and an-
ti-blackness that must be held ac-
countable.
Jason Washington’s death is, as
are the hundreds of others that hap-
pen each year at the hands of the
police, understood among many
Black people as the state’s intent
to keep Black people down. More
subtle forms, while not always
causing death, do cause suffering
and remain much easier for main-
stream/white society to exculpate
themselves from and us to blame
ourselves for or to just remain con-
fused.
I argue, as Vargas does, that the
immediate death by police/vigilan-
tes and/or the slow death by sick-
ness and stress are interconnected.
Anti-Black racism justifies them as
the fault of Black people who are
deemed criminal, lazy and without
restraint.
Letter to the Editor
On Post Office Jobs
Thanks for printing Keith Combs commentary (“Honor Veterans
and Protect the Postal Service”, Nov. 13 issue). Another critical service
that the USPS provides veterans is delivery of pharmaceuticals. The Vet-
erans Administration ships all their medications through the postal ser-
vice. And finally, your readers should know that the postal service has
provided a pathway to living wage jobs for hundreds of thousands of Af-
rican Americans (21% of the USPS workforce), many of them veterans.
Jamie Partridge, retired letter carrier from northeast Portland
word racism or white supremacy
was probably threatened by a col-
league who called out anti-Black
racism regularly. Several years
ago, a colleague of mine informed
me that the professor died of a
heart attack. He was just 50 years
old. Could it be that the stresses of
coming to PSU and working in a
Black Studies Department that did
not support him and where he was
one of the few voices speaking out
against white supremacy contribut-
ed to his death? Or was it because
he had poor eating habits and did
not exercise enough?
Like my colleague who died
prematurely, I imagine he was
much like me. When I first moved
to Portland from Oakland, Calif., a
city that continues to be majority
non-white, I was and continue to
still with us in spirit.
More than ironically, Portland
and much of Oregon benefits from
having a reputation as one of the
most politically progressive plac-
es in the whole country. I joking-
ly tell my students you can smoke
weed here legally, ride your bike
with thousands of other mostly
white people naked (Portland has
a naked bike ride every year) and
Oregon has its own public de-
fender specifically hired to protect
animals, something which Black
people do not have. More serious-
ly, Portland also has a politically
progressive reputation for having
a descent public transportation
system, probably one of the most
extensive bike path systems in the
country and a no growth boundary
to prevent sprawl. Oregon, which
is much whiter than Portland,
also has one of the most accessi-
ble voting processes in the coun-
try. However, as I and others have
pointed out these policies are due
to the city and state being so white.
Without a large non-white popula-
tion, struggles over transportation,
housing, schools, voting and other
public services don’t confront re-
sistance because these institutions
generally serve the majority white
population. White middle-class
people in particular in the Portland
area don’t have to share buses and
housing with Black people because
of our small numbers, so they fund
their public transportation system,
libraries and schools.
Someone who I considered my
friend used to be the coordinator
for what is called the Multicul-
tural Center at PSU. Much of the
student activities on campus that
serve non-white students come
out of this center. An African, he
was very supportive of the Black
Studies Department. He regularly
made his space available for the
department to conduct what we
call the Black Bag Speaker Se-
ries. This event invites people and
organizations doing work that fo-
cuses on Black life locally and na-
tionally to share their efforts with
students and faculty. The topics
include police brutality, art, music,
literature, health, gender, immi-
gration, sexuality and many other
issues. It was the only Black-cen-
tered forum on campus, but nev-
er received institutional funding
from PSU. My friend collaborated
with me often to share expenses to
help run the event. My friend also
supported the Muslim students on
campus for which I am sure many
were not happy. He opened the
Multicultural Center’s doors to
the Muslim students on campus
to hold prayer in the main room of
the center on Fridays. I remember
C ontinued on p age 12