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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 18, 2017)
January 18, 2017 The Skanner Page 3 News ence to remember that King himself sometimes felt despair and kept fighting anyway. Moore was introduced by Portland veterinari- an and The Skanner News columnist Dr. Jasmine Streeter, and his remarks were preceded by brief speeches by Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, Gov. offer wheelchair access and usually didn’t. King himself was not permit- ted to stay in hotels while he traveled. “We know peril. We know things can be hard. That doesn’t stop us from struggling, from fight- ing,” Moore said. On the media: We can’t depend on We know things can be hard. That doesn’t stop us from struggling, from fighting Kate Brown and U.S. Sen- ators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley. Wyden, Merkley and Wheeler — who spent the day before at a Northeast Portland rally to save the Affordable Care Act — were in rally mode, with Wheeler and Merkley both leading the crowd in chants for justice and against building a wall or registering Muslims. Those in attendance also had the opportunity to sign a petition asking Portland Parks and Rec- reation to change Delta Park’s name back to Van- port, and 375 people did. To sign an online peti- tion, click here. For a play-by-play of the event, including a full list of scholarship winners announced, go to TheSkanner.com. Reflecting on progress: “This is a tough time. This is a time of peril. But there have been times of peril before. Martin Luther King had fewer rights than we have to- day.” Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people were largely in the clos- et during the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and the 1960s, he said, and people with disabilities had no rights. Public buildings didn’t have to Trump the so-called “fourth branch,” the media, any- more, as mass, corpo- rate-owned media have increasingly trended conservative and often fail to fund deep report- ing or robust analysis, Moore said. While social media holds promises, audiences must remain skeptical of the new me- dium. “Social media is an un- proven source. The speed with which it can reach a mass audience on mil- lions of mobile devices is unmatched in history, but social media is yet to establish whether it can sustain critical thought and deep analysis.” On accusations of Rus- sian tampering in the election: “No Russian voted in the election unless they were citizens of the United States,” Moore said, and allegations of Russian tampering are a distraction from discuss- ing the racism that led to Trump’s ascendancy. He pointed out that 51 per- cent of college-educated White women cast their votes for Trump. “What were they thinking — or were they thinking?” Read the full story at TheSkanner.com Hidden Figures Students and teachers involved with the Dreaming of Potential Excellence program encouraging girls in science, technology, engineering and math held a Hidden Figures event from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday. The event included speakers talking about their careers in STEM fields and kicked off with a screening of the movie “Hidden Figures,” which tells the story of the female African American mathematicians who calculated flight trajectories for Project Mercury. March cont’d from pg 1 announcing it had withdrawn its prior endorsement of the event. “We have eight days to get this going, and we’ve just been work- ing nonstop, like 24-7,” Jacobsen told The Skanner Friday. There are two main organizers, she said, and about 50 people who are vol- unteering to make the event hap- pen. “We’re just trying to make sure that what was handed to us, that we do the best with it.” The NAACP’s release acknowl- edges the transition in leader- ship, quoting chapter president Jo Ann Hardesty saying, “Monday I learned that the original orga- nizers have all resigned and now several Portland women have stepped up to continue this effort. We applaud this recent develop- ment and wish the new organiz- ers much success.” Hardesty told The Skanner she is not personally discouraging anyone from participating in Sat- urday’s march — but she stands by her decision to withdraw and feels the damage done by the original organizers cannot be un- done. Constance Van Flandern, a state administrator coordinating communication among the orga- nizers of the national Women’s March on Washington, helping facilitate travel to the national event and certifying the social media presence for local march- es in the state of Oregon, said she started hearing concerns about the original organizers’ inclusiv- ity in November. She received messages from “ of red.” Van Flandern and Hardesty both said they had difficult inter- actions with Glass. Van Flandern was concerned that, coming from eastern Oregon, she was out of touch with Portland’s activist communities, which didn’t pair well with her seeming lack of in- ‘We’re just trying to make sure that what was handed to us, that we do the best with it’ several women of color who were blocked from posting on a private Facebook group dedicated to dis- cussing the event created right after the election, after posting articles about intersectional fem- inism or questions about wheth- er the voices of immigrants and women of color, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people would be included in the march. That group’s administrator, Dara Glass, spoke briefly with The Skanner earlier in January, saying she was organizing the march with the help of friends of hers in eastern Oregon, who she described as “dots of blue in a sea terest in organizing with commu- nities of color. The latter was the larger con- cern for Hardesty. “It’s not about being in Eastern Oregon. It’s about an unwilling- ness to highlight the women who would be the most harmed under this incoming administration,” Hardesty said. The Skanner contacted Glass by phone Friday, and she confirmed that leadership of the march had changed hands but had no fur- ther comment. According to Van Flandern, Glass stepped down from the organizing role. Read the full story at TheSkanner.com cont’d from pg 1 the president’s alleged policies and rac- ist rhetoric could take the United States back in time — to an era when people of color had to struggle from under White oppression. “(Trump is) a leader who has clearly suggested certain things that would be very anti-African American,” said Pla- za. He cites the 1989 full-page ad that the business tycoon published in all four major New York daily newspapers, calling on the state to kill five Black and Latino schoolchildren who were accused of attacking and raping a white female jogger in Central Park. Though the five boys were found to be innocent, Trump has never retracted or apolo- gized for his call for their execution. Plaza also chastises Trump’s tenden- cy to blindly back law enforcement without questioning the number of African Americans fatally shot by the police since the summer of 2014. Some 40 miles south of OSU, The University of Oregon (UO) is currently teaching The Rhetoric of Racial Rec- onciliation: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and the Promise of Intersec- “ packed Trump’s unorthodox campaign from various refer- ence points, including femi- nism, the media, and race. ‘That’s what universities are about – we’re about conversations and talking about ideas, not squelching them’ tionality, which dissects the exchanges between the two men on the issue of race. The primary texts include dozens of race-focused speeches that Obama gave during his two terms as president and the discourse of Trump’s White identity movement. Yet Oregon’s academic institutions are not alone in tackling the quagmire that is the Trump presidency. At Penn State University, The Mc- Courtney Institute for Democracy of- fered a seminar last semester candid- ly called The Trump Course. Led by six different professors, the class un- PHOTO BY THERESA HOGUE “ cont’d from pg 1 PHOTO BY ANTONIO HARRIS Breakfast “In political science and else- where, students were coming into this election with this feel- ing of being overwhelmed and literally, like, ‘What is going African American Resistance in the Era of Donald Trump is on? Is this normal, and how being held at the Lonnie B Harris Black Culture Center at OSU. do I, as a voter, see my way BCC peer facilitators Osenat Quadri, left, and Justeen Quartey, through this?’” said Christo- pher Beem, managing director right. of the McCourtney Institute. “We felt like we needed to offer a re- Slavery and Abolition Then and Now source for what is, I would argue, a new this spring. phenomenon in American politics at Read the full story at this level.” TheSkanner.com Loyola University Chicago will offer