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