Representative Anitra K. Rasmussen shares the story of racial relations in her state at Metropolitan Richmond Day on November 18th 1999

Rep. Anitra K. Rasmussen,
11th District, Oregon State Legislature
Metropolitan Richmond Day,
November 18, 1999, Richmond VA

Good Morning, and thank you for inviting Senator Gordly and myself to this event. It is an honor to be here, in a city that is filled with as rich and complex a history as Richmond holds. Senator Gordly has asked me to give you her best wishes and her deepest regrets that she could not be here this morning but she is under medical advice to not travel at this time. So, it falls to me to carry both her story as well as my own. I will not be able to tell Sen. Gordley’s story as well as she can, but I will do my best.

It is our stories, our history that brings us together this morning. History already recorded, and history waiting to be made. I come from a part of the country where written history, European-American history, is very thin. We are not quite 200 years away from the great Lewis and Clark expedition to the west coast, and almost all of us are from somewhere else within the last two generations. It’s not that there isn’t history spanning millennia in my state, it’s just that it wasn’t recorded in a way that was respected by the European-American settlers of the last century, and thus almost all was lost as entire tribes died due to white men’s diseases.

I enjoy thinking about history. I enjoy thinking about how it was that we came to be here now. I think that careful examination of our history gives meaning to our present lives and grounds our future choices. But not all of our history is pleasant or heroic. Our personal history, our family history, our cultural history all hold events that must be healed in order to move forward in health and wholeness. So this morning, I’m going to tell you some history. Some of it is my own personal history and some of it I must claim simply because of where I live. And then I will tell you how history was changed on one afternoon in April of last year.

I can remember the first time I saw someone of African-American heritage up close and personal. That's the way it is in Oregon. Perhaps for most of you, when you hear of my birthplace you think of forests and salmon, progressive environmental and social legislation, but there is a deep shadow in our paradise. We who are of European-American heritage, have been pretty successful in keeping people of color - especially African-Americans - out of our state.

We started this project in 1849 when the white male settlers who made up the Oregon Territorial Legislature specifically prohibited "negros, mulattos, and colored persons" from our state. Now, as a white woman, I would love to be able to say that it's all the white men's fault. The truth is, I don’t believe that the white women of the community were standing outside the door of the room with pickets in their hand protesting the action.

And as long as I'm here for true confessions, I must reluctantly acknowledge that while my feminist sisters have done a great deal to improve the life of the white, middle class woman; we have not done as much as we could and should in solidarity with our sisters of color. In other words, as I look at this story, I really don’t want to identify with the oppressor, but I find no other justifiable place for me to stand in this story. I'd really prefer to point the fingers of blame elsewhere, but elsewhere only leads back to here.

As near as I can tell from reading the 1849 resolution, this exclusion came from a place of fear - one of the worst motivators in our human emotional range. The resolution essentially reads, "We're surrounded by Indians. We let in African-Americans, they're going to cause trouble, stir up the native Americans, and then we'll all be dead."

I find this statement fascinating because buried within this law is an acknowledgment that the Chinook people, the Klamath People, the Nez Pierce and all their brothers and sisters throughout the Americas might have a reason to be unhappy with the loss of their land and their way of life.

When Oregon finally came into the Union, we made a decision to be a free state rather than a slave state - not so much out of a concern for the suffering of our brothers and sisters in bondage but more from a sense of just “don't let these kinds of people here.” No black folks, no problems. Our state constitution very specifically limited the participation and presence of African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Native Americans. Political and economic power was clearly to remain in European-American control.

We continued to do our best to keep these kinds of people out of our homeland. For the most part, we were pretty successful up until World War II, when the Kaiser shipyards needed workers for one of the most intense ship building times of our history.

African-Americans came from the south and the mid-west by the thousands in order to work at some of the best paying jobs in the country at the time. And as the war wound down, the city fathers (not to forget the silent city mothers) gathered together in their boardrooms and around their club tables to discuss what they were going to do about the black problem. You see, we couldn't allow these people to stay. We knew their type, and we knew that if they stayed there was only going to be problems. So, how were we going to get them all to move back to where they came from?

We made them invisible. We tore down the heart of their community - in the name of progress and urban development. We tore down their businesses, their churches, and their homes, and then we paid for the replacement of function, not what the value of what existed. In other words, we destroyed a church built of stone, mortar and stained glass and paid for a church built of plywood and 2x4's. But we got a nice coliseum out of it. And some years the basketball team that plays there actually almost wins the NBA championship – but of course the crowd is mostly white and I have to guess they don't often think of what the shards of stained glass mixed into the dirt beneath the gym floor as they drink their heffervison beer and watch the Blazerettes take the floor during the time outs.

Also during world war II, we rounded up all the Japanese Americans; the apple orchard and strawberry farmers and business owners, their wives, their children, and we sent them away because they looked more like our enemy then like us. And if we cheated them out of the fair value of their land and businesses we forced them to leave behind - well - there's a war on and, things are different.

Meanwhile we invited Latinos to come into our valleys and help harvest our crops. Not that we were really interested in fairly sharing the bounty of that work, or in their staying for one day longer then necessary for the harvest. Workers were advised to stay on the farm on their day off or risk beatings in town.

The 60's came and eventually we decided that the sign in the barber shop window prohibiting African-Americans really wasn't all that cool, so we took it down and decided we were no longer prejudiced. And in 1968, four years after the first time I encountered an African-American; I had my second encounter - this time a child came to my school. Looking back at it now, I can only imagine what a terrible burden it was for him to be there. The teachers gave us a lecture about how we are all the same no matter our skin color. The kid was doomed before he stepped one foot on the playground. To the best of my memory, I don't think he lasted very long. But we weren't racist.

And we're still not racist - even when I followed an African-American sister legislator into two receptions earlier this year and watched the official greeters look directly past her in order to grant me the "special guest privilege." Twice. In one night. She was invisible and I was not. I'm willing to bet that if you asked any of those nice, well meaning people if they were racist they would hotly deny it. Yet in each case, in their action, they denied my college the possibility of her true status, and I experienced white privilege.

So what do you do with unconscious racism? How do you transform it, make it visible? And how do you deal with the fact that your home state, your birthplace, the land where the roots of the mighty Douglas fir tree reaches as deep into your soul as it reaches deep into the soil - how do you deal with the fact that your state has such a racist history?
Last spring Senator Gordly and I were granted an opportunity to participate in a powerful and symbolic act of healing, A ceremony called the Day of Acknowledgment. It was a symbolic act by Oregon’s political leadership. The resolution – passed by both the House and the Senate - simply but clearly acknowledged Oregon’s racist history.

Sen. Gordly and I worked with many others to shape and move the resolution through the process. It was not easy nor automatic. It took a great deal of sensitivity and patience. But in the end, It was an amazing, transforming, and healing event, an hour long bill signing ceremony held in the House chambers. I asked for the opportunity to introduce some of our speakers and to sit at the podium because I wanted to see the room, I wanted to see the people’s faces.

At first we reserved the desks on the floor for the members of the House and Senate and their staff. Oregonians of all ethnic and racial heritage sat on the side and in the gallery. They filled the room and overflowed to other rooms where they could watch on TV. As is the nature of legislative life, not all the members were present at the appointed hour so the speaker of the house invited the people of Oregon to come out and sit on the floor, to take their seats in the Chamber. For a moment, they hesitated, and then Oregonians – Oregonians of all colors and dress– came and took joyful possession of their chamber. For years I have seen white, economically successful men and women sit in those desks and I have known that something was missing, that the pallet was somehow too monochromatic. Right then, sitting at the podium, I saw who we could and should be, and it is a memory I will hold for the rest of my life.

I will hold the memory of an older Japanese American man who sat in back of the room with the biggest, most joyful grin on his face. He would have been one to have spent time in the internment camps of Tulelake. I will hold the memory of pride on the face of a young African-American man, pride that he was sitting on the floor of his government’s chambers hearing the stories told. . I will hold the memory of my young European-american legislative colleague’s face shining with the transformational joy that erupted in that room in that hour. He too had glimpsed how it could be. It was powerful to be there, and it is power that lingers in the video. Last summer, Sen. Gordley and I traveled to an international conference on reconciliation in Switzerland where we showed the tape to people from around the world including the grandson of the man who invented modern day apartheid. His grandson, now an ANC member and formerly a staff person on the Truth and Reconciliation committee claimed our material and took it back with him to South Africa, where it will become available to people seeking reconciliation from all over the world.

Four o’clock in the afternoon of April 22, 1999 is a moment in history where change happened. And like all moments of change, it is only when we look back can we see how the forces of water and earth came together to form this new bend in the river. Citizens of Richmond Virginia – you were there. Your work with your own walk of history, your pioneering work in racial dialogues, came to Portland two years ago and showed us – at a conference on racial issues at Portland State University – that there is something we can do together to heal not only the wounds of the past but also to forge a new future. We formed dialogue groups based on the Hope in the Cities process and we were supported both financially and intellectually by Hope in the Cities as an ad hoc group of activists who came together to first plan the celebration of the Day of Acknowledgement and now to form our own non-profit organization called Oregon Uniting.

We are not done. Oregon Uniting is continuing racial dialogues based on the Hope in the Cities discussion guide. We will be training 13 new facilitators in January. We will be extending our dialog process out to the rest of the state. We have an active and powerful education committee that is working to incorporate not just the ceremony but also the history itself into K-12 curriculum throughout the state. We are ending the invisibility of ethnic minorities in our stories. We are discussing changing or adding murals to our 1930’s state capitol in order to make them more inclusive of all Oregonians. We are preparing to mark our own racial history so that we can teach it to ourselves and future generations. We will encourage the passage of similar resolutions in our sister territorial states of Idaho and Washington.

I’ve not yet been here 24 hours, and I’ve already learned something new. David Campt, a friend and a man who’s wisdom and insight I deeply respect pointed out that we also need to find a positive place for European-Americans to identify with, to stand with, as we tell this more complete story. And the places are there in the stories of those who opposed slavery, who risked their life serving as stops on the Underground Railroad, of those who overturned racist laws.

The power of the Day of Acknowledgment continued to reverberate throughout the session. Sen. Gordley wants you to know about SB 103 – which directed the State Superintendent of Education to include multicultural curriculum in all of Oregon’s K-12 schools so that students may learn how Oregon is more then just European-American. It is a bill that was printed the day after the Day of Acknowledgment ceremony and it sailed through both chambers with bipartisan support in a highly partisan session, something that Sen. Gordley attributes to the Day of Acknowledgment. House Bill 3114, introduced by Jackie Winters, the first Republican African- American to serve in the Oregon Legislature, directs the Superintendent to make sure that when history is taught to Oregon students, that all of Oregon’s history is taught.

Again, it passed with little to no resistance.
Sen Gordly told me about how she noticed the transformational joy of the Day of Acknowledgment lingered through the session, how many of her colleagues continued to remark on that event. And when a controversial and unfortunately partisan bill was debated on the floor of the senate – a bill that would ultimately threaten the safety of farm workers – still often Latino – that when both Sen. Gordly and Sen. Susan Castille invoked the Day of Acknowledgement, they knew their colleges listened more carefully. There is no question that this event bridged the deep divisions in our legislative body between urban and rural, Republican and Democrat, and united people of all races in history.

I wish Avel Gordly could be here to tell her own story. She is the first African-American woman to serve in the Oregon Senate and a powerful and inspirational legislator. She is a woman of history. I guess, in our own ways, we are all men and women of history. History made and history waiting to be made. The past does not condemns the future.

While we must remember where we have been, we retain, each day fresh again, the opportunity to choose where we want to go and how we want to create today’s history. I thank you, people of Richmond, for the new history you have created, and I look forward to walking with you through our history today. Thank you.

© Anitra Rasmussen 1999