Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons^™

Taking The Fiction Out Of Science Fiction: A Conversation About Indigenous Futurisms, Grace L. Dillon, Pedro Neves Marques

Indigenous Nations Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

In our conversation, Dillon talks about key concepts within Indigenous-led science fiction and offers a genealogy of the term “Indigenous Futurisms,” going back to authors like Gerald Vizenor and Diane Glancy; in doing this she provides a precious bibliography at a time when some of the most exciting science fiction writing today is coming from nonwhite authors. She considers stories with topics ranging from technology, environmental justice, and relations between human and other-than-human creatures, showing that thinking with science fiction offers a rich path to decolonize the notion of science itself, freeing up space for political imaginations beyond a one-world …

History Of The Tulsa Race Massacre, 1921 (Bibliography), Patricia A. Schechter

The Tulsa Race Massacre: Teaching and Learning Resources

This bibliography gathers the most significant and important scholarship on the Tulsa Race Massacre. It includes books and articles by historians, journalists, lawyers, and political commentators, like President Joseph Biden.

Videos, News, And Historical Documentaries: The Tulsa Race Massacre, 1921, Patricia A. Schechter

The Tulsa Race Massacre: Teaching and Learning Resources

To mark the centennial year since the Tulsa Race Massacre, a number of news outlets and public broadcasting stations, including the History Channel, put together one-hour specials. Included on this list is testimony solicited by the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Congress in May, 2021.

The Current Language Crisis In Siberia, Emma L. Vandehey

University Honors Theses

In the early years of the Soviet Union, state leaders were hesitant to create laws that would establish a national language. The USSR prided itself on multiculturalism and its ability to unify people from a variety of cultural backgrounds. As the Soviet Union became more established, ideations shifted from unity to uniformity. Indigenous languages from all over the country and various states were phased out, and the Russian language was implemented for children starting in primary school. Policies regarding heritage languages in primary and secondary schools stayed in place after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now indigenous peoples living …

Color And Descriptors To See A Deeper Meaning In "Passing", Dani Szafran

Anthós

A small glimpse into the novel “Passing” by Nella Larsen. A fictional story of Irene Redfield, a black woman living in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and her unraveling life brought on by a chance meeting of an old friend. This is a look at the latent lesbian feelings as shown by the use of descriptive words to paint a picture of a desire that was forbidden during those times.

Situating Hiv/Aids Humanitarian Film In The National Cinema Culture Of Mozambique: Historical, Contemporary And Feminist Perspectives, Sebastián Andrés Suárez Hode

University Honors Theses

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Mozambique has enabled a new wave of humanitarian cinema to develop as it seeks to educate and empower a population that has been adversely affected by the epidemic. Colonial-era patriarchal systems that persist have resulted in Mozambican women being disproportionately impacted by the virus, and humanitarian projects in turn use film as a vehicle for the exploration of Mozambican women’s subjectivities. Thus, these films have made for an especially feminist reconditioning of Mozambican national cinema culture. This essay will explore HIV/AIDS humanitarian cinema’s place within the larger discourse of Mozambican national cinema and will demonstrate how …

Psu Proposes Race Studies Mandate, Beverly Corbell, Ethan Johnson

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

New course requirements originating with the School of Gender, Race and Nations are being proposed in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Curriculum that can enrich the students’ learning experiences would be required of all undergraduate students, including two courses in race and ethnic studies. If passed, the added classes would also build support for the creation of conditions for a master’s degree program in the PSU School of Gender, Race and Nations. “We have a master’s certificate, but not a master’s program,” he said. Johnson says a vote for the proposal will help fulfill a Senate resolution to …

The La Uprising On Camera: The Changing Mediascape And Its Influence On Conceptions Of Race And Poverty, Neave Carroll

Phi Alpha Theta Pacific Northwest Regional Conference

Using the LA Riots as a case study, this paper examines the impact broadcast journalism had on electoral politics in America by deconstructing the media discourse surrounding the event and reviewing the electorate’s response. Mainstream network broadcast transcriptions and archival footage represent the bulk of source material used. These sources suggest changes in journalistic methods, such as the adoption of the 24-hour news cycle and sensationalist reporting, as well as new technologies like the camcorder which led to the advent of eyewitness reporting, coalesced to influence politics in 1992. Urban crime was linked to an ailing economy, encouraging politicians to …

Days Of Decision: San Francisco’S 1960 House Un-American Activities Committee Protest As A Turning Point Of The New Left, Sophie Carter

Phi Alpha Theta Pacific Northwest Regional Conference

After the degradation of union power throughout the McCarthy era, a new politics took hold among young Americans, and its academic roots and appeal to young leftists established the university as the new institutional mediator for left-wing radicalism in the 1960s, allowing college students to promote antiwar, civil rights, and civil liberties campaigns both on and off campus. Years before the major events that are tied to the New Left in American collective memory, however, Bay Area college students’ protests against the House Un-American Activities Commission garnered national media attention for their perceived radicalism in the face of the federal …

Asian American And Pacific Islander Presidential Fellows Report, Betty T. Izumi, Bree Kalima

OHSU-PSU School of Public Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

Since the 2010 Census, Oregon’s Asian American population has grown by 42.3% and its Pacific Islander population has grown by 57.3%, making these groups the fastest growing in the state (US Census Bureau, 2019; US Census Bureau, 2020a). In the Portland metropolitan area, these populations experienced a growth of 42.1% and 64.7%, respectively (US Census Bureau, 2019; US Census Bureau, 2020a). Although Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are often lumped together as a monolith, they differ from each other in ethnicity and also culture, politics, socioeconomic status, language, religion, immigration status, and migration and colonization histories. Given the history …

Black Magic & White Supremacy: Witchcraft As An Allegory For Race And Power, Nicholas Charles Peters

University Honors Theses

This paper examines dramatic representations of witchcraft in contemporary television, and their roots in stereotypes from 17th century dramas, exploring the function of witchcraft as an allegory for race and power in America. Television is a form of cultural media that can explore these stereotypes and create representation that influences the audience's perception of society, and can function as a call to action for social justice.

‘The Environment Is Us’: Settler Cartographies Of Indigeneity And Blackness In Prophecy (1979), Kali Simmons

Indigenous Nations Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines the triangulation of whiteness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the ‘creature feature’ sf-horror film Prophecy (Frankenheimer US 1979), arguing that the film’s renderings of environmental racism ultimately function to justify white supremacist hetero-patriarchal maintenance and surveillance of Black and Indigenous lands and bodies. A close examination of Prophecy’s representational and ideological shortfalls – in particular its renderings of Black and Indigenous maternity – reveals troubling entanglements between settler-colonial logics of geography, ecology, monstrosity, and subjectivity.

Blacks In Oregon, Darrell Millner

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Periodically, newspaper or magazine articles appear proclaiming amazement at how white the population of Oregon and the City of Portland is compared to other parts of the country. It is not possible to argue with the figures—in 2017, there were an estimated 91,000 Blacks in Oregon, about 2 percent of the population—but it is a profound mistake to think that these stories and statistics tell the story of the state's racial past. In fact, issues of race and the status and circumstances of Black life in Oregon are central to understanding the history of the state, and perhaps its future …

Evaluating The N/Ne Preference Policy, Amie Thurber, Lisa K. Bates, Susan Halverson

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

North/Northeast Portland has long been the heart of Portland's Black community. By 2010, the area had lost two-thirds of its Black residents to displacement. In response, the City adopted a Preference Policy that prioritizes displaced affordable rental and homeownership applicants. This report describes findings from the first phase of a study to understand what difference this policy is making in the lives of residents.

Examining The U.S. Wars On Vietnam, Laos, And Cambodia As The Production Of Neo-Colonialism, Aiden Gregg

University Honors Theses

I interrogate the colonial and neo-colonial histories of the U.S. wars on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos within the context of racialized and gendered labor accumulation, the production of difference through violence as a legitimation of colonial extraction, and ongoing neoliberal economic coercion. I examine genocide and ecocide as interdependent processes in the production of dependency and underdevelopment. I reject a common narrative of temporal and spatial disconnection which separates the wars from current economics and examine the violences which both produce and result from an economy based on growth.

Healthy Birth Initiatives: The Road Toward Reproductive Justice, Roberta Hunte, Susanne Klawetter, Sherly Paul

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study concerns racialized experiences of reproductive oppression among Black women and the efforts of one organization - Multnomah County’s Healthy Birth Initiatives (HBI) - to combat this oppression and move towards Reproductive Justice. This study explores how Black women experience and respond to racism-related stress and its impacts on their health during and after pregnancy and subsequent parenting. The project was informed by a pilot focus group conducted in 2016 by Drs. Jenna Ramaker and Roberta Hunte in partnership with HBI, which asked HBI clients about the role of toxic stress and racism-related stress in their lives. The current …

Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories Of Abolition Day, Amber Butts, Ayize Jama-Everett, Calvin Williams, Donte Clark, Lisa K. Bates, Naudika Williams, Shawn Taylor, Walidah Imarisha, Amir Kadar

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

The anthology is available here for download, and the YouTube video of authors reading excerpts is embedded.

Wakanda Dream Lab and PolicyLink present a storyworld of safety and freedom in a future without prisons and policing.

While debates about “defunding” raise the question of what a new public safety system might look like, authors and artists are showing us what is possible through speculative fiction. In the spirit of visionary fiction, we convened future-bending Black storytellers for a Black Speculative Writer's Room Project, and together, we created an anthology of freedom dream stories exploring a world after the abolition of …

White ‘Alliahs:’ The Creation & Perpetuation Of The ‘Wise Indian’ Trope, Jessica Mehta

PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal

Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine auto-fill features allows us to see how people search online, and the words they use, in real-time. Anonymous querying equates to anonymity, and by nature when we input key words or key phrases in search engines like Google we use succinct, brief, and to-the-point queries. What does this mean for how we search for Native American or “Indian” results? A 2019 SEO and keyword/phrase analysis revealed that the notorious “wise Indian trope” (similar to the “magical negro” trope) is still very prevalent today, particularly when comparing the keyword “wise” paired with non-Native races. …

Colonial Articulations: Race, Violence, And Coloniality In Kafka's "Penal Colony", Marshall Pierce

PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal

Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony” has been widely, even exhaustively studied. However, there is a dearth of analysis which stresses the centrality of the colony as a site, and race as a structure, in this text in a sustained and appropriately nuanced manner. While Kafka’s work is often read as representing universal conditions of domination and alienation, this paper argues that “In the Penal Colony” illustrates specific political processes and relations which belong to colonial and racialized orders of power. Reading “In the Penal Colony” alongside theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, and Saidiya Hartman, this …

Two Black Utopias Of The United States: Self Determination And Survival, Makaveli Gresham

University Honors Theses

In line with Charles Davis III's assertion in regards to the formation of black space and it’s spectral qualities representing the "material conditions of black survival", two black utopian projects: Soul City, North Carolina and the unrealized work of Architects Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) in New York City are analyzed to explicate to what extent that the United States built environment is compatible with "black survival". These two case studies are used to inform an understanding of the anti-black nature of Modernism and the cultural relationship between the construction of "whiteness" and "blackness" in the United States. This relationship …

Racial Justice Is Climate Justice: Racial Capitalism And The Fossil Economy, Julius Mcgee, Patrick Trent Greiner

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

The narrative of oppression moves through dialectical pressures. Capitalism evolved from the feudal order that preceded it, creating new forms of racial oppression that benefited an emerging ruling class [1]. Racial tensions evolve alongside economic oppression that subjugates labor to capital. The preceding racial order molds to emerging mechanisms of expropriation and exploitation by way of force and resistance. Beneath the surface of these tensions lies the interconnected threads of ecological and human expropriation. At the heart of all oppression, lies the manipulation of reproduction. The social processes necessary to reproduce black and brown communities, the ecological processes necessary to …

The Use Of The Birth Control Movement As A Eugenics Weapon, 1920'S-1960'S, Peyton P. Holstein

Young Historians Conference

While Margaret Sanger made great strides in the crusade for legalization and open access to birth control for women, groups paired her work with ideologies such as Social Darwinism to arm the eugenics movement throughout the Twentieth-century. The eugenics movement was a culmination of racism and newly found scientific theories which led a crusade to purify the American population through reproductive cherry-picking on the basis of race. One of the primary ways that this group attempted to weed out “undesirable” races within the American population was through birth control as well as sterilization. These two movements - birth control and …

Living And Working In A White Homeland: A Challenge To Be Heard And Recognized, Ethan Johnson

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Ethan Johnson, Chair of Black Studies at Portland State University, discusses racism in Oregon, comparing experiences from California, Ecuador, and providing historical context.

As pushout, incarceration and homicide are forms of exclusion, we can say Portland continues to legally exclude Black people as citizens of the state. If you do not graduate high school, are incarcerated or murdered, the obstacles for you to participate as a citizen are at best curtailed and at worst eliminated.

Black Males And Complexion And Phenotype: A Case Study Of Portland, Oregon, Ethan Johnson

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This is a paper given at the 2020 National Conference of Black Studies, Atlanta, Georgia, examining how complexion and phenotype shape black life in the Portland Metro area.

How Oregon’S Racist History Can Sharpen Our Sense Of Justice Right Now, Walidah Imarisha

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Writer Walidah Imarisha on eight years of talking about the brutal history of race in Oregon.

Name a small town in Oregon. I have most likely been there, talking about race.

For the past eight years, starting as part of Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project, I’ve stood in front of thousands of attendees in packed libraries, community centers, senior homes, college campuses, and prisons.

I’ve seen it all: multiple people arguing the Ku Klux Klan was and remains a “civic organization,” chiding me for focusing solely on the “negatives” while adamantly denying they support racism or are themselves racist. I’ve received …

Centering Equity In Oregon’S 100 Year Water Vision: A Student-Led Policy Paper Prepared By The Oregon Water Stories Team At Portland State University, Clare T. Mcclellan, Sadie Boyers, Victoria Cali De Leon, Tony Cole, Laura Cowley-Martinson, Shersten Finley, Dustin Lanker, Julia Seydel, Aakash Nath Upraity, Janet Cowal, Melissa Haeffner

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this report is to provide evidence for the need to further intentionally incorporate equity into Oregon’s 100 Year Water Vision. Four case studies contextualize this need and highlight the variety of water issues throughout the state, supported by linguistic analyses of local newspapers. As Oregon policy-makers are responsible for ensuring working water systems for all Oregonians, we also suggest implementable criteria for the evaluation of equity in water issues and decision-making. This student-led and interdisciplinary report comes from the Haeffner-Cowal Oregon Water Stories research lab at Portland State University.

Rememory, Walidah Imarisha

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Short Story Summary

Set in a future world where those who believe in liberation have set up autonomous zones across the United States, teen Ayo contemplates her place in this society without prisons and police. While her chosen sibling Essakai is fighting to free more territories, Ayo decides to journey into the Rememory, the collective consciousness of past Black liberation movements, to find out what her role in creating these new just worlds should be.

Foreword to Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day

There are times when our lived reality feels stranger than science fiction - a viral …

“Their Markers As They Go”: Modified Trees As Waypoints In The Dena’Ina Cultural Landscape, Alaska, Douglas Deur, Jamie Hebert

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Inland Dena’ina, an Athabaskan people of south-central Alaska, produce and value Culturally Modified Trees (CMTs) in myriad ways. Ethnographic interviews and field visits conducted with Inland Dena’ina residents of the village of Nondalton, Alaska, reveal the centrality of CMTs in the creation and valuation of an Indigenous cultural landscape. CMTs serve as waypoints along trails, as Dena’ina people travel across vast distances to hunt wide-ranging caribou herds and fish salmon ascending rivers from Bristol Bay. CMTs also provide bark and sap used in Dena’ina material culture and medicines, leaving signature marks upon the spruce, birch, and other trees found …

Albina Zone, Lisa K. Bates

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Story Summary:
In near future Portland, the police have been abolished, but what else is needed for real liberation? A gifted young woman and her mother struggle to communicate across a rift of unspoken history.

Foreword to Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day

There are times when our lived reality feels stranger than science fiction - a viral pandemic, an economic crisis, global conflicts on multiple frontlines, the rise of white supremacist racism, a wave of state violence against Black bodies, the fiery uprisings across the nation, and militarized guards deployed in response… It was the Red Summer …

Death And Dying As A Black Studies Professor The Toxicity Of Racism At Portland State, Ethan Johnson

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Ethan Johnson, Chair of Black Studies at Portland State University, discusses the killing of Jason Washington by Portland State University security and the decisions that led to that shooting, as well as the toxic environment on campus.