Sam Dunaway | News Editor

Martin Luther King Jr. Day brought several events to Western’s campus. Each year’s MLK Celebration Week consists of a day of service, a faculty-led session, a student-led session and a dinner with a keynote speaker. This year’s events focused on the history of racial injustice and talking about race from a historical perspective. In case you missed any of these powerful events, read on for a recap of the week.

“Poverty Simulation: Addressing Income Inequality”

The faculty-led session for the university’s Martin Luther King Jr. week consisted of a Community Action Poverty Simulation led by Community Health professor Doris Cancel-Tirado.

The purpose of the exercise is to help people better understand the realities of living in poverty. According a study conducted by Oregon Center for Public Policy in 2014, one in every six Oregonians lives below the federal poverty line. Some individuals have never experienced living in poverty, while some know it all too well.

The simulation split participants into family groups with a specified income, monthly budget and various struggles that needed to be addressed. The hour-long exercise simulated an entire month, with each 15-minute period representing a week. Families had to find ways to make ends meet throughout the “month” in very low-income situations.

“There’s a lot of myth about families of low income,” Cancel-Tirado noted. “One of the myths is that they don’t work. That is a myth. Most of the families that are in the system receiving some sort of support have at least one adult working. So these families are working but they face systemic challenges that make it very hard for them to move out of poverty. And that’s one of the things that the simulation illustrated.”

Cancel-Tirado explained that many people think of poverty in the context of developing countries and hungry children, but this simulation represented a more widespread type of poverty.

“It’s poverty where people struggle, maybe do a little bit better, then struggle again. It’s kind of a roller coaster all the time. And that has in impact on people’s health … your socioeconomic status has an impact on your health overall. Those that haven’t experienced poverty can at least get an idea of the stress level that these families have.”

When introducing the simulation, Cancel-Tirado expressed the importance of this topic during MLK week. “When we think about Martin Luther King Jr., we think about racial injustice. But with racial injustice, we need to talk about economic justice as well. The purpose of this simulation is not just for you to participate in this experience, but it’s to raise our level of involvement so we can move some of these agendas forward for economic justice for everyone.”

For more information on the poverty simulation and economic justice, contact professor Cancel-Tirado at canceltd@wou.edu

Keynote speaker: Walidah Imarisha

The annual Martin Luther King Jr. week dinner invited students, staff and community members to join keynote speaker Walidah Imarisha in talking about the history of race in Oregon.

Imarisha is a writer, reporter, educator and spoken word artist. She’s written numerous novels including two anthologies, a non-fiction book that won a 2017 Oregon Book Award and a poetry collection. She’s traveled as a representative from the Oregon Humanities Conversation Project and talked about race all over Oregon for six years.

The focus of the speech was race in history — the history of Oregon, how black individuals were treated in the Pacific Northwest throughout history and where we are today.

Imarisha spoke of the Martin Luther King Jr. that many don’t talk about.

“I think there is an image of Dr. King that gets put out that is a sanitized image, it is a safe image,” Imarisha explained. “I think it’s incredibly important to recognize Dr. King was a political prisoner who was arrested multiple times for his beliefs. Dr. King engaged in civil disobedience, he shut down bridges, he shut down highways.” She compared these acts to the Black Lives Matter movement that shut down bridges in Portland on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2017.

“When we talk about the legacy of Dr. King’s work, we have to talk about the real Dr. King and the real work that he did.”

Learn more about Imarisha’s work at walidah.com

“Media’s Representation of Marginalized Communities”

The student-led session, Media’s Representation of Marginalized Communities, capped off the week’s events. The session was led by Black Student Union president and MLK committee member Marnasha Fowlkes and Black Student Union secretary Sabrina Clark.

The representation of different races, sexual orientations and cultures was the focus of the session. A timeline beginning with the 1950s and ending in modern day displayed the different attitudes about race and culture in the mainstream media.

Several examples of race being poorly represented in movies and TV shows were discussed. This included the happy-go-lucky black servant in “Gone With the Wind,” the representation of gang violence in the Mexican-American community in “Mi Vida Loca,” the stereotypically loud Latina character of Gloria on “Modern Family” and the slant-eyed buck-toothed Chinese stereotype and the womanizing Italian stereotype in Disney’s “The Aristocats.”

Other misrepresentations were discussed at the session. The idea of the gay best friend and other token minorities are used in several movies and TV shows, and Caucasian actors casted to play minorities is still an issue in modern entertainment.

The session explained that, although there have been improvements in the representation of marginalized communities in the media, society still has a long way to go.

Contact the author at journalnews@wou.edu

Photo by: Paul F. Davis