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Sam Dunaway | News Editor<\/span><\/p>\n Martin Luther King Jr. Day brought several events to Western\u2019s campus. Each year\u2019s 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\u2019s 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. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cPoverty Simulation: Addressing Income Inequality\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The faculty-led session for the university\u2019s Martin Luther King Jr. week consisted of a Community Action Poverty Simulation led by Community Health professor Doris Cancel-Tirado.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201cmonth\u201d in very low-income situations.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of myth about families of low income,\u201d Cancel-Tirado noted. \u201cOne of the myths is that they don\u2019t 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\u2019s one of the things that the simulation illustrated.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s poverty where people struggle, maybe do a little bit better, then struggle again. It\u2019s kind of a roller coaster all the time. And that has in impact on people\u2019s health \u2026 your socioeconomic status has an impact on your health overall. Those that haven\u2019t experienced poverty can at least get an idea of the stress level that these families have.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n When introducing the simulation, Cancel-Tirado expressed the importance of this topic during MLK week. \u201cWhen 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\u2019s to raise our level of involvement so we can move some of these agendas forward for economic justice for everyone.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n For more information on the poverty simulation and economic justice, contact professor Cancel-Tirado at canceltd@wou.edu<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Keynote speaker: Walidah Imarisha<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Imarisha is a writer, reporter, educator and spoken word artist. She\u2019s written numerous novels including two anthologies, a non-fiction book that won a 2017 Oregon Book Award and a poetry collection. She\u2019s traveled as a representative from the Oregon Humanities Conversation Project and talked about race all over Oregon for six years.<\/span><\/p>\n The focus of the speech was race in history \u2014 the history of Oregon, how black individuals were treated in the Pacific Northwest throughout history and where we are today.<\/span><\/p>\n Imarisha spoke of the Martin Luther King Jr. that many don\u2019t talk about.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI think there is an image of Dr. King that gets put out that is a sanitized image, it is a safe image,\u201d Imarisha explained. \u201cI think it\u2019s 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.\u201d She compared these acts to the Black Lives Matter movement that shut down bridges in Portland on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2017.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhen we talk about the legacy of Dr. King\u2019s work, we have to talk about the real Dr. King and the real work that he did<\/span>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Learn more about Imarisha\u2019s work at walidah.com<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cMedia\u2019s Representation of Marginalized Communities\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The student-led session, Media\u2019s Representation of Marginalized Communities, capped off the week\u2019s events. The session was led by Black Student Union president and MLK committee member Marnasha Fowlkes and Black Student Union secretary Sabrina Clark.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Several examples of race being poorly represented in movies and TV shows were discussed. This included the happy-go-lucky black servant in \u201cGone With the Wind,\u201d the representation of gang violence in the Mexican-American community in \u201cMi Vida Loca,\u201d the stereotypically loud Latina character of Gloria on \u201cModern Family\u201d and the slant-eyed buck-toothed Chinese stereotype and the womanizing Italian stereotype in Disney\u2019s \u201cThe Aristocats.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Contact the author at journalnews@wou.edu<\/span><\/p>\n Photo by: Paul F. Davis<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sam Dunaway | News Editor Martin Luther King Jr. Day brought several events to Western\u2019s campus. Each year\u2019s 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\u2019s events focused on the history of racial injustice and talking about race from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1030,"featured_media":6953,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1030"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}