On January 11, 2024 Portland State University (PSU) professor Kristen Teigen will offer a free, online lecture for people interested in untangling the racist history of the State of Oregon. The webinar January 11 is titled “Seeds of a White Utopia” and is from 6-8 p.m. on Zoom. Click here to register.
“The entire region of the Northwest… criminalized the presence of black people and the first black Exclusion Law included the Lash Law that said black people would be publicly whipped every six months until they left the territory.”
— Walidah Imarisha, educator and writer
Event organizers at Ashland Together has stated that the goal of the event is to ” better understand our state’s largely unexamined history of discrimination with the hope of empowering us all to be part of the vision for a more equitable and inclusive community.”
This lesson will include how the Oregon’s founders compromised not to make Oregon a slave state in exchange for racist “Black Exclusion Laws” that were incorporated into the defining documents of Oregon’s territory. Much of this history is untold, understated, and sadly, perpetuated through the language and policies in the State.
The criminalized presence of Black people and the nearly complete genocidal removal of Indigenous communities dominated the formation of the State of Oregon, and it’s critical that we take a close look at this history, so we can begin to unravel the harm and racist legacy that Oregon communities continue to face.
Oregon is the only state in the Union that included this type of black exclusion language into their founding documents, and, while the civil rights movement in the state succeeded in the removal of much of the legal language of the racist policies, much of the legacy has yet to be dismantled in rural Oregon.
Look no further than the map of hate groups from the So. Poverty Law Center, which marks white supremacy organizations as commonplace in many rural areas of Oregon, with a concentration of under documented groups located in the Rogue Valley. Reviewing demographic maps in the state continue to show how Communities of Color and especially African Americans live only along the well-traveled I5 corridor in 2024.
That’s why Ashland Together, along with its partners at BASE and Peace House, found priority to host this free webinar January 11 from 6-8 p.m.
The event will be followed by a four week online course titled “Unwelcomed: Understanding Oregon’s History of Racial Injustice.” The month-long online course will also be led by PSU Professor Kristin Teigen.
Instructor Kristin Teigen, MA, M.Ed. is an educator at Portland State University, where she teaches the history of BIPOC communities in Oregon and issues of women’s homelessness. She’s also an anti-oppression activist, working in feminist, queer, environmental justice and people of color movements, and a trained anti-oppression facilitator.
