Spring Break
Panel discusses State of Black Oregon report
Report compilation of data by Urban League of Portland; sets the scene of black Oregonians
Rebecca Johnson
Issue date: 11/6/09 Section: News
|
The Daily Barometer
There was a panel discussion Thursday night in the MU ballroom that discussed issues facing black Oregonians today.
The night was focused around a report that was given out by the Urban League of Portland called "State of Black Oregon."
The speakers included Marcus C. Mundy, Urban League president; Robert Thompson of the OSU ethnic studies department; Henry Luvert, Eugene NAACP president and Carla Gary of the UO office of institutional equity and diversity.
The report was a compilation of data that sets the scene of African-American Oregonians, which Mundy felt was necessary after not being satisfied with what his research was showing.
"I didn't see anywhere, in a single place, what was going on in Portland," Mundy said.
This is the first report of its kind in 17 years and much of the data did not show much improvement to systemic discrimination in Oregon even after all that time.
"We discovered that there was a whole lot more to this story," Mundy said. "I don't want people to view this report as just a bunch of bad news. ... It's just the facts."
Unemployment rates were a large issue. There has been a lot of attention and concern given to the rise of unemployment in Oregon statewide, but Mundy says this crisis is nothing new for the African-American community.
"Blacks in Oregon have seen double digit unemployment since the '70s," Mundy said.
Most of the discussion focused on the problems black Oregonians face in education and the criminal justice system and how the two issues are not completely unrelated.
"The prison system uses the educational system to gauge how much it needs to build in the future based on failure rates of students starting in elementary school," Luvert said.
Data collected showed black students have a dropout rate almost twice that of white students. It also showed that 10 percent of the Oregon prison population is black while the African-American population makes up only two percent of the entire Oregon population.
"States use prisons as a solution to social, political and economic problems," Thompson said. "The implication is that the dividends that accrue from this prison industrial system only amount to social disruption."
Note: writers will not reply to comments.
Be the first to comment on this story
Comments by registered users are approved by default.