Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2014: Quandary

Quandary
Fall/Winter 2014
Inside the media circus
in Ferguson, Missouri
The downsides of feminism’s
pop-culture moment
Which race to choose,
which to leave behind
Growing up black
in Portland

$8

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Oregon Humanities (ISSN
2333-5513) is published triannually by Oregon Humanities,
813 SW Alder St., Suite 702,
Portland, Oregon 97205.
We welcome letters from
readers. If you would like to
submit a letter for consideration, please send it to the
editor at [email protected] or to the
address listed above. Letters
may be edited for space or
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Oregon Humanities is
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To join our mailing list, email
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edit or
Kathleen Holt
a rt di r e ct or
Jen Wick
com m u n ications
co or di nat or s
Ben Waterhouse
Eloise Holland
cop y edit or
Allison Dubinsky
com m u n ications/
pu bl icat ions i n t er n
Hali Engelman

Oregon Humanities

edit or i a l a dv is ory
boa r d
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Greg Netzer
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Rich Wandschneider
Dave Weich

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Fall/Winter 2014

Departments

Features: Quandary

4
Editor’s Note

12
The Late Show

28
Are You My Mother?

by n ige l dua r a

by l ois rusk a i m e l i na

6
Field Work
Conversation Project Tour:
Oregon Black History ✢ Toward
One Oregon ✢ Letters to
Strangers ✢ YWCA of Greater
Portland’s Social Change
Program ✢ OH News ✢ Veterans
Discussion Group ✢ Author!
Author!

We went to Ferguson to get a
story, even if we had to make it
ourselves.

She wasn’t acting like herself.
Was that so bad?

11
From the Director
40
Posts
Readers write about “Quandary”
44
Read. Talk. Think.
Saint Friend by Carl Adamshick
✢ While the Gods Were Sleeping
by Elizabeth Enslin ✢ Racism in
America by Robert L. Jackson ✢
Morning Light by Barbara Drake
✢ Excellent Sheep by William
Deresiewicz ✢ Utterly Heartless
by Jan Underwood
46
Croppings
Roger Shimomura: An American
Knockoff at Hallie Ford
Museum of Art in Salem

18
Feel-Good Feminism

33
Gone Astray
by s at ya d oy l e b yo ck

Has feminism’s pop-culture
cachet doomed the movement?

Values fall by the wayside for
a humanitarian aid worker in
Sri Lanka.

23
Boxed In

36
The Air I Breathe

by a n di z eisl e r

by w en dy w i l l is

Which box to check, which
people to leave behind

by i fa n y i d. be l l

Growing up tolerated and
underestimated in Portland

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Oregon Humanities

Editor’s Note
Messy Business

W

hen she w a s you nger, my daug hter had a pret t y
good poker face. She could be warm and chatty and
unfailingly polite. But if she didn’t like you, you wouldn’t know
it. If she adored you, you wouldn’t know it. She’d maybe give a
sidelong look and soft “thank you” before politely taking what
you offer, whether words of praise or a chocolate chip cookie.
But it didn’t mean you’d made a lifelong ally of her. She is always
in the process of consideration, always protective of that roiling
sea inside her.
Because being a parent is often about being a performer,
I’ve been hyper aware that this watchful, inscrutable child is
my audience. I know she’s looking for clues about how to be—or
not be—in the world, and over the years, I’ve done my best rendition of a mother: I’ve lectured and cajoled. I’ve given advice
and instructions. In more grandiose moments, I’ve concocted
parables and metaphors. But unlike her, I’m easy to agitate, less
deft at keeping my emotions in check.
She’s ten years old now and only a half-a-foot shorter than
me, a preadolescent assemblage of pointy joints and long limbs.
She watches me react swiftly and passionately to things beyond
my immediate control—things like bad luck and circumstance,
like injustice and inequity. I worry that it can’t be good for her
to see her mother thrash and rail and struggle to make sense of
the world. Some days I wonder if I can pull off being two different people: the messy, impulsive person I am when she’s not in

the room—the one who always seems on the verge of blurting out
a half-formed thought or opinion—and the deliberate, capable
person when she’s there.
The other day as we were walking home from school, she
casually mentioned that two boys playing kickball at recess
that day—the only two boys—were the team captains. I paused
a moment then, using my best calm-mom voice, asked, “Why
were they the captains? Why not the girls?” I was holding her
hand as we walked (something that sadly doesn’t happen much
anymore) and though my voice was steady, I’d clenched her hand
tightly. In response, she wriggled her hand a bit, not to let go, but
to remind me she was there—watching, listening.
The essays in this issue of Oregon Humanities magazine are
about people in tough predicaments or dealing with conundrums. To get to the hearts of these quandaries, we pushed
hard on the writers and, in the process, hit some very soft
places, bruising an ego here and hurting some feelings there.
So what you see on the pages that follow are naked emotions,
struggle, doubt, and vulnerability. Because that’s what it looks
like to be perplexed about how to move forward or to lurch forward uncertainly and find on the other side regret or relief or
resignation. It’s messy, this business of deliberation and action
and reflection, of making one’s way through the world.
k at h l een holt, Editor
[email protected]

Cover Art Ideas for “Fix”
We are excited to feature the work of
new writers and artists in the pages of
Oregon Humanities. The cover of this issue is
Juggling by Alejandra Laviada.
If you’re an artist and have work that we
might consider for the Spring 2015 issue,
on the theme “Fix,” we’d love to know
about it. Please familiarize yourself with our
publication (back issues viewable online at
oregonhumanities.org), then send us the

following by March 20, 2015:
• A high-resolution digital image (300 dpi
at 8” x 10”; scans or photographs, JPEG
or TIFF)
• Your name, the title of the work, the type
of media, as well as contact information
(email and phone number)
• Description of the relationship of the
image to the theme
Please consider the constraints of a

magazine cover (e.g., vertical orientation,
nameplate, and cover lines). We are most
interested in works by Oregon-based artists.
Submissions can be sent to
[email protected] or by post
to Oregon Humanities magazine,
813 SW Alder St. Suite 702, Portland,
OR 97205.

5

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

A
pointedand
andcurious
curiouslook
look
A playful, pointed
at the Northwest’s
at
Northwest’sleading
leadingartists
artists
and
and creative
creativework.
work.

Saturdays at
Saturdays
atnoon
noonon
on
OPB
OPB Radio
Radio

Stream it at www.opb.org/stateofwonder

Stream it at www.opb.org/stateofwonder

6

Oregon Humanities

Field Work

NAOMI STUKEY

H U M A N ITI E S ACRO S S OR E G ON

Walidah Imarisha on the
Conversation Project tour with Rural
Organizing Project in Albany

“Why Aren’t There More Black People in Oregon?” in six communities. The program, led by
writer and educator Walidah Imarisha, traveled to Grants Pass, Redmond, Astoria, Albany,
Newport, and Bay City. Jessica Campbell, an
organizer with the ROP, says the group chose
communities that could best use the program
as a springboard to further organizing.
The partnership grew out of an earlier public discussion in Josephine County around the
question “What would you need to still live in
this community in twenty years?” For people
of color, Campbell says, “it certainly wasn’t a
safe place for them to live.” White supremacist activity in the area has been on the rise—a
trend the ROP is working to document.
Imarisha’s program, based on a timeline
of Oregon history (an excerpt of which was
published in the Summer 2013 issue of Oregon
Humanities magazine), demonstrates that
white supremacist ideology is nothing new
in the state. “Oregon as a state was founded
as a white homeland,” Imarisha says. In 1859,
Oregon became the only state to join the union
with racial exclusionary clauses in its constitution—barring African Americans from living
in the state, making contracts, or holding real
estate. That language was not removed until
2001. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Oregon’s population is 2.6 percent African American, which
ranks it forty-first in the nation, according to
the 2010 Census.
This isn’t just history, Imarisha says: “It’s
a living legacy, because this very much walks
Not Done Talking
with each of us every day.” Racial disparities
A Conversation Project tour inspires ongoing
in home ownership, employment, access to
action around race and oppression in Oregon.
health care, education, and criminal justice,
she says, “are a direct result of this idea of the
N SEPTEMBER, OREGON HUMANITIES
white homeland.”
partnered with the Rural Organizing ProjThe September tour drew six hundred
ect (ROP), a network of volunteer organiza- people overall, and Campbell says two dozen
tions promoting human dignity and democracy, communities have asked to be included on any
to present the Conversation Project program
future tours of the program. After the tour, she

I

adds, three themes emerged about next steps
to take in local communities. First was the
need for more public education on the history
of race in Oregon. Second was the need for a
rapid-response mechanism for incidents such
as hate crimes. Third was the importance of
focusing on institutional racism, such as racial
profiling by police or disproportionate disciplining of students of color.
Justin Chin was one of more than two hundred and fifty people who attended the Albany
event; he is also one of about thirty community
members from Corvallis and Albany who have
begun meeting every two weeks to organize
around the issues raised by the program. When
Chin was growing up, his family members
were the only people of Chinese descent living
in his hometown of Dallas. “I always thought
of myself as a native Oregonian,” says Chin, a
Linn-Benton Community College career coach.
“Walidah’s presentation really opened my eyes
to what a white separatist or whites-only state
Oregon was.”
Chin’s informal committee has discussed
how to make Linn and Benton counties more
welcoming to people of color, how to pool
resources and help people access them, and
how to bring information about Oregon’s
ongoing history of race relations into local
schools. Chin hopes to get community leaders,
like the members of the Albany city council,
to participate. “It’s one thing to be grassroots,”
he says, “but it’s another thing to be grassroots and be heard by the next level up, and
the level after that.”

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

COURTESY OF MICHAEL HIBBARD, PORTL AND
STATE UNIVESIT Y, OREGON STATE UNIVERSIT Y

7

Mike Hibbard, Ethan Seltzer,
Bruce Weber

One Oregon?
A Conversation Project explores the connections
between Oregon’s diverse communities.

A

LL OF OREGON HUMANITIES’

Conversation Project leaders travel, often
over long distances, to bring public discussions to all parts of the state. Michael Hibbard,
Ethan Seltzer, and Bruce Weber have done so
ambitiously. Between the three of them they
have presented their program, “Toward One
Oregon: Bridging Oregon’s Urban and Rural
Communities,” fifteen times in the past year,
in such disparate communities as Halfway,
Prineville, Tillamook, and Grants Pass.
All three are scholars at Oregon universities, and their program was inspired by their
research into ties and divisions between urban
and rural communities. “The idea going into
it was that we would be in these various communities ranging from Portland to very tiny
places, and people would think about the place

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Oregon?
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ER IC G OL D

Dear Stranger: Quandary
For the third time in 2014, we’re inviting Oregonians to write a personal letter to someone
they’ve never met. Call it an old-school pen-pal
program, a long-distance community-building
initiative, or a new-school commitment to paper
in an email age. We’re calling it Dear Stranger.
Here’s how it works: Write a letter. Address
it “Dear Stranger.” Fill a page, maybe two. Write
about quandaries—a time you’ve experienced a
pickle, a bind, or an impasse. A time you faced a
seemingly unwinnable challenge. Sign your letter, but do not include your mailing address.

Print and sign the Dear Stranger release
form at oregonhumanities.org. We cannot
exchange letters without a signed release.
Mail your letter, the signed release, and
a stamped, self-addressed envelope (so we
can mail you a letter from your stranger), by
January 9, 2015, to Dear Stranger, Oregon
Humanities, 813 SW Alder St., Suite 702,
Portland Oregon 97205.
When we receive your letter, we will
exchange it with a letter from another writer.
They will get your letter; you will get theirs.
Read the letter; what happens next is up to you.

Oregon Humanities

8

Oregon Humanities News
BE YON D T H E M A RGI N S I n S ept em-

ber, Oregon Humanities kicked off a new
online project we’re calling Beyond the
Margins, which is a monthly emailed essay
subscription sent (and then posted to our
website) during the months the magazine
isn’t published. We receive a lot of great submissions that we simply don’t have room to
publish in our three print issues each year
and we’re thrilled to be able to share them
with you. Visit oregonhumanities.org/magazine-extras to read and subscribe.
T H I N K & DR I N K R ET U R N S O r e g on

Humanities’ Think & Drink returns in
2015, inviting the public to think and talk
together about big ideas. Speakers lined up
for the series include author Barry Lopez,
writer and educator Walidah Imarisha, and
author Eula Biss. Visit oregonhumanities.
org and sign up for our enewsletter to get
all the latest news about the 2015 Think &
Drink series.

of their community in the state as a whole,”
Hibbard says.
Over the past year, however, the three
have found that the state as a whole is not
necessarily at the top of participants’ concerns.
“People live their lives locally,” Seltzer says.
“And again I think the challenge that that
poses for the state of Oregon is that the state
of Oregon remains a kind of abstract concept.”
“Toward One Oregon” will continue to venture into Oregon cities and towns in the year
to come. “People are interested in exploring
their own attachment to the places that they
live,” Weber says.
To bring “Toward One Oregon” or any of the
thirty-three Conversation Project programs
offered by Oregon Humanities to your community, check out the 2014–15 Conversation
Project catalog at oregonhumanities.org.
The catalog includes thirteen new conversations on topics such as the meaning of sports,
the Second Amendment, and community in
the age of the Internet. Oregon nonprofit and
community organizations may apply through
January 31, 2015, to host programs taking place
between March 1 and June 30, 2015.
BEN WAT ER HOUSE

H O S T A C ON V E R S AT I ON P R O J E C T

Since 2009, more than two hundred organizations across the state have hosted
free humanities-based public discussions
through the Conversation Project. Oregon
nonprofits and community groups can
apply until January 31, 2015, to host Conversation Project programs in the spring
and summer—visit oregonhumanities.org
for more information. And watch out for the
application window for 2015–16 conversation leaders opening in January.
W E L COM E , N E W B OA R D M EM BE R S

Oregon Humanities’ board of directors
voted in two new members this fall: Jeff
Cronn, a partner at Tonkon Torp LLP, and
Kimberly Howard, head of education initiatives for the corporate social responsibility
team at Portland General Electric. Find
more information about our board of directors at oregonhumanities.org/about-us/
board-of-directors/

Dismantling Oppression
An Oregon Humanities grant-funded program
works as a catalyst for social change in Portland.

E

LIMINATING OPPR E SSION A N D

empowering underserved populations is
not a simple task. These core issues have been
the driving forces behind the YWCA of Greater
Portland’s Social Change Program, which
offered fifteen advocacy training workshops
this fall, all aimed at educating individuals
through dialogues about racism, sexism, and
other forms of oppression. The workshops,
presented this year at the YWCA’s downtown
Portland facility, explore class-, race-, and
gender-based oppression and are supported in
part by a grant from Oregon Humanities.
Program manager Dara Snyder says, “Our
goal is not only to get people thinking about
and understanding core competency areas
and fundamental concepts, but also to begin
to become activists in their own right and work
to dismantle different forms of oppression that
are systemically in place.”

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

9

The workshops are facilitated by different
experts, depending on the topic, and are frequently taught in collaboration with the program’s partner organizations, such as Bradley
Angle and Raphael House of Portland. Some
individuals participate in one or two workshops; others are working to become certified
by the Department of Human Services and
attend as many as fifteen.
Snyder, an expert in areas of racism and cultural humility who teaches workshops such as
“Understanding Oppression” and “Sex, Gender,
and Sexual Orientation,” says that the average person doesn’t understand how issues of
oppression work in a community. “The broader
community is where a lot of the work, in terms
of progress and social transformation, happens,” she says. She cites a lack of dialogue and
honesty regarding these issues as the cause.
“[Issues of oppression] are more insidious and
covert than they were when discriminatory
policies were the norm,” she says, “but they are

still very real and continue to affect all aspects
of our lives.” Snyder says the workshop program, which continues through April 2015, will
be successful if it can continue to engage the
broader community of people who have never
examined these issues.
K ATI E G OU R L E Y

War and Words
Oregon Humanities debuts a free reading and
discussion program for veterans.

O

R EG ON H U M A N IT I E S H A S JOI N E D

forces with Maine Humanities Council
and ten other state humanities councils to present a series of free, five-session reading and discussion programs for veterans in three Oregon
communities in 2015.
The programs are made possible through
support from the National Endowment for

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Humanity in Perspective graduate Carlos Dory (in green t-shirt)

Oregon Humanities

KIM NGUYEN

We need your support for
more connected, imaginative,
and vital communities.

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M E T TE WE
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OF PORT

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GIVE!
GUIDE
2014

BEN WAT ER HOUSE

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the Humanities’ Standing Together initiative,
which was created to promote understanding of the military experience and to support
returning veterans. The programs aim to provide opportunities for participants to reflect on
military service in a veteran-centered setting,
connect with other veterans, and talk about the
challenges and opportunities of transitioning
from active duty to civilian life.
Adam Davis, executive director of Oregon
Humanities, says the series is of a piece with
OH’s other discussion programs.
“In all our work, we try to help people connect and make meaning,” he says. “Service—
maybe military service most of all—isn’t over
when it ends. These discussion programs provide Oregonians from different backgrounds
and generations the opportunity to connect
across deep and complex experiences and
commitments.”
The program will kick off in Oregon in January and run through April 2015, with series
in Roseburg, Portland, and Medford. For more
information, visit oregonhumanities.org.

Visit giveguide.org/#oregonhumanities to make a
gift through Willamette Week’s 2014 Give!Guide.

Storytellers Take the Stage
Oregon Humanities cosponsors third year of Author! Author!
Oregon Humanities is pleased to cosponsor Deschutes Public
Library Foundation’s Author! Author! literary series, which
brings well-loved authors to Bend. Revenue from ticket sales
will support library services and programs. The series takes
place at the Bend High School Auditorium.

Author! Author! speakers Kerman, Patchett, and Stein

February 11, 7:00 p.m. Garth Stein, bestselling author of four
novels, including The Art of Racing in the Rain and A Sudden
Light

May 29, 7:00 p.m. Writer Piper Kerman, whose memoir Orange
is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison was adapted
into a Peabody Award–winning Netflix series

March 6, 7:00 p.m. Author Ann Patchett who has written six
novels and three books of nonfiction, including The Patron Saint
of Liars, Bel Canto, Run, Truth & Beauty

For more information about this series, please visit the
Deschutes Public Library Foundation website at
www.dplfoundation.org.

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

KIM NGUYEN

11

Practice
A DA M DAV IS

O

N E A FTER NOON DU R ING M Y
junior year of high school, I made plans
with two friends at the end of basketball practice to meet up again that night. As I was leaving
the gym another kid on the team approached
and asked what we were doing later. I had
fielded this kind of question from him before
and seized the moment: “If we wanted you to be
there,” I said, “we would have invited you.” And
I walked out the door.
I don’t remember what my friends and I did
or what we talked about that night. It’s possible
that I told them what I had said to the fourth
kid. It’s possible that the three of us laughed.
I suspect I was proud of myself for having said
the honest and difficult thing that I thought
needed to be said.
Now I work with an organization bent on
inviting people to say honest and difficult
things. We try to get the young talking with the
old, the locavore talking with the large-scale

F ROM TH E DI R ECTOR

farmer, the fifth-generation Oregonian talking with the newcomer. And we work to get
more subtle differences to emerge as well—so
that veterans of different wars can talk with
one another about their experiences of coming
home, so that Oregonians of different backgrounds can talk about the Oregon that is and
is not their home.
We make a particular effort to invite people
to talk about things that might divide them—
about gun ownership, for example, and about
the apparent rural/urban divide, and about justice. It is rarely easy to get people who think they
disagree into a room together, or to get them,
once there, to speak honestly with one another.
But the hardest part of this work—the
part I’m learning most about through Oregon
Humanities’ efforts—is not the saying of difficult things. As I should have known from my
righteous declaration after basketball practice,
saying honest and difficult things to another
person is actually not so hard.
The harder work—and the more important
work—is what comes after the first utterance,
after the saying of the first honest and difficult
thing. The harder work is genuinely inviting
honest and difficult response. This requires
that we be as open, even if only briefly, to others’ experiences and convictions as we are to
our own. This feels to me like the risky and
essential core of our work because of the exposure it demands, the opening up.
In some contexts exposure is a dirty word.
It can mean showing too much and it can
mean leaving yourself vulnerable. The kid who
approached me after practice did just that: he
risked an invitation and he left himself open.
My response to him was genuine—I spoke what
I felt—but I had already made my decision. I
already knew enough for both of us.
I don’t mean to suggest that I should have
invited him to join my friends and me that
night. There are plenty of valid reasons to keep
some doors closed, to keep some groups small.
What I wonder about when I look back is my
certainty about who we were and who he was.
With Oregon Humanities’ work in mind, I
wonder especially about developing a practice
of uncertainty—about creating opportunities
where all of us can work toward invitation,
care, and risk.

12

Oregon Humanities

We went to Ferguson to find a story, even if we had to make it ourselves.
N IGEL DUA R A

D

AYS BROK E WA R M A N D ST ICK Y,
the humidity hanging over our shoulders
like a load of wet laundry. By mid-August, protests were in full swing every day, marchers
rounding the same familiar cracks in the sidewalk, casually tossing trash into sewer grates.
It became routine after the first of couple
days. The sun drifted behind fat, blue clouds,
humidity hung, and the mosquitoes found us.
“They always look for me,” I told my producer, Priya. “Sweet blood.”
We spent our days in St. Louis city and the
surrounding county, looking for witnesses or
autopsy reports or which politician was flying in next. But without fail, each evening we
found ourselves back behind the yellow tape,
in the crowd, waiting for the show.

And a show is what it became in Ferguson, Missouri, in the
weeks after an unarmed black eighteen-year-old was shot and
killed by a white police officer in a city where most of the cops
are white and most of the residents are black. Maybe that’s what
it was from the beginning. Protesters south, cops north. Sometimes the police would push in from farther south, trapping the
protesters between two lines.
This had the potential to be civil rights history. That, ostensibly, is why we in the media were there. From either coast, we
came to see firsthand what we’d previously seen only as blackand-white images from the 1960s: protesters versus police, a
changing nation, a signal moment in a national shouting argument about race.
At first blush, the right elements were there: a city wracked
by racial discord, white flight, and redlining; aggressive police
officers; clusters of protesters more ready to loot than march. If
the reminders of the 1960s weren’t clear enough, at one point a

13

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

AP PHOTO/JEFF ROBERSON

CNN International news anchor even asked why police didn’t
clear the protests with hoses.
When I set out for Ferguson from Portland, I imagined
reporters as impartial observers, the blue helmets in international conflicts watching what was happening and sending it
back in text, pictures, sound. I wasn’t prepared for the role the
media would play in the story. I wasn’t prepared to deal with
how the story permeated every inch of my life, from the food I
ate to the people I spoke with. Even when I was back at my hotel
alone at night, Ferguson was there: in my clothes that stank of
tear-gas funk, garlic, and burning trash; in my dreams.
E V E RY N IGHT BEG A N L IK E T HIS: DA R K N E S S
approached and we parked at the police command center and
walked down West Florissant Avenue, the street where Mike
Brown was killed. Marchers started doing laps in a giant rectangle, walking past the looted businesses and the boarded-up
windows shattered a night or two earlier. The chants got louder.
The police assembled. The sun set. And then, almost by design,
something would crack.
The reasons varied from night to night. Missouri governor
Jay Nixon issued a curfew, and protesters used the midnight
deadline to challenge police. Police would order marchers to
keep marching as part of an order against “static assembly.”
Protesters would stop moving, forcing a face-off. Sometimes,
the police would simply decide the situation was unsafe, order
dispersal, and begin firing tear gas, rubber bullets, and mace
bombs into the crowd.
I came to believe I understood the rhythms of police action.
First, they would present themselves in ordinary uniforms.
Then they would park armored personnel carriers at either end
of Florissant. Once I saw officers carrying wooden batons and
gas masks on their hips, I knew the night wouldn’t go well.

We watched the small skirmishes expand
into larger clashes. We ducked into the sole
burger joint that stayed open after sundown,
its panicked owner handing out sodas between
frantic, wide-eyed stares at whoever was walking through his door. We ate, we waited, we
smoked, we watched. Then, inevitably, the
police would have enough and order protesters to disperse. Without fail, the protesters
refused. And out came the tear gas. One night,
police appeared to use one of my videographers
as a tracer round, following him as he scurried
away from the gas, launching canister after
canister near his feet as he fled.
The two biggest dangers in a place like this
come from the crowd. The first is trampling.
People, screaming, ran from the slightest
sound. We later learned a Maoist revolutionary group was throwing firecrackers designed
to sound like gunfire. The second, of course, is
gunfire, fired from the crowd, at the protest or
at the cops or at the sky or at nothing at all. One
man went to the hospital in critical condition,
shot in the neck. It’s a small miracle no one else
was wounded by bullets.
We got gassed, we went home, we drank.
Then we did it again, a day later. We were there
to report on a police shooting. We stayed, and it
became something else entirely.
R EPORTER S LIK E ME A R E TR A IN ED
to cover events. We’re not as good with tectonic
cultural shifts or marking depth in the river of

In this
Monday,
August 18,
2014, file
photo, people
stand near
a cloud of
tear gas in
Ferguson,
Missouri,
during
protests.

14

time, but give us something with borders and
a running clock, something with boundaries
temporal and geographic, and we’ll get you a
story: NFL games and political debates, 3 a.m.
murder scenes and city council meetings.
Each night, we covered an event. Some of us
waited at the command center or in a cordonedoff media staging area in a fast-food parking lot.
The rest were in the crowd, following protesters up and down Florissant, jamming cameras
or recorders in faces, walking backward like
campus tour guides. Listen, and you’ll hear
us in the background of most interviews from
the protests—“Watch your back! Watch your
back!”—chirping to each other to avoid cracks
in the sidewalk, a clump of police in riot gear,
sullen protesters looking for a fight.
Since we didn’t have the boundaries we

Oregon Humanities

The arena is one in which even the slightest turn of the screw
makes news, where a single arrest in broad daylight on an otherwise unremarkable street is broadcast to the world.
ST. LOU IS IS A R EL ATI V ELY SM A L L M A JOR A M ERican city, surrounded and choked off by the larger county. White
flight meant prosperous residents left decades ago, heading
west into the cities of O’Fallon, St. Charles, and beyond. South
St. Louis County stayed white but never prospered, and is now a
bastion of working-class white families, largely Catholic. North
County is mostly black.
The police on camera in Ferguson came from South County to
enforce the law in North County. That is how it works here. North
County police departments grab recruits from South County.
Racial tensions endure and are exacerbated by this dynamic.
And then there’s the matter of money.
St. Louis County is divided into ninety municipalities, tiny
fiefdoms sometimes no more than a few square blocks. Each has

We got gassed, we went home, we
drank. Then we did it again, a day later.
We were here to report on a police
shooting. We stayed, and it became
something else entirely.
were used to, we created them. The nominal
theater was West Florissant, but in truth, it was
broader than that. It was an arena in the minds
of the men and women on the street, each side
wearing their respective uniforms, created by
people who followed the #Ferguson hashtag or
who donated to a fund set up for Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Brown. Two sides, a
boundary, and a ticking clock. We were back to
news normalcy.
At some point, I began to question whether
we were doing more harm than good. We had
a duty to be there—this much is clear. Who
knows what either side might have done with
the cameras off.
But the arena we created by being present is
different than one construed by a few local TV
cameramen and one harried print reporter trying to capture video with the phone in her right
hand while tweeting with the one in her left.

a mayor and each has a police force. Many of the municipalities
wouldn’t exist were it not for the police, whose tickets in some
cases make up more than 30 percent of the city budget.
The protests in Ferguson were about many things, and one of
them is this dynamic of white administrations making money
off the fines paid by black residents. The underlying message is
that racial disparity between the public service and the people it
serves creates friction, a misunderstanding between the people
delivering that service and its recipients. This is also a criticism
of newsrooms.
There is an effort among news organizations to remedy this.
Newspapers have long been strongholds of white, upper-middleclass men, and change is afoot: more women and people of color
are rising to positions of power than at any time in the history
of American journalism. Look no further than the New York
Times, where Jill Abramson was most recently executive editor,
replaced by her deputy, Dean Baquet, who is black.
But journalism overall still lags behind the broader employment market, and the recession pushed people of color and
women even further out of newsrooms. We are yet further, as an

15

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

industry, from the people we cover. Some companies assemble
newsroom staffs that racially and ethnically reflect the populations of the cities they represent. But the truth is, this doesn’t
necessarily bring us closer to the people we write about. I’ve
been in lily-white Iowa newsrooms and those in the Deep South
where half of my coworkers were black, but what I’ve observed
is that black or brown skin doesn’t make a reporter interested in
the issues of black or brown people.
This may, at first glance, seem callous. But I find it more callous that we would simply assume a person of matching ethnicity
will automatically bring a better understanding of that race’s
culture and experience to a story or beat. This is not a call against
diversifying newsrooms, but rather to consider factors beyond
race, which might be the easiest and most obvious way to sort
people but isn’t always the most valuable way.
Simply being brown or black doesn’t mean you’ll understand
people any better. West Montgomery, Alabama, had some of the
most abject poverty I’ve seen in the United States. One reporter

for our jobs, and we would be leaving, unlike
those from the local media. We reported what
we saw through that prism. And, perhaps worse,
we shifted from being necessary observers to
partial participants. We couldn’t extricate ourselves from the situation, and our presence and
attention were affecting the actions that we
were observing. This seems to be a fundamental truth about reporting. But to see it happen in
Ferguson was to see it in slow motion, stretched
across a timeline of days that became weeks.

assigned to cover the area—what little coverage we gave it—was
black. But he was a military veteran from a good home in New
York State. He lived in a completely different part of town, ate at
different restaurants, experienced Alabama through an entirely
different lens. All he shared with the impoverished in the Deep
South was the color of his skin and a presumption from editors
that this should unify him and his subjects.
This is, at best, ripe for mocking and, at worst, dangerous. I
went to school in Missouri, a hundred or so miles from Ferguson. It remains a deeply segregated state. Three is the number
most often referenced regarding the police in Ferguson: there
are fifty-three officers on the police force and only three are
black. But the issue goes deeper than that. The police officers
monitoring the civil unrest in Ferguson were not from the area.
Most police officers who worked that area came from outside
of it, from the heavily white, heavily Catholic exurbs south of
the city. This is where part of the tension lay, and it was exacerbated by racial disparity.
Not all of us who went to Ferguson are white; I’m not. But we
all enjoyed a kind of privilege—we didn’t have to be there but

The previous night had been filled with
more gunfire and more tear gas, and I wasn’t
sure why. Protesters marching north were
met by police who ordered their dispersal. The
police said objects were thrown at them. There
was no inciting event, just a drawn-out conversation between police and protesters that once
again ended in a spasm of violence. It almost
seemed rote.
I spent Tuesday morning trying to convince people in power to give me Mike Brown’s
autopsy report. I told them a family-ordered
autopsy of Brown was the only one available,
and I felt that the state’s version could corroborate or refute the facts presented: that a bullet
traveled through Brown’s brain and out of his
eye, that the bullet’s path showed Brown had
his arms up, that the case was closed.
The truth would help, I told them. I made
the pledge in earnest, because I believed it

FROM M Y PER SPECTI V E , THE SHIFT
happened on Tuesday, August 19. It won’t be
marked as much on the Ferguson calendar.
Hardly anyone was arrested and no one was
shot. But it laid bare everything that bothered
me about our presence at the protests.

Photos taken
by the author
during the
Ferguson
protests in
August

16

then—and I believe it now. The facts, laid out
without hyperbole or guesswork, would help
answer people’s questions. They were crucial
to the story. But I didn’t get the report, and
at that moment, it felt like the story slipped
through my fingers. Not only the story, but
maybe the answer to the whole question of Ferguson and the nightly riots: In what part of his
body was Mike Brown shot—his back, his hand,
his armpit? Did the evidence show he charged
at the police officer?
I shuffled to the parking lot and sat in the
driver’s seat of my black Volkswagen rental.
I locked the door and stared at the steering
wheel. I felt a ringing in my ears. It took me a
moment to realize I was screaming.
That night, the usual issues cropped up
early: Protesters fought each other, police
intervened. Someone threw something at the
officers. The officers ordered their dispersal.
But then something kind of magical happened.
Maybe they tired of tear gas, maybe the order
to keep moving wore protesters out. But for
whatever reason, on that Tuesday, the script
briefly changed. Protesters, aided by peacekeepers who separated them from the police,
began to disperse.
Not all of them, and not all at once, but they
did begin to move, slowly, then picking up
steam, a river of people with signs and bullhorns and children perched on shoulders walking back into neighborhoods or returning to
their cars. It seemed peaceful and calm. Some
people even smiled.
But we in the media were still there. And we
didn’t budge.
Some protesters saw that, particularly the
ones who weren’t ready to leave. The police
ordered us to return to the media staging area
in the fast-food parking lot. Then they told
us to leave. Then they couldn’t make up their
minds. Should the media go north or south?
Should they be forced to walk through the
neighborhoods east and west of the protests?
In the meantime, protesters slipped into
the media area.
“Save us!” one man shouted repeatedly.
“Media! Stand with us! Don’t leave! Don’t leave!
Don’t leave!”
Police said they saw a protester with a gun. A
SWAT team pushed into the media area, grabbing people they suspected of throwing things
at officers or concealing weapons. Guns leveled
at the media-protester mix, the police threw

Oregon Humanities

people to the ground, protesters mostly but also some reporters.
Canada’s CTV News reporter Tom Walters was cuffed after asking a police commander why they were forcing the media from
the area.
“I just asked a question!” he shouted repeatedly as he was
held down.
The police stopped distinguishing between protesters and
the media. Ferguson was about Us vs. Them, and we had the luck
and misfortune to be Them to both protesters and police. Police
said we were interfering with their actions. Protesters said we
were hiding video of real police abuse.
Into this mix stepped Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri
Highway Patrol. He took control of the police presence after a
week of protests and became the public face of law enforcement.
He would later tell a packed, majority-black church that he sympathized with their struggle and believed in rights for his own
son, a black twenty-year-old with tattoos and baggy pants.
But on this Tuesday night, Johnson was all cop. And the cops
couldn’t decide what they wanted to do with us.
They herded us south. Then a cluster of police began pushing us east. Another cluster, apparently not in communication
with their fellow officers, ordered us to go west. Chaos. Shouting.
More guns from the police, pointed at our faces, the red dots
from rifle sights speckling our clothes.
I spotted Johnson on the edge of the crowd, behind police.
“Captain Johnson,” I yelled over the helmets of the advancing
police line, “is this going the way you thought it would?”
He glared at me and walked to the other side of the crowd.
We had become the story. We were the people they were trying to disperse. When we moved or failed to move, the police
action we were reporting on was what was happening to us.
I believe most of us did the best we could with the situation
we were presented. But I also clearly remember dumb tweets
that presented a protester’s opinion as fact. I remember a
reporter from a small start-up news organization putting his
hand over another reporter’s camera to block a shot of protesters rolling on the ground in a fistfight. I remember shockingly
stupid questions lobbed at police, ministers, and activists during their respective press conferences.
And here’s what I saw: Reporters getting arrested and
screaming. Reporters getting detained and calmly waiting five
minutes before they were released. Well-known TV faces creating a scene on the sidewalk, bringing marchers to a halt—a violation of the police order. Cameramen shouting at protesters to get
out of their shot. Reporters giving people their water. Reporters
sharing milk to wash people’s eyes of tear gas. Reporters running from gunshots. Reporters running toward tear gas. Reporters screaming. Reporters crying.
And each day, I readied myself for the backlash. Where was
it? Where was the outrage? Where were the websites seemingly
built explicitly around outrage? Where were the easy stories
from lazy writers looking for easy clickbait? Hell, where were
the SEO-friendly headlines?
“You Won’t Believe What This Reporter Said on Camera!”

17

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

“Privileged Media Gets National Race Story Wrong!”
reporters who took to the Sunday talk shows
“17 Reasons Reporters Shouldn’t Be in Ferguson”
immediately after their brief detainments by
“Protester OBLITERATES Media Narrative!”
police.
Instead, we got praise for our work and tweets hoping for our
“There was plenty to report, and it was
safety. All appreciated. All utterly misplaced. We enjoyed the
worthwhile,” Jones said. That said, he added,
most privilege of those on the streets of Ferguson in August, no “I don’t think journalists should make themquestion. We had the most choice. And yet, it seemed to me, we
selves the focus of the story.”
were upheld as doing the most righteous of work. But we and the
So if national media couldn’t do the job,
public and social media had created an arena from which no one
would local media have handled it admirably,
could escape—not the young, male protesters who liked whip- with sensitivity and good judgment? That
ping off their shirts and being the center of attention nor the cops
might not have been true, either.
in riot gear, sporting small smiles. Each side was trapped in a
What I can offer is this: as media splinters
conflict from which they would not and could not back down, and
and diversifies, more of us will be in more
each side bore a share of the public’s blame. We in the media were
places for longer periods of time. This time, it
generally held out as doing good work. The ones being excoriated
was Vice News with a live-streaming camera
were the people with the least amount of choice.
and Argus Streaming News, a news outlet that
Reporters naturally affect the course of the stories we cover
materialized wholesale at the protests. There
and, in the process, we are often seen as righteous heroes, when, was Infowars, the right-wing conspiracy

We got praise for our work and tweets
hoping for our safety. All appreciated.
All utterly misplaced. We enjoyed the
most privilege of those on the streets
of Ferguson in August, no question.
We had the most choice.
in fact, most of us are just doing our jobs. Nowhere is this more
true than in an ongoing crisis, one prolonged over days and
weeks, the same tired actors bracing themselves each morning
for a fight, the same weary folks heading home after a night of
standoffs, violence, close calls, and near misses.
Alex S. Jones runs the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics,
and Public Policy at Harvard University. He told a panel there
that the media were indeed guilty of occasional sensationalism
and erroneous reporting in Ferguson, but said they did their
duty by bringing national attention to the situation and putting
police militarization squarely in the national conversation.
I asked him what we could we have done differently. How was
the coverage handled? Were there lessons we could learn for
future coverage?
Jones seemed uncertain. He was happy, generally, with
the fact that we were there at all. And he believed much of the
reporting was crucial to our broader understanding of how
police react with their backs to the wall. But he was dismayed
by some of the tactics: for instance, a national network news
reporter who, on air, loudly pledged to help protesters; and print

theorist site, and the Huffington Post, winner
of a Pulitzer Prize.
We’re going to be in these places, with these
people, affecting the nature of the news. Our
role is absolutely necessary—that’s true. But
it’s also true that we are altering the story as
we report it, and there’s probably no satisfying
solution to this conundrum.

Nigel Duara recently left his position as a reporter
for the Associated Press in Portland, where he led
coverage of the Ferguson civil unrest, investigated
the Boy Scouts’ confidential “perversion” files, and
unraveled the history of a Bosnian war criminal living
for decades in the US. In January, he will begin his
new position focusing on immigration and the border
as a national writer for the Los Angeles Times.

18

Oregon Humanities

Feel-Good
Feminism
Has feminism’s popculture cachet doomed
the movement?
A N DI Z EISL ER

N

I N E T E E N Y E A R S AG O, T WO F R I E N D S A N D I S AT

around a San Francisco bedroom, putting the finishing
touches on the first issue of our zine. It was a thirty-two-page,
black-and-white, hand-illustrated affair centered on feminism,
popular culture, and the representation of gender within both. It
included articles about television and movies, critiques of sexist
ad campaigns, a handful of reviews of the newest books about
women and feminism, and more. Bleary-eyed, fueled by Twizzlers, hopped up on idealism, proofreading page after page as
Guided By Voices bleated from tinny speakers, the three of us
had found a place to channel our anxious post-college energy

K ATE BINGAMAN - BURT

Feel-Goo
Feminis

l
e
e
F
Femi

19

and the sense that our lives stretched before us, waiting to be
filled with purpose.
It was 1995, post–riot grrrl but pre–Spice Girls, and it felt
like feminism had only recently reentered the pop-cultural
imagination. As magazine hoarders, TV junkies, and cinephiles who hated the word “cinephile,” we were ready for it. At a
time when the first whiffs of the Internet had just begun to permeate mass culture, the zine we started aimed to take popular
culture seriously as a force that shapes the lives of everyone—
particularly young women—and the three of us were excited to
make a case that the publication was the right place to center
discussions about feminism.
Furthermore, we were interested in the possibility of
disarming the word “feminism” itself. My cofounders and I
were born in the 1970s but came of ideological age during the
backlash ’80s, when feminism was seen either as something
that had already happened (Those marches! Those groups of
women sitting around admiring their vaginas through speculums!) or something that had utterly failed, leaving many
women bitter and love-starved (thanks, Fatal Attraction).
The zine we started was called Bitch, but we were equally
concerned with reclaiming a word in the subtitle: “A feminist
response to pop culture.” The zine grew into a magazine. The
word “bitch” moved deeper into common parlance, becoming a
staple of television and radio, a pangender casual greeting, and
a signifier of female “badness.” But the complexity of making
“feminist” palatable remained.
And here we are, at the end of 2014. It’s been slightly more
than a month since Beyoncé commanded the stage at MTV’s
Video Music Awards, the word “FEMINIST” spelled out in
lights behind her as her song “Flawless” sampled the words of
Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “We teach girls
to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much.’” The sample
concludes with Adichie paraphrasing the dictionary definition
of “feminist”: “The person who believes in the social, political,
and economic equality of the sexes.” Bathed in spotlights, the
biggest pop star in the world was wearing that maligned label
like a curve-hugging designer dress, literally spelling it out for
her fans. For once, the hackneyed phrase about having come a
long way actually seemed to fit.
All of a sudden, it seems, feminism is hot, trendy, a Thing.
Shortly after the VMAs, the actress Emma Watson, beloved
for years as Harry Potter’s Hermione, gave a speech on the
importance of gender equality to the United Nations—noting,
among other things, that “It is time that we all perceive gender
on a spectrum, instead of two sets of opposing ideals. If we stop
defining each other by what we are not, and start defining ourselves by who we are, we can all be freer.” The pop singer Taylor Swift, who several years earlier had disavowed feminism,
quickly changed tack with a media announcement that, in fact,
she’d been feminist all along. At Paris Fashion Week, Chanel’s
runway-show finale took the form of a feminist rally, with models draped in the label’s signature tweeds raising signs that read,
“History Is Her Story” and “Women’s Rights Are More Than
Alright.” Brands like Verizon are centering feminist themes in
their ads for wireless plans. And my Google alert for “women
and feminism,” which used to turn up lonely articles with headlines like “Feminism: Outmoded and Unpopular” is now teeming with woman-power boosterism: “Beyoncé’s Hip New Club:
Feminism,” “Emma Watson Gives Feminism New Life,” “Why
Male Feminists Are Hot.”
The culture is exactly where my cofounders and I hoped it
would be back when we spent late nights scrambling to finish up
that first issue of Bitch. Well, kind of. A little bit. Maybe. It is and
it isn’t. And that’s exactly the problem.
As I write this, for instance, the Supreme Court, in an ongoing legal battle, has just placed a hold on a Texas law that aims to
close every abortion clinic in the state by demanding that each
one meets the medical standards of ambulatory surgery centers. Meanwhile, a feminist video-game critic has been forced
to cancel an appearance at Utah State University because of
an anonymous threat that stated, in part, “If you do not cancel [the] talk, a Montreal Massacre–style attack will be carried out against the attendees, as well as students and staff at
the nearby women’s center. … This will be the deadliest school
shooting in American history.” And Microsoft’s CEO Satya
Nadella recently gave a speech to a group of female professionals in which he responded to a question about how to ask for
a raise by saying that women shouldn’t, in fact, ask for raises,
but instead “[have] faith that the system will actually give you
the right raises”—you know, the system that has always paid

Feel-Good
Feel-G
Feminism
ood

Feminis
m

20

Oregon Humanities

The culture is exactly
where my cofounders and
I hoped it would be back
when we spent late nights
scrambling to finish up
that first issue of Bitch.
Well, kind of.

women less than men—and be rewarded with “good karma.”
In other words, despite every signal boost for feminism,
every go-girl tweet from Lena Dunham or Miley Cyrus, every
feel-good Upworthy video, every nod to “leaning in,” the beliefs
behind it are still among the most contested in political and
social life. The question at the heart of every wave of women’s
liberation—are women human beings with the same rights and
liberties as men?—is posed nearly every day in spheres from
politics and policy to entertainment and academia. It comes
to the fore with every state restriction on abortion, with every
Supreme Court decision like the one decreeing that Hobby
Lobby can deny its workers insurance coverage for IUDs, with
every epithet and death threat aimed at women who speak out
about rape or harassment.
It’s becoming clear that this state of affairs, much as we’d
like it to, won’t be solved by Beyoncé or Sheryl Sandberg or any
amount of savvy capitalist spin. And now I can’t help but worry
that those of us who hoped that the marriage of pop culture and
feminism would yield deliciously progressive fruit might have a
lot to answer for.
The aspects of feminism that are currently given voice in
pop culture, after all, are the most media-friendly ones, the
ones that center on heterosexual relationships and marriage,
on economic success that doesn’t challenge existing capitalist structures, on the right to be desirable yet have bodily
autonomy. Watson’s speech to the UN was centered on getting men invested in feminism, in order to better legitimize
it; Sandberg’s Lean In philosophy is about women conforming
to workplaces that increasingly see them not as human beings
but as automatons with inconvenient biology. The feminism
they espouse is certainly reasonable, but it’s not particularly
nuanced. It doesn’t challenge identities and hegemonies so
much as it offers nips and tucks.

And I feel, well, a little responsible.
I realize how self-aggrandizing that sounds, so let me be
clear: I don’t think that Bitch, with its relatively dinky circulation of fifty thousand, brought the gospel of feminism to the
pop-culture heroes and heroines who now spread its light. But
Bitch was part of a zeitgeist of media, both creators and chroniclers, that spent the 1990s and 2000s blurring the boundaries
between pop culture and politics. With the advent of the Internet and social media, the deregulation of media properties, the
entertainment industry increasingly peopled with hyperliterate auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, and
a market of overeducated, amply opinionated young people
hungry for their product, pop culture became more important
than ever before. And a feminist analysis of it was no longer the
exclusive realm of academics like bell hooks or Angela McRobbie, but something you could read in a new website or listen to
in a podcast or see in a tongue-in-cheek infographic. If the personal was political, as the old slogan goes, the pop, it turned out,
was even more so.
And feminism’s focus on pop culture as a locus of activism
has in many ways worked. Feminism has made inroads into all
aspects of culture, not simply in the numbers of female senators and CEOs but in the ways that we talk about entertainment,
about ethics, about life. Accusations of domestic violence, once
considered extrinsic to the business of sports and its players, are
now the subject of lengthy debates and press conferences. Offensive jokes in comedy shows that would have gone unremarked
upon a decade ago are now the basis of microcampaigns on
social media capable of gaining enough steam to create lasting
impact for the joker. Weekly entertainment magazines review
new movies with a lens on how—or, for that matter, whether—
female characters are represented.
Still, now that we’re at a moment when feminism is literally

Feel-Good
Feminism

21

trending (just check the Twitter stats that correspond to Beyoncé’s VMA performance), it seems worth considering that it just
might not be possible to make a political movement palatable on
a mass scale without dumbing it down. The Chanel runway show
is perhaps the most egregious example of bandwagon-jumping,
but even Watson’s well-received speech wasn’t exactly groundbreaking in its content. The fact that feminism isn’t just for
women has been a tenet of the movement since Free to Be ... You
and Me, and telling men that they should care about their sisters,
mothers, wives, and daughters is oversimplified pandering. Had
a non-celebrity stood before the UN to give the same speech, it
would have gone unnoticed.
And yet, even for feminist statements that were about as mild
and inclusive as they come, Watson received death threats, rape
threats, threats to disseminate nude photos of her—all the nowregular online abuse that women who speak up on the Internet
are depressingly accustomed to. It seemed like a bit of a waste to
me, to be honest: Watson would have been scorched for anything
she said in favor of women, so she might as well have advocated for
something more radical. (State-funded separatist communities!
With their own political charters! And pet unicorn helpers!)
I’ve thought quite a bit about why much of this trendification of feminism doesn’t sit right with me, and it comes down to
nuance. Feminism, as a movement, is not a monolith—in fact,
the current state of both theory and praxis is better described
as “feminisms,” plural. So from the very start it is intrinsically
incompatible with mainstream culture, which requires the
broadness of characterizations and expedience of sound bites
to make an impact. Marrying pop culture and feminism really
does demand that much of what makes contemporary feminism
so exciting—its diversity of both population and thought, its
inclusivity of a range of experiences, its willingness to venture
well beyond the academy into areas like prison reform, sex work

Good
nism

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

as labor, and more—is stripped out to prioritize what is loudest
and sexiest.
I’ve done that. The magazine I cofounded has done it too.
In steadily courting an ever-bigger audience, in saying, “Look!
Feminism can be popular—just give us a chance!” perhaps we’ve
done a disservice to the larger movement. (Some have certainly
argued that we’ve sold it out with the title alone.) I was taken
aback recently when a piece of e-mail came across my inbox
praising Bitch for its coverage of a particular subject: “It’s so
refreshing to see this in the pages of a mainstream magazine,”
the e-mail enthused. It was meant to be a compliment, but my
mind stuck stubbornly on that word. “Mainstream” was the
thing we’d always wanted feminism to be, but the organization
itself? The product we produced? Nope, never. It was a reality
check: If everything I associated with the word “mainstream”
was banal, overbroad, surface, why would bringing feminism
into contact with it be a great idea?
It’s hard to remember whether we actually talked, back then,
about what a mainstream embrace of feminism would look like.
I can’t speak for my cofounders, but to me, it was the idea of a
complete change in attitude that was most exciting, the idea that
someday, someone might mention, in passing, “I’m a feminist,”
and the person they were talking to—whether woman, man, or
other—instead of saying something like, “Huh. Why?” or, even
worse, “Well, I believe in equal rights and all, but I’d never call
myself a feminist,” would simply say, “Cool. Me too.” It was the
idea that being a feminist could stop being an outlying identity
and instead be one that seemed so obvious and commonsense
that it might not even be worth mentioning in the first place.
Such a state of affairs would require a lot. It would require
feminism to become less elite, less associated with only the
lives and concerns of white, educated, liberal women. It would
have to loosen its ties to rarefied academic spaces dense with

22

Oregon Humanities

Rebranding a movement
isn’t like redesigning
the packaging on a
soda can, because
feminism was never
meant to be a product.

poststructuralist theory. It would mean less dogma,
more flexibility, a big-tent approach that made room
for opposing viewpoints to flourish side by side. That’s
indeed where feminism has been headed for the past few
decades. But the more I think about it, the more I realize
that perhaps what’s really required is a decontextualization that comes from thinking about feminism as less of a
collective social movement and more of a personal identity. And that, coincidentally, is exactly what’s happening
with today’s trendy feminism.
The past few years have seen a number of attempts to
rebrand feminism, generally undertaken with the reasoning that the movement no longer feels relevant to
young people and has too many fusty, humorless associations to flourish in an age of gifs and memes. In 2013,
Elle magazine paired three feminist organizations with
three London ad agencies to come up with posters that
would serve as rebrandings. All were bright and snappy
and visually appealing, but that’s about it. None moved
beyond the parameters of the exercise itself; trying
to remember the resulting slogans or ideas requires a
Google search. Rebranding a movement isn’t like redesigning the packaging on a soda can, because feminism
was never meant to be a product.
And yet, I worry that turning feminism into a product
is the natural result of celebrities and corporations taking it up as a pet cause—and that, by extension, those of us
who cozied up to the mainstream are responsible for the
dumbing-down that will likely result. Chanel’s embrace
of feminism, for instance, feels particularly tone-deaf
considering that high fashion still rewards only the thinnest—literally—swath of female humanity for conforming to its impossible ideals; brands like Verizon using the

-Good
nism

concept to shill for brand loyalty, meanwhile, can’t help but
look cynical.
Then again, I keep coming back to what a waggish commenter on Bitch’s Facebook page recently noted, apropos of
some bit of trendy-feminism news: “Feminism isn’t like an
indie band that you don’t want to see get big because you discovered it first.” And it’s true. The feminism that I’ve been
most excited about for more than eighteen years is the one that
shares its enthusiasm, rather than hoards it for cool points.
And even if I look askance at Karl Lagerfeld right now, in the
end I’m not sure if it matters where feminism comes from, provided that the people it reaches ultimately do more than passively take it in. I no longer see mainstream acceptance as the
goal, but as yet another tool of activism. Do you want to know
more about what feminism means? Do you have questions that
can’t be answered by Beyoncé or Emma Watson, by a TED talk
or a blog post? Do you feel responsibility to your idealism and
a hunger to see it make change—even after no one is singing
about it or touting it as the next big thing?
Cool. Me too.

Andi Zeisler is the cofounder and editorial/creative director
of Bitch Media. She is the author of the book Feminism
and Pop Culture and speaks frequently on the subject of
feminism and the media at colleges and universities. She
lives with her family in Portland.

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

23

Request for Identity

Identity is
dy na mic.

Name

Race / Ethnicity

White

*

Black/African American

American Indian or Alaskan Native

It’s
complicated.

Hispanic

Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander

*There’s
more to
this story

Some
of the
above.

Who do you think you are?

Boxed In
Which race to check, which people to leave behind
W EN DY W I L L IS

W

E HAVE BECOME A NATION OF

inquiry. Every time we turn
around, we are being asked our
opinion about breakfast cereal or
the governor’s race or the mood of the country. We send each other surveys to set meeting
times and to extend birthday party invitations.

But then those queries often turn toward us.
The purveyors of all those forms say they want
to “get to know us.” They say they want to know
“who is in the room.” So we gamely comply. Of
course, the forms include the basic fill-in-theblanks—address and phone number, name and
preferred salutation.

24

But there are also the true, honest-to-goodness forced-choice questions. The ones where
we actually have to choose from among a finite
set of options. I do pretty well with gender and
marital status and age, though I know that is
not true for everyone. I’m not even shy about
answering questions about my family income.
But we are also usually asked to check a box to
identify ourselves by race or “ethnic origin.”
And that’s where my confidence starts to break
down. That’s where my hand wavers and my
heart races a bit.
It shouldn’t be that hard. The simple story is
that I am a middle-aged white lady, and in most
instances that’s how I identify myself. But that
is not the whole story. In fact, my grandfather
and his family were Cherokees who stopped
in Arkansas and then pulled up stakes and
moved again when Oregon looked a little more
promising than northern Arkansas through
the smudge of the Dust Bowl. Eventually my
grandfather met my German-Norwegian
grandmother on Main Street in Springfield.
She worked at the grocery store. He worked at
the bakery. They married, he never returned to
Arkansas, and he died in his fifties, when I was
not quite three years old.
Now, forty-five years later, I still haven’t
sorted out how to capture that story within the
confines of a single—or even a double—check
mark. I tell it to my friends and loved ones in
pretty much the way I relayed it here. But the
forms aren’t asking for a story; they’re asking
for an outright choice. And they’re asking for a

Oregon Humanities

choice for mostly good reasons—to make sure
that people of color are visible and accounted
for in our institutions and our thinking, and to
make sure we are cognizant of who’s benefiting
from society and who isn’t.
Most of the time, I check “White, non-Hispanic.” But not always. On forms that seem
somehow less official, I occasionally choose
“Mixed Race” or both “White” and “Native
American.” I am not sure why I waffle or why
I sometimes choose one or the other. I suppose
it is partially because identity is dynamic, but
more than that, it is because I struggle over the
right thing to do. I’m not used to that feeling.
At this stage of life, I have a pretty good idea of
what the right thing to do is in most circumstances. But this case is different. I really don’t
know what is right. Or to put it more accurately,
I feel like both choices are wrong. I feel a sense
of prickly discomfort and guilt either way. If I
check “Mixed Race” or “Native American” in
addition to “White,” I worry that I am being
an appropriator or a poseur. As one friend put
it, “everyone wants to be an Indian until they
have to deal with the realities.” And I don’t
want to be that person—the one that appropriates but doesn’t give back. The one that takes
on the mantle of suffering without actually
experiencing any of the suffering. The one that
takes on legacies of power and pride that are
not hers, legacies that she has not earned.
For me, like for many mixed race Americans, it is easy enough to “pass” as simply
white, and the uncomplicated story often

If I just check “White” and call it good, I feel like
a liar willing to leave a whole branch of my family
behind for the sake of simplicity and safety. I feel
like I am letting the assimilationists win.

25

seems like the preferable one, the one less
fraught with moral and political risk. After
all, I’ve had all the privileges of being a white,
educated, middle-class woman, and most of
the time I think that’s where I should stay. I
think of Elizabeth Warren and Johnny Depp
and others who have been publicly castigated
for calling themselves Indian. I don’t want
to feel like that kind of pretender or subject
myself to that type of ridicule, even if it’s only
in my own mind. On the other hand, if I just
check “White” and call it good, I feel like a liar
willing to leave a whole branch of my family
behind for the sake of simplicity and safety. I
feel like I am letting the assimilationists win.
Because the fact is, this is just how the
founders and authors of the capital-A, capitalS “American Story” wanted it, and not just that
nasty Andrew Jackson either. Thomas Jefferson, who both admired Native culture and set
wheels in motion to obliterate it, wrote to the
US Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins:
In truth, the ultimate point of rest & happiness
for them is to let our settlements and theirs
meet and blend together, to intermix, and
become one people. Incorporating themselves
with us as citizens of the US, this is what the natural progress of things will of course bring on,
and it will be better to promote than to retard it.
Surely it will be better for them to be identified
with us, and preserved in the occupation of their
lands, than be exposed to the many casualties
which may endanger them while a separate

This is not
the whole
story.

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

people. I have little doubt but that your reflections must have led you to view the various ways
in which their history may terminate, and to see
that this is the one most for their happiness.

Teddy Roosevelt summarized it this way: “But
a ll of the India ns who had attained to an
even low grade of industrial and social efficiency have remained in the land, and have
for the most part simply been assimilated
with the intruders, the assimilation marking
on the whole a very considerable rise in their
conditions.”
And Henry Pratt, the founder of the notorious federal Indian boarding schools, put it even
more bluntly when he advocated that the government “kill the Indian and save the man” and
then proceeded to aggressively pursue what he
called “assimilation through education.”
So here I am, living in the twenty-firstcentury West, in exactly the position that Jefferson and Jackson and Roosevelt and Pratt
designed for me: assimilated and white and
anchoring down their vision of civilization in
the far corner of the American frontier. To continue calling myself white without footnote or
protest makes me feel complicit in imperialism
and like a pawn of their genocidal impulses.
I recognize that my version of this dilemma
is a small one in a long line of uncomfortable—
and often unjust—problems created by these
check boxes. On the 1790 Census form, the only
racial categories included were “Free White
Males; Free White Females; All Other Free
Persons; Slaves.” In 1910, they were “White;
Black; Mulatto; Chinese; Japanese; Indian;
Other.” The Census Bureau essentially created
a new race in 1980 by separating out “Hispanics.” And Native Hawaiian wasn’t included
as an option on the Census form until 2000,
which was also the first year that individuals
were allowed to identify as belonging to more
than one race. Since the time of the founding,
Americans have struggled to find themselves in
the categories they have been presented with.
But in this particular iteration, it is not that the
categories are not there for me; it’s that I feel
like a fraud no matter what I choose.
When it gets down to putting pen to paper
and filling in the box with my own hand, questions of identity have other, less visible complexities. Yes, they present issues of race. And

26

race and all that goes with it have deep political
and social consequences. Race is the source of
the gravest injustices Americans have perpetrated upon one another. So those questions are
fraught from their inception.
But the questions also raise issues of family loyalty and gratitude and just plain good
manners. In twenty-first-century America, we
are rarely asked to think beyond the current
moment and its short-term gains and losses.
We are rarely asked to acknowledge our past
or take account of our future. We are a nation
that values the here and now, the hot story of
the moment. So when we are asked to identify
ourselves by racial and ethnic origin, it is one
of the very few times when we are asked, “Who
are your people? Where did they come from?
Who do you bring with you?” In that context,
when I check the box “White” and nothing else,
I am bringing treasured people along with me—
my German-Norwegian grandmother and my
great-great-grandfather who was a “ship boy”
between Germany and New York. I am bringing along sons and daughters of the American
Revolution. And I am glad to have them there
beside me.
But if I leave it at that, I abandon a whole
bunch of other ancestors. I abandon my greatgreat-grandmother who lived on a dirt farm
near the Arkansas-Missouri border, and my
great-uncle, whom we remember because of
the one photo we have of him with his rifle and
his “pup dog,” as he wrote on the back. I deny
my legendary great-grandfather who had a
naughty streak and a taste for whiskey. And I
leave behind my grandfather, who I remember
for his sweet-smelling pipe and gravelly voice.
When I think about all of them, it’s not about
passing or blood quantum or federal recognition. It is about my connection to real people.
It is about being honest about who I love and
honor. And to deny those dear ones to the
likes of an Internet provider or census taker
or employer feels disloyal and ungrateful. It’s
like bragging about the accomplishments of one
of my children and pretending the other one
doesn’t exist. It makes me feel like I should be
struck by lightning.
I also think that the urgency of the question
of who comes along with me across generations
and who is left behind is amplified by middle
age and its nagging shadow of mortality. As I fill
out some of the last school forms I will ever be
faced with, I can’t help but wonder what boxes

Oregon Humanities

I ca n not
a nswer your
q uestions.

Neither,
exactly.

my daughters and their children and the children after that will check. I wonder whether
they will choose the simple boxes they inherited from their father, the ones that flow from
England and Ireland and Germany. I wonder
if I will get left behind because I make things
too complicated or—worse—because I chose to
make things simple.
All that said, though, I know this dilemma
is a privilege: I live in a cloak of whiteness.
Anytime I want, I can shelve my moral handwringing, check the “White” box, and never
have to think or talk about race and its power
dynamics and its ugly legacy unless I want to,
and if I do, it can be on my own terms. This ability partially answers the question about what
box I should check.
But it doesn’t answer it entirely. There is a
kind of polite, middle-class timidity in checking “White” in order not to offend, in trying
to stay far from the line where anyone could
possibly criticize me for being a poseur or an
appropriator. There is privilege, yes, in taking the path of least resistance. But there is
also cowardice and complicity. I want to come
to this question with more fierceness, with
more outrage and courage. I am reminded
of and chastened by James Dickey’s magnificent poem “For the Last Wolverine.” The
entire poem embodies the snarl and wildness
of an imagined wolverine before the species
becomes entirely extinct. In Dickey’s poem,
the wolverine eats an “elk’s horned heart” and
mates with the last eagle in the branches of a
tree. Here is where the poem ends:

27

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

There is privilege, yes, in taking the path of
least resistance. But there is also cowardice
and complicity.

Your unnoticed going will mean:
How much the timid poem needs
The mindless explosion of your rage,
The glutton’s internal fire    the elk’s
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,
The pact of the “blind swallowing
Thing,” with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes
Forever. I take you as you are
And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajoy, bloodthirsty
Non-survivor.
Lord, let me die    but not die
Out.
In the face of this invitation to “eat/
The world, and not to be driven off it,” I am
ashamed of my own “timid poem,” of my own
quiet dithering over which box to check on the
survey about cereal preferences. Despite the
best efforts of Andrew Jackson and his cronies
past and present, Native cultures are alive and
well in America. They have thrived in the face
of tremendous adversity and violence.
But in my own lineage, the thread has
grown thin. My grandparents are gone, and
I fear their legacy is passing into milk-white
obscurity. I am embarrassed by the placidity of my response. I certainly do not want

to pretend that I carry the lived experience
of Native peoples who are facing down fracking and depletion of fisheries and centuries
of struggle to regain traditional lands. I can’t
speak to those injustices, but I do carry a different lived experience—one that is nameless
and amorphous and without a box. If I were a
braver woman and less timorous in the face
of what my Cowlitz-French friend calls the
“internalized fear of ridicule” or the “Johnny
Depp syndrome,” I might approach those boxes
more like the wolverine. I might spit on the
form and scrawl across it: “I know you have to
ask these questions. Go ahead. And what is my
answer? You have turned me into a house cat
with your Indian Removal Act and blood quantum measurements and deep concerns for my
happiness that come tied up with a bow of obliteration. I am three generations removed from
knowing what month the tart-sweet berries
turn red or where best to hunt the fattest turkey. I am declawed and weak and trembling. So
here’s the answer: I cannot answer your questions. I have no idea what I am. Move along. Oh
Lord, let me die. But not die out.”

Wendy Willis is a poet and essayist living in Portland.
Her first book of poems, Blood Sisters of the
Republic, was released by Press 53 in 2012. She is
also the executive director of the Policy Consensus
Initiative, a national nonprofit devoted to democratic
governance housed at Portland State University.

Oregon Humanities

JEN WICK STUDIO

28

Are You My Mother?
She wasn’t acting like herself. Was that so bad?
L OIS RUSK A I M EL INA

“T

H E R E H E I S ,” MOM S A I D , P OI N T I N G T O
one of the men gathered in anticipation of the 4:45 p.m.
opening of the dining hall. She whispered so that he wouldn’t
overhear, but I detected the school-girl excitement in her voice.
He was white-haired and hunched into his own world, like most
of the residents who waited on cushioned benches that lined the
walls, on the drop-down seats of walkers, and on armless chairs.
A few, like Mom, sat in wheelchairs. On our way to the dining
room Mom had relayed her discovery: Eddie Albert, who had
starred with Eva Gabor on the television show Green Acres, lived
in her assisted living facility.
A s though to confirm what she’d told me, Mom called out to
the man she’d spotted, “Do you ever see Eva?”

Mom’s bold overture, lacking salutation, surprised me. I
knew her to be shy and socially unsure. Much of my life she’d
been depressed and anxious, not always available even to those
she loved.
When the man didn’t respond, Mom repeated her question,
this time a little louder: “Do you ever see Eva?”
Eddie Albert looked up, looked bored.
“Not in years,” he said, then bowed his head again, denying Mom any further conversation. Mom smiled at me and
mouthed, Just like a movie star. Then the dining room doors
opened, and an aide greeted each resident and guest by squirting antibacterial liquid into their hands and wiping down the
handles of wheelchairs.

29

Mom had moved to the assisted living facility a few months
earlier, and she’d told me it was hard for her to make friends.
“Most of them are a little confused,” she said about the other residents. They couldn’t remember that they had sat with Mom at
another meal, much less what they talked about. They couldn’t
keep track of the important currency of conversation among
the elderly—children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.
Like a version of the movie Groundhog Day, each encounter was
an introduction. Stories couldn’t build. Relationships couldn’t
form without stories. I could see that even if Mom weren’t such
an introvert, she would be challenged, so I’d accepted her invitation to dinner. That night, however, Mom was doing a good
impersonation of an extrovert. I couldn’t remember when I’d
heard her chatter so much to people she barely knew.
When I got home, I Googled Eddie Albert. He had died three
years earlier. I decided not to tell Mom.
ON A NOTHER V ISIT, NOT LONG A FTER TH AT ONE,
I’d barely stepped through the door of her apartment when
Mom called out to me, “I want you to make copies of this!” She
smiled broadly as she handed me a page ripped from the Sunday Parade magazine. What had caught Mom’s eye? Large gold
coins, a patriotic image embossed on them, that looked like they
might contain discs of milk chocolate. The ad promised unbelievably low prices for these genuine gold coins, touting this as
an unprecedented investment opportunity.
“I want you to give the copies to the aides,” she explained.
“They make so little money, and this is such a good opportunity
for them to get ahead.”
All my life I had known Mom as a quiet, no-nonsense person
who examined the fine print on the inserts that came with her
medications, looking for potential side effects and contraindications with other drugs. She scrutinized contracts before she
signed them. When the credit card company sent a notice of a
change in fees, she read every word printed in impossibly small
type on pages as thin as tissue paper. She was smart. She didn’t
fall for scams.
“I’ve been calling this number all morning,” she told me,
pointing to the toll-free number on the glossy page I held, “but
I can’t get through.”
I quickly read the ad and spotted the language indicating the
coins were neither solid gold nor actual coins, but shiny medallions commemorating America’s freedom. When I pointed this
out to Mom her face fell with disappointment and shame, then
guilt as she remembered that she’d already given some of the
aides the toll-free number.
“They probably got a busy signal, too,” I told her.
A few days later, Mom’s mail, ordinarily limited to catalogs and an assortment of solicitations for Catholic charities,
included a small package. I handed it to her, and she immediately

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

opened it with the unabashed enthusiasm of a child at Christmas, slitting through the packing tape on the box with the metal
nail file that was always on the side table by her chair. Inside was
a gold-colored ring with a large purple stone, which Mom immediately placed on the ring finger of her right hand, struggling to
push it over a knuckle distorted and enlarged by arthritis. Once
past the inflammation, the ring hung loosely, but Mom looked as
thrilled as if it held a diamond that had been placed on her finger
by her beloved.
“This was free,” she said, explaining that it was one of three
rings she had picked out as gifts for joining the Jewelry-ofthe-Month club. “One of them is cubic zirconia,” she said, in a
way that let me know how thrilling the day would be when that
ring arrived. She quickly added that she could return any of the
monthly selections for a full refund.
I had never seen any rings on her fingers other than her simple platinum wedding band and an engagement ring with a small
sapphire in an unadorned, classic setting. While the top drawer
of mom’s dresser contained boxes of costume jewelry bedded
in cotton, they were all small, tasteful pieces made by Monet
or Trifari.
Mom extended her arm to display the ring.
“You’ve never had anything like it,” I said.
“I know,” she replied, with deep contentment.
W hen Mom first moved near me, I imagined taking her to
concerts, movies, plays. Often when I arrived to pick her up,
tickets in hand, she’d become fearful that there might not be a
readily accessible restroom or that the weather would turn foul,
and she’d decide to stay in her apartment. In the weeks after the
purple ring arrived, Mom expressed a desire to go shopping, to
go out for lunch, to see a musical. She had resisted joining the
bridge group, fearing her own mental skills might have dimmed
and made her into the bridge player everyone tolerated but no
one wanted as a partner. Now she arranged for an aide to take
her to join bridge games whenever they needed a fourth.
Mom is coming out of her shell, I thought with relief. Settling
in. Adjusting. This is good. I’d never seen her out of her shell.
“I WANT TO HAVE A PARTY,” MOM SAID TO ME ONE DAY.
“ What kind of party?” I said, glancing around the small
apartment.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She paused, thinking. I could tell she
hadn’t gotten very far in her plans. “I could have a shower for the
kids,” she said, finally, referring to my son and his fiancée. Mom
and I met with the staff at the facility, who showed us the different rooms available for private parties. The catering staff presented menu options, and Mom engaged them with stories about
the days when she managed food service for a school district.
From deep inside of me and long ago, I recognized a longing
for a mother I’d never known: this mother. This mother, who

30

Oregon Humanities

Mom was doing a good impersonation
of an extrovert. I couldn’t remember
when I’d heard her chatter so much to
people she barely knew.
knew her own wants. This mother, who could express joy and
enthusiasm instead of anxiety and judgment. A mother willing
to take chances, explore the unknown, strike up conversations
with celebrities, make bold fashion statements, throw parties
that defied convention.
I remembered the last time my sisters and I had been together
with Mom, a dinner to celebrate her eightieth birthday. Because
of our differences in age and distance, it had been more than
thirty years since we’d all been together. Looking around the
table at the restaurant where we’d gathered, I thought about how
I would feel if I were Mom. That year I had a daughter who had
left home to go to college and a teenage son with a new driver’s
license and friends who were more interesting than his parents.
My daughter had been home for Christmas, and my joy at having
both my children around the dinner table was fresh. I tried not
to imagine waiting thirty years to have my children together
again and wondered how my mother had tolerated the way our
family had splintered and dispersed to the farthest reaches of
the country.
Mom wore a pale-blue chiffon dress that night. Her white
hair, thinning on top, was freshly styled and sprayed into place.
Her exceptionally fair skin, shielded throughout her life from
the sun, was remarkably smooth and white. In the photos the
waiter took of us, the four of us surrounding Mom, awkwardly
leaning into one another, Mom is so pale she seems barely there.
And that is how she has always seemed—a presence nearly invisible but impossible to ignore.
Mom said nothing to indicate that having the five of us gathered around the table was unusual or meaningful. She smiled and
listened as we chatted about recent developments in our lives. I
wanted her to tell the maître d’ what a momentous occasion this
was and order an extravagant bottle of champagne. I wanted her
to throw her arms wide, as though to embrace us all at once, and
say, “Oh, it’s wonderful to have you all together with me!”
Finally I asked her how she felt having us all together. “I can’t
even say,” she said. It was all she said that night, and I knew she
spoke the truth. I understood her silence then, her silences
all the years I was growing up. It was not for lack of emotion,
but lack of ability to express what she felt. She’d turned those

feelings back on herself, holding them inside her, weighing herself down with the sadness and anger of life’s losses, the fear of
more. Perhaps she worried that if she let the joy out, the sadness
and anger might start to seep out with it, and then, like a balloon
let loose, it would all whoosh out, the momentum of release tossing the receptacle every which way until it landed with an empty
flop on the floor.
The woman now planning my son’s shower, this mother
would have ordered the champagne that night.
I wondered if this was the woman my father fell in love with,
before he returned from the war in a full-body cast not knowing how he would support his family, before multiple losses of
unborn babies, before Mom learned that life could be so unpredictable, scary, and painful that all she could do to survive it was
disappear into herself.
As much as I liked this new mother, the change seemed
remarkable and sudden. I watched closely, as I’d learned to do
as a child. But instead of being alert for early signs of irritability
and withdrawal, I watched for impulsivity, impaired judgment.
One night Mom and I were watching It Happened One Night—
the Clark Gable version—when an advertisement for senior living came on featuring attractive and energetic older men and
women laughing while they played golf under cloudless skies.
“I always wanted to retire in Hawaii,” Mom said. “Not Arizona or Florida—I couldn’t take the heat—but I loved the trip I
took to Hawaii.”
“Let’s go!” I said, assuming Mom was just engaged in the
kind of wishful thinking that allows those of us who live in the
Pacific Northwest to survive winters in which one gray mist follows another. But not long after, brochures began to arrive in
the mail. Four-day cruises in the Bahamas. Assisted living in
Maui. A time-share in Puerto Vallarta. I encouraged Mom to
talk more about the tropics, hoping I could discern how serious
she might be. “I don’t know that I would ever move,” she said,
“but it’s fun to think about.” I relaxed. Mom shuffled through
her pile of pamphlets before selecting one and handing it to me,
saying, “I called their marketing person, and I can definitely
afford this one.”
I had, of course, heard people talk about how the aging

31

process returned adults to the physical state of a baby, incontinent and unable to walk or chew. I wondered if aging could
involve a cognitive regression as well—not dementia, but a
waning ability to think complexly. Mom seemed like an adolescent who wasn’t tempering decisions with an understanding
of the potential ramifications, not the mother who had taught
me to make choices in terms of how they would appear to the
neighbors.
If genetics was any predictor, Mom would live many more
years, and her cognitive abilities would stay sharp until the
end. However, her physical decline, including the arthritis that
made it painful for her to walk, meant she would not be able to
handle the consequences of poor decisions independently. She’d
spent her life saving money, and she already needed it to pay for
her apartment, for meal preparation, for someone to help her
shower and roll elastic support hose onto her feet, up her calves,
over her knees. She had every right to make her own decisions
about how she wanted to spend her money, I reminded myself.
But I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if she spent
that money unwisely.
When Mom named me to be her proxy for health care, I had
not shied away from the delicate conversations about feeding
tubes, resuscitation, vegetative states. But I didn’t know how to
talk to Mom about what I was seeing now. Mom, you seem to be
happy, and I think that might indicate a problem. I didn’t know
where that conversation might lead.
I told myself I was worrying unnecessarily. Yes, she was
being impetuous, but in general, the changes were positive. If,
at eighty-eight, she had finally stopped preparing for a rainy
day, who was I to remind her? Nonetheless, I wanted to make
sense of what was happening. I wanted to know who my mother
really was.
I thought back to when the behavioral changes began and
realized they had coincided with the start of what I considered
to be unnecessary treatment for nonexistent dementia.
I accompanied Mom to regular appointments with a geriatric
psychiatrist. Each time, I offered to sit in the waiting room while
Mom met with the psychiatrist, but she dismissed any need for
privacy, wanting me to join her. The sessions were hardly personal or revealing, but were required so that the psychiatrist
could get paid for refilling Mom’s prescription for anti-anxiety
and anti-depression medications. At each visit, the psychiatrist
gathered data about Mom’s mental status, asking her to draw a
clock and position the hands with the current time, questioning her about the correct day of the week, the current president.
“You should ask her to say the alphabet backwards,” I suggested
once, remembering the pride Mom had in her only party trick.
The psychiatrist only smiled at me.
Weeks before the Jewelry-of-the-Month began to arrive,
Mom had told the psychiatrist of her fear that she might be

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

developing Alzheimer’s. She sometimes walked into her bedroom
and forgot what she’d gone to fetch, she explained. Sometimes
she looked for the key to her apartment and found it in the refrigerator. The psychiatrist explained that these experiences were
common. I could imagine “Eddie Albert” with similar fears—not
knowing who “Eva” was, but assuming he should know, pretending he did because he didn’t know if he was forgetting important
people in his life, forgetting when he’d seen them last. The psychiatrist reassured Mom that her mental status was excellent.
And then he prescribed a medication that was thought, in some
cases, to minimize the advancement of dementia. “I don’t think
you need this,” he said, “but it can’t hurt you.”
I began reading the scientific literature about the drug she
was taking as well as different kinds of dementia. Though there
were no specific warnings, I saw reports that while the drug
was effective with Alzheimer’s patients, it wasn’t suitable for
dementia that involved the frontal lobe of the brain—the part
that regulates emotions, impulsivity, social functions, and the
ability to recognize long-term consequences. I began to suspect
that the drug was acting like some kind of reverse lobotomy—
Mom’s flat affect and reserved personality were gone, replaced
by spontaneity, joy, and reckless abandon.
I liked this Mom. I wanted to keep her. I wanted us to watch
The View and exclaim over Whoopi Goldberg’s clothes and Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s opinions. I wanted to go shopping and giggle
as Mom tried on outfits she would never buy. I wanted to help her
plan parties. I wanted to believe that medication that changed
Mom from a shy, anxious, socially awkward person to someone
who could find happiness in life was no different than the drugs
she was taking for anxiety and depression—except that it was
effective. I wanted to believe that while this woman was making decisions the mother I knew never would have made, they
were still coming from her, perhaps as manifestations of her
genuine personality, a side of her that had been long-buried but
finally had found expression. At the same time, I suspected that
the drug responsible for the changes was being prescribed for a
condition Mom probably didn’t have. I didn’t know how far her
impulsivity would go, or what else the drug might be doing.
I wrestled with the question of my responsibility. Mom was
still competent to make her own decisions. While that might
change one day down the road, requiring me to step in and make
decisions on her behalf, that was not yet my role; my role was to
be a companion, to run errands, to take her to the doctor, to be
her advocate. But as her daughter, I wondered what my responsibility was to her personhood, her uniqueness, to the choices
she’d made to be the individual she was.
The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas would have said
that my very question indicated that I had received an appeal
from the Other. A call had been made to me and I was hostage to
it, to my mother, and through this call, to myself. Once touched

32

From deep inside of
me and long ago, I
recognized a longing
for a mother I’d never
known: this mother.

by this appeal, I could not turn away. I had to do something, act
for the good of the Other, my mother. But how does anyone know
what is good for another? When does medication remove layers
of temperament or qualities that don’t “belong,” and when does
it reveal a true nature or personality? How do those who care
for and about someone know where the line is that separates
eccentricity from illness, quirkiness from personality disorder?
I knew that artists with bipolar disorder sometimes reject
medication that mediates the extremes of mania and depression, denying that the margins where they live constitute mental
illness or embracing it as a price they willingly pay for creativity. I knew that some teachers see a child who is frequently out
of his seat or speaks out of turn as having an attention deficit
and believe he needs drugs to move him into the zone we call
“normal,” meaning consistent with societal norms, receptive to
society’s structures of learning. Others see that child as bright
and enthusiastic, and would consider medicating him a dampening of imagination, even genius.
I also knew that the loved ones of alcoholics—the very people
who beg the addict to change—frequently sabotage recovery.
Life with an alcoholic might be miserable, but it is predictably
miserable.
Nel Noddings, an American feminist philosopher, says the
individual caring for another cannot try to put herself in that
person’s shoes, but must invite the person into herself and allow
herself to be invaded by the person in order to know how to act,
to know what is good, to experience what is happening. But I
didn’t know whether to invite the mother I’d always known or
the mother I’d always wanted.

Oregon Humanities

MOM’S APARTMENT WAS DARK AND THE DOOR WAS
locked when I arrived. I tiptoed to her bedroom door. Perhaps
she’d fallen asleep and forgotten I was coming to take her to
church. She wasn’t in bed. Her wheelchair was gone. I walked
to the area where the residents gathered to play games, then to
the library where the donated paperbacks smelled like piles of
dry autumn leaves. The calendar posted by the elevator did not
reveal any musical groups or speakers that might have drawn
her to the main floor. Trying not to jump to any conclusions—
not even knowing what conclusion I might jump to—I went to
the nurse’s station. Mom had not signed out, a practice that I
often forgot myself when I took her to church. But I didn’t know
if she’d left the building without telling anyone or if she was still
there. I headed back to Mom’s apartment, thinking, I should have
listened to my instincts. This has gone too far.
I saw her as soon as I’d rounded the corner to her hallway. She
was seated in her wheelchair, dressed in her favorite green Pendleton wool blazer. The cubic zirconia ring sparkled on the hand
resting on the purse in her lap. She was laughing as Eddie Albert
unlocked her door.
“LOIS THINKS YOU MIGHT BE MAKING DECISIONS
and spending money a bit differently than in the past,” the psychiatrist said to Mom on our next visit, after she’d positioned
the hands of the clock at three and twelve and correctly identified the current occupant of the White House. I had called the
psychiatrist before the visit to discuss my concerns.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mom said. “I ordered some jewelry that
I saw on TV. Well, maybe I am buying a few more things, but it’s
my money, why not?” She rattled on, moving quickly from one
idea to the next, interrupting herself, saying more than she’d
said to the psychiatrist in all previous visits combined. When
her fifty minutes were nearly up, he scribbled an order on a prescription pad and handed it to me to take to the nurses at the
facility.
“We’re going to take you off this medicine and see how you
do,” he said to her.
A week later, when I stopped by Mom’s apartment, the dirty
dishes from the lunch she’d eaten alone sat on a tray next to her
chair, ready for an aide to take them to the kitchen. She was still
wearing a cotton housecoat over her nightgown. She was paging through the Sears insert devoted to spring lawn and garden
supplies. Without looking up, she said, “I think I’ll send the kids
money for a lawn mower instead of having a shower.”

Lois Melina is the author of three books about adoption
published by HarperCollins. Her work has been published
in the anthologies Borne on Air and Forged in Fire. This
essay is excerpted from her unpublished memoir, Into the
Distance. She lives in Portland.

33

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Gone Astray
Values fall by the wayside for
a humanitarian aid worker in Sri Lanka
SAT YA D OY L E BYO CK

“I could get nothing into perspective.”
—George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant”

I

WA S M I DWAY T H ROUGH M Y SE C ON D

trip to Sri Lanka when I passed an injured
elephant wandering near the road. He was pacing back and forth, just at the edge of light forest and grassland, holding up a leg, in which a
bullet was lodged. The wound, open and weeping, was wearing him down with each moment.
He hung his head low and he moved his lethargic body as well as he could. His suffering was
slow, protracted.
I reasoned that one of the squatters in the
nearby forest must have shot him. This was a
stretch of fertile earth beyond any established
town, where the people hack away brush and
light fires to clear the land. They erect cardboard houses with a board or two of wood siding, and work to survive day by day. When the
elephants come near, the people fight them

off; there is the threat of being trampled in
the night, or of losing the gentle beginnings of
crops, devotedly planted and protected. I imagined the shooter was displaced from his former
land like all the others around him, displaced
by the endless civil war or the tsunami’s killing
waves, squatting illegally near national conservancy territory. He’d set up a modest shelter
and hoped not to be moved again.
Like the shooter, this elephant was caught
between disasters. The war, the tsunami,
increasingly privatized land, a growing human
population: his land was disappearing quickly.
Between the fences and the encampments,
there was nowhere for him to flee when the
shooter raised the rifle. Maybe he charged.
Maybe he was starting to turn around. As I
passed by, I imagined him receiving the bullet
in his flesh, trumpeting his shock and pain.
I struggled to believe that a wound the size
of a bullet could affect a body as enormous as

34

his, but I could feel the grief and loneliness that
radiated off of him. He was stuck in human territory with nowhere safe to hide. I felt it heavy
in my chest: to die slowly and without companions, to be surrounded only by strangers and
aggressors in such a defeated state. I stared at
the elephant’s slow pacing from the backseat
of my three-wheeled taxi. The nervous driver
passed carefully but at some speed.
After those moments, after the elephant was
behind me on the road, I tried to put him out of
my mind. If I’d seen him weeks before, his proximity alone would have overwhelmed me and
ruined me for days. I would have felt compelled
to act in some way, certain that my actions to
organize assistance would help him survive.
But now—after two months of trying to coordinate post-tsunami aid, trying to communicate
beyond language and culture with the locals
and in any meaningful way with the other volunteers—there was no space left in me for grief
or exhaustion. When I saw the elephant pacing
near the village, limping and alone, I did nothing. I understood the uselessness of exerting
that energy. I contemplated for a moment what

Oregon Humanities

had occurred, then let it go.
He died four days later, falling on his side in
an expansive, green-gold field. On the coastal
land a few miles away where I worked, the local
staff became giddy at the news. There were tusks
to be harvested. Adventure was in the air—an
unsanctioned gold rush, valuable as much for the
dangerous, illicit journey west as for the reward.
After weeks or months in the dusty, destroyed
town, everyone needed something seductive.
By mid-afternoon on the day he died, the excitement had seduced me too.
I knew abstractly that I was opposed to the
notion, knew that harvesting tusks from an
elephant who had died lonely and for no reason
did not accord with my values. When I was six, in
advance of the Shrine Circus’s arrival in town, I
composed a letter to the editor of my local paper,
commenting on the irony of exploiting wild animals to support sick and injured children. At ten,
I stood outside the circus entrance, picketing the
use of elephants in the shows. But when night
began to fall in this very different world, I joined
the pursuit west toward the fallen body and its
coveted prize.

35

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

The elephant is already dead, I reasoned.
He’s dead and no longer in pain. This is
an acceptable journey.

In the dusk-gray town on our sandy plot of
land, I was the last to enter the van. There were
six of us: three Western volunteers and three
Tamil staff, their taste for the experience melting my resistance. I shook my head as I found
my seat, the final protest from my former self.
I slid shut the side door and Subash, our camp
driver and co-adventurer, started the engine.
We drove straight ahead, through the opening of the makeshift fence and then left onto
the road. Within moments, amid the laughter,
I found myself smiling too. The elephant is
already dead, I reasoned. He’s dead and no longer in pain. This is an acceptable journey. We
settled into the darkened vehicle as if driving
to a hidden forest rave, a secret, nighttime event
with danger and anticipation palpable in the air.
As we neared the place where the elephant
was said to be, Subash killed the headlights.
Accustomed to black nights without electricity,
we had come prepared: headlamps strapped to
our foreheads, flashlights gripped in our hands.
We were miners descending toward coal. But
for now, we needed the darkness to cloak our
illegal pursuit, so we kept the lights switched
off. We wound around dark roads in the van’s
dark cab. We drove ahead in the near pitchblackness, all of us staring intently through the
windows for a sign of the body we knew we were
approaching.
Then we found him. There. Look. Lying a
dozen feet from the road, frozen on his left side,
the moonlight coating his body, casting shadows in the folds of his skin, crevasses of flesh
that carried just enough silver light to define
where he lay.
Subash pulled over, turned off the engine,
and we all instinctively slid into silence. We
flipped our lights on one by one and climbed
out of the van with a cautious composure that
barely masked the adrenaline pulsing under
our skin. We walked toward the carcass, the
lights from our bodies illuminating the mammoth form in front of us in small, dancing orbs.

The men immediately noticed that the
tusks were gone. There weren’t even traces of
ivory left, just a small bit of blood and an empty
pocket of skin on the side of the jaw that faced
the sky. Perhaps another villager had arrived
before us, the men lamented, or an official from
the wildlife park had come in broad daylight to
keep the tusks off the market.
We stayed for a while nonetheless. Standing
together, we observed the death as if on vigil,
surrounded by night, our flashlights like votive
candles, our bodies stationary, poised to offer
eulogies. But we were not there to pay homage
or to offer our respects. We stayed there for
personal reasons. Like distant, absent relatives
at a wake, we stood around his body, reflecting
on our own lives and our own mortality.
Before we got back in the van, we posed for
photographs with the corpse: the novelty of
death in a foreign land. In the photos, I’m wearing my worn gray work shirt and tan linen pants,
standing next to the elephant, my feet touching
his back, my hand on his side, my bottom lip
extended to emphasize the grief I felt. His head
lay hard on the grass and dirt, his trunk curved
upward, his pink mouth slightly parted, his
right eye open and staring at the stars. There
was an unmistakable track of tears running
down his face.
As I looked at that sad stain, something deep
within me stirred again. I thought about the
horror of being trapped somewhere you don’t
want to be, alone and without allies. If you feel
that no one loves you, I thought, you can begin
to lose your mind.

Satya Doyle Byock is a psychotherapist in private practice
who writes on topics related to dreams, Jungian psychology,
and coming of age in the modern era. She lives in Portland.
This piece is excerpted from a larger book project.

Oregon Humanities

INTISAR ABIOTO

36

The author and his daughter, Isira

I

The Air
I Breathe
Growing up tolerated and
underestimated in Portland
I FA N Y I D. BEL L

R E C E N T LY H A D A P HON E C ON versation with a friend who is still living in
Portland. He asked me how I was doing after a
harrowing cross-country drive, and I struggled
to explain to him what it was about Philadelphia that inspired me to make my way East.
Portland, after all, is experiencing a period of
unprecedented social and economic growth
that is drawing people from all over the country. At some point, it seems, the word got out
about the city’s socially responsible businesses,
bike lanes, organic food, and outdoor lifestyle,
and this has inspired a renewal of the Oregon
Trail. New settlers have immigrated to the
city by the Subaru- and Prius-full, shifting the
demographics in almost every way imaginable.
Meanwhile, I have f lowed against the
onrush of new pioneers seeking to claim a slice
of the Oregon way of life, in search of a place
where I could simply breathe. It isn’t an easy
sentiment to verbalize, but it’s something many

37

black Portlanders understand. On the phone,
my friend could hear it in my voice. I told him
that Philadelphia was not a particularly beautiful city, although it is certainly as rich in history as, say, Boston or New York, and in some
cases more so. There is something fundamental
about Philadelphia that drew me to it, but also
wrested me from a place I should, of all places,
belong: Portland, Oregon, the city of my birth.
When I first left Portland after high school
in the fall of 1996, I never thought I would come
back. Growing up, I always had the sneaking
suspicion that no one outside of the five or so
blocks that made up my Northeast Portland
neighborhood wanted me to be there. Portland did not appear to love me, its own son,
but merely tolerated and continually underestimated me. So when I graduated from high
school, I left and didn’t look back, until I was
pulled back several years ago.
I explained to my friend on the phone that I
could no longer afford to remain in Portland for
any sustained period of time. I described how,
on any given day, I could leave my place in west
Philadelphia and not see a white person for a
half hour or more. My mail carrier was black,
the person who served me coffee was black,
the person who issued me parking tickets was
black, the mayor was black.
But there was more. In Philadelphia, among
the monuments of those who founded this
country, there are references to people and
events deeply rooted in the African American
tradition. Woven throughout the narrative of
that city’s history, and by extension the history
of America, are the stories and lore of African
Americans who contributed to the founding
of our entire culture and identity. The story of
African Americans is written, though perhaps
apologetically, in permanent ink and projected
on the walls of buildings and placards; it is
carved in the statues and monuments of black
people who make that city what it is.
All of these things brought about a new kind
of social and emotional security that may be
a given to most white Americans. A sense of
belonging, a sense that one’s own interests are
being looked out for and that the feelings and
beliefs of one’s fellow citizens mirror those of
one’s own, a sense that one belongs to a community. For a black person in Portland, this
shared sense of history and belonging is notably absent.

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

It’s not that I didn’t like Portland while I was growing up,
and, to be honest, I do not dislike it today. Portland is an area
of land that I walked on, fell into, collided with, bled, spat, and
pissed on, used, farmed, and took from while it asked for nothing in exchange. It is in no way a greedy, vindictive, arrogant, or
prejudiced place. If only the trees could speak, the grass could
nurture, and the steel and concrete could soften underfoot while
reminding me that I am part of its story.
Some would call my childhood idyllic. I lived on the eastern
border of the Piedmont Neighborhood in Portland, the western
border of which was formed by Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, which used to be Union Avenue, which through it all has
been US Highway 99. Nestled among the apple, cherry, and plum
trees, I played hide-and-seek with the neighborhood kids in
the summers before dinnertime and climbed trees after doing
homework during the school year. When it wasn’t raining we
played basketball or football in the streets, or cruised around
on bikes and skateboards until the streetlights came on and it
was time to retreat inside for dinner or chores. There were times
when I felt proud of my neighborhood, especially in the summers
when school was out, before the drugs and the gangs destroyed
what I considered to be the last vestiges of black neighborhood
life in Portland.
Though I grew up on the east side of Portland, I went to school
across the river, on the west side. Twice a day, from third grade
until I graduated high school, I took a trip in a rumbly yellow bus,
and later public transportation, to get to school and back. I know
it might be hard to believe because of the current popularity of
places like Alberta and Mississippi Streets, but in the late 1980s
and through the mid-’90s, many white people found no reason to
cross the river. Friends I’d made in elementary school were not

A sense of belonging,
a sense that one’s own
interests are being
looked out for and that
the feelings and beliefs
of one’s fellow citizens
mirror those of one’s
own, a sense that one
belongs to a community.

38

Oregon Humanities

allowed to come over to my house for birthdays or sleepovers,
and objections were often raised at the suggestion that I spend
time at theirs.
For the first six months of third grade, I felt like an exhibit.
It took that long for the other kids to realize that I was just as
curious, interested, and articulate about the world as they were.
I wasn’t often picked first for school-yard sports; in elementary
school, when deciding teams, you pick your friends first. You
don’t necessarily choose kids who are the best athletes and
will give you the greatest chance of winning; you choose the
ones you understand, the people you are familiar with. (If your
friends happen to be the best athletes, that’s icing on the cake.)
When they found out I was familiar with the way they lived and
breathed in the world, I began to make friends.
But even at the age of nine, I could feel a certain sense of fear
from them, not about how I looked or even talked, but about
what I knew and how intelligent I was. The constant stream of
gold stars pasted next to my name on worksheets hanging on
the wall was more dangerous to my social life than the color of
my skin.
Looking back, I wonder if even then I understood the gravity of privilege and community, though I couldn’t describe it
or explain it. The vulnerability and feelings of uncertainty and
fear I saw in the eyes of my towheaded friends still shake me
to this day. I can’t remember how many times I intentionally
lost a game, offered incorrect answers, or scuttled a sure victory, all to maintain the fragile and delicate balance between a
white kid’s self-esteem and my sense of worth and capacity for
achievement.
There is no place in the world that is immune to bias fueled

Looking back, I wonder if even
then I understood the gravity
of privilege and community,
though I couldn’t describe it or
explain it. The vulnerability
and feelings of uncertainty
and fear I saw in the eyes of my
towheaded friends still shake
me to this day.

by fear. Philadelphia certainly has its problems
with culture, class, and economic disparities,
but it is a city that has grown and strengthened
its identity through prolonged engagement in
issues of equity and representation. It is a city
girded by a deep connection to a history that is
inclusive of the contributions of black people.
Perhaps the most difficult thing about living
in Portland was the lack of an authentic visual
and social acknowledgment, recognition, and
appreciation of African American people.
Without a historical anchor, I fear the potential
of what Portland could be in the twenty-first
century will be lost to the unrelenting pressure to maintain and preserve a very particular
understanding of its history.
I returned to Portland in January 2011,
after years spent in Boston and San Francisco,
following my infant daughter and her mother
after a traumatic and sudden separation. My
plan had been to raise my daughter in a place
that was sure to value her difference, rather
than see it as a novelty. The San Francisco Bay
area, even with its extremely high cost of living, was well worth the price for a diverse community, social activism, and genuine value and
respect for people of color. But when, one rainy
afternoon, her mother disappeared with my
daughter and headed to Portland, my responsibility as a father superseded my concerns
about my career and misgivings about returning to the culturally sheltered and increasingly
homogenous community that is my hometown.
In the midst of intense emotional and legal
entanglement, I landed a job at Oregon Public
Broadcasting that gave me a means to support my daughter and myself. As the only black
person in a creative role at my job, being in the
office felt much like being back in middle school
in a class with only white students and faculty.
Between working and trying to raise a child
with an uncooperative and combative partner,
I spent most of my time exploring ways to keep
my head above emotionally rough water.
The city was very different than I remembered from 1996. It seemed that Portland no
longer had any black neighborhoods; instead, it
seemed that there were places where black people lived or occasionally came to be for periods
of time. In hindsight it is more likely that there
were never any truly black neighborhoods, but
simply places in Portland where white people
did not go out of fear, mostly imagined and

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

exacerbated by isolation and economic factors.
Perhaps there still remains a central concentration of black residents around the Northeast
Killingsworth area near Jefferson High School
and Portland Community College. That area is
flanked by the rapid gentrification of Alberta
and Mississippi Streets to the east and west.
When I had my daughter with me, I explored
the city through a whole new lens, not simply
as a black man who was born and raised in
a place that was seemingly unfamiliar and
unconcerned with its own history, but as a
father of a biracial child. Through that lens, I
felt deeply concerned for the development of
her identity and emotional well-being as an
“other.” But she will have a different experience than I had growing up. She will be saddled
by the challenges of womanhood as well as the
unique biases reserved for her skin tone and
the unmistakable evidence of me in the curl of
her light brown hair. I wanted her to grow up
in a place where she would not experience the
feelings of isolation and difference that I did
growing up. Now, ironically, I am tethered to
this city for the foreseeable future.
I resigned from OPB in the summer of 2014.
It took me three years to understand that no
manner of exceptional work would lead to
any real acknowledgment or recognition of
my value to the organization. Maintaining a
sense of optimism under these circumstances
became a convoluted exercise in self-delusion
and poorly managed expectations that ate away
at my self-confidence. Among an essentially allwhite staff, I found myself misunderstood, my
ideas and suggestions held in a kind of creative
quarantine. By the time I left, I realized that no
one would really ever know I was gone.
I cannot abandon Portland again. I still live
there in many ways: because of my daughter,
though I have no custodial influence in her life,
and because of my own history, I will maintain
this connection. I know what it will be like for
her to grow up in Portland, where she will surely
be singled out by her peers, who will remark on
the texture of her hair and the tone of her skin. I
worry about her sense of self-worth if she is in a
classroom of full of white students.
However, today I feel something like a
pause in the collective consciousness of the
city, perhaps because the dramatic and rapid
transformation of these communities has been
so remarkable, unprecedented, and visually

INTISAR ABIOTO

39

stunning. It is as though Portland is staring into the glare of a
sparkling clutch of diamonds and suddenly questioning the origins of the jewels.
In my mind it is possible that the city will capitalize on this
moment and collectively reevaluate its course. Though there
is no precedent for such large-scale social, political, and ethical reform, if there is any city that can investigate the anthill
beneath its boot, it is Portland. It is for a purely selfish reason
that I hold out hope that this city and the people who control it
will chart a new course for the future. I hope it is a course that
deftly avoids the pitfalls of other communities in this country,
which have fallen victim to a volatile parity that eventually
erupts into flames.

Ifanyi Bell is an award-winning visual storyteller and
veteran producer for several PBS and NPR stations.
He is the founder and co-creative director of Brushfire
Creative Partners, a socially sustainable creative marketing
agency in Portland. He divides his time between Portland,
Philadelphia, and New York City.

40

Oregon Humanities

Posts

R E A DER S W R ITE A BOU T QUA N DA RY 

A Lucky Lie

T

H E N E U T R A L T ON E S OF C A I RO
whiz past the backseat window. Endless
rows of concrete buildings form a buff backdrop to crowds clad in tan tunics and black
burkas.
“Where are you from?” the taxi driver
demands. He cocks a thick eyebrow and glowers at us in the mirror. His eyes are liquid and
black and impenetrable.
I pause to consider the question.
It is 2005 and George W. Bush is commander
in chief. He has been at war in Afghanistan for
four years and in Iraq for two. Despite this, my
family and I have been traveling through the
Middle East, to Israel, Jordan, Turkey, and now
Egypt.
As often as possible, we own our American
identity. In some loose, informal sense, I know
we are ambassadors. Most people here have
never been to America—have never even met
an American—and their ideas about us are as
warped and caricatured as our view of them.
But when we meet, we can sit together,
drink mint tea from gold-rimmed glasses, and
explain that we don’t agree with our president
either, and that, in America, that’s allowed. We
can also listen, and hear how it feels to live in a
world completely unlike the United States and
yet dominated by its presence.

In many places, we find people who can discern the thin line of separation between a government and its people, and we are humbled
by their generosity. But in others, the current
of anti-Americanism roils close to the surface.
Now I need an answer. “Canada,” I lie. I
heed my gut. In any case, it’s close enough. I
grew up in Michigan, a few hours from the border, in a land that shares Tim Hortons donuts
and the same flat, bland accent.
“Canada—very good country!” the driver
exclaims, beaming at us before darkening.
Then, unprovoked: “Bomb the US!” He slams
the steering wheel hard with a clenched fist.
He depresses the accelerator and recites
the details of a vast conspiracy between the
United States and Israel that he says led to 9/11.
Trapped, we rage through the city’s narrow
streets. We strike something—a pedestrian,
maybe—and keep going. We feel the full force
of human hatred, and then we feel it miss.
The pressure wave drums against our
throats.
We tell him that he can let us out just here—
just anywhere—and reel with relief as he rolls
away into the thick, acrid air.
J U L I A ROSEN, Corvallis

Roughing It

S

Where’s the dorm room with the
meeting of roommates? Where’s
the welcome of the RA and the
rumble of youthful voices? Why is
our son sleeping in a tent?

EVERAL YEARS AGO, MY HUSBAND
and I had a lovely autumn trip taking our
son back to college.
He was excited to be getting back to his second year of school after a summer term off. He
talked with enthusiasm about his return to his
classes.
We helped him unpack the car, unfold his
belongings, and triage items that didn’t fit
into the space or were extraneous. We decided
which things we could mail on to him in a few
weeks. We had a long drive ahead of us, so, after
an early dinner in the waning light, we helped

41

him put up his tent, said our goodbyes, and
drove away.
Wait—what? A tent? Where’s the dorm room
with the meeting of roommates? Where’s the
welcome of the RA and the rumble of youthful
voices? Why is our son sleeping in a tent?
Well, our son had a run-in with school
rules. Nothing so serious as to knock him out
of his educational path, but enough to get him
banned from student housing. Unfortunately,
he procrastinated on apartment hunting. The
result: an autumn college pilgrimage to a
campsite.
I felt as if I had multiple personalities. First
there was the hovering Helicopter Mother who
wanted to call student services to see what support they could give. Then there was the Dispassionate Adult who believed that this was a
consequence of not planning ahead and that a
few nights or weeks in a tent might be a good
lesson for my son.
Finally, there was the Teacher in a Bind: I
am an educator at a public university and I
wondered what I would do if I learned that a
student of mine had come to school without
a permanent, indoor residence. Would I be
helpful? I have an office—someone could crash
there. But I’m not a tenured faculty member.
Could I lose my job for an act of kindness?
What would I do then?
What I did, as a mother, still had me wavering. I tried to ease my mind with the dispassion
of “logical consequences” while my heart was
tugged at by the memory of us of pulling away,
leaving my son alone in the campground.
L IN DA G OL A SZ EWSK I, Portland

Breaking the Rules

I

MET EUGENE IN PRISON IN
November 2012. I was volunteering with
the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP). Day
one: My group of thirty people arranged themselves in a circle. We were so close our sleeves
touched. Eyes scanned the room with hesitation. What happens in a grueling AVP weekend
intensive is profound barrier-breaking, honest
self-contemplation, and compassionate connection that most inmates have never experienced in their lives.
Day two: Against prison rules, I sneaked
in Man’s Search for Meaning, a book Eugene
regretted not being able to find in the prison
library. Tall, masculine, and dark, Eugene was

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

I could not understand why a
program that stresses validating
the individual insisted on no
contact with this individual.

slumped quietly in a chair when he wasn’t dominating, a soft sadness oozing out of him. My
action took him by surprise, made him smile.
In for murder and hoping to get out to a better
life, he seemed on a path of self-discovery.
As a life coach, I appreciated the yearning for
transformation among the prisoners, but did
not appreciate the lack of available resources in
prison. I wanted to help more, knowing that I
could get caught. Both of us would be in trouble
with the Department of Corrections. I could be
expelled from the AVP program for maintaining contact with an inmate.
I broke the rules anyway and mailed Eugene
another book. He wrote to thank me. His letter was intercepted by prison authorities, who
reported my actions to the AVP coordinator.
The Department of Corrections banned me
from the prison.
Eugene was questioned. He wrote again. I
wanted to respond to him, but AVP warned me
not to. I could not understand why a program
that stresses validating the individual insisted
on no contact with this individual.
I solved the dilemma by renting a P.O. Box
and writing to him under a different name.
The friendship prompted me to educate
myself about the heartbreaking reality of modern-day segregation, the racial biases in the
legal system, and the pitfalls of a profit-driven
prison industry. I reevaluated my own unconscious stereotypes. I became more sensitive
to social justice issues, and more interested in
getting to know people despite their labels and
their history. I’ve helped Eugene get in touch

P OSTS

42

Oregon Humanities

continued from previous page

with family and friends he’d lost track of. I feel
humbled.
I am still one of AVP’s facilitators. My
prison re-entry awaits resolution.
VA L EN TINA PETROVA , Morro Bay,
California

Out to the Washhouse

I

COME FROM A SHORT LIN E OF
do-gooders. My grandparents were flappers,
so it was up to my mother to establish the family norm. She was a city girl, plucked from San
Francisco and dropped onto a dry-land Eastern Oregon wheat farm by the handsome GI of
her post-war dreams.
Most of mother’s good deeds took place in
town, where civilization was. Meanwhile my
father sat on his tractor, ignoring his memories
of the New Guinea campaign by hosting political debates in his head. He was a charming man
turned reluctant recluse until one day his passion for politics got the better of him. When the
county clerk came calling, my father agreed to

Deep in the fine print was a rule forbidding
alcohol at polling stations. My parents
looked at each other. The Greatest
Generation was no bunch of teetotalers.

open our home on election days as the newly
designated polling place for Rural Precinct 28.
My parents took the oath in 1960, the year
of Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow. They
swore to keep the vote secret and to count the
ballots truly, to drive them straight to town by
midnight and to deliver them directly to the
county clerk herself. They promised to supervise the volunteers, and they acknowledged
that tampering could land them straight in jail.
There was just one problem. Deep in the
fine print was a rule forbidding alcohol at polling stations. My parents looked at each other.
The Greatest Generation was no bunch of
teetotalers.
Fifteen steps from our house was a structure called “the washhouse.” It was smaller
than the chicken house, smaller even than the
“little house,” that spider-infested bunkhouse
where my mother had spent her first years
of marital bliss. It was the place, as its name
implied, where the washing was done. It was
also where pheasants were plucked, sturgeon
were gutted, and popsicles were stored in a
chest freezer stuffed with a year’s worth of
beef cut to my mother’s exact specifications
and wrapped in snow-white butcher paper.
The night before each election day, we
would nail a billboard-sized “VOTE HERE”
sign over the garage, set out colored sample
ballots and indelible pencils in the dining
room, and padlock the wooden ballot box, with
its stenciled, white “28.” The next morning,
before the casserole-bearing ladies arrived and
the polls opened precisely at eight o’clock, my
parents would remove the Jack Daniels and the
Gallo Red to the washhouse. At five, we knew
where to find them.
JOYCE CH ER RY CR E S SW EL L ,
Portland

Safety Not Ensured

O

N SE P T E M BE R 1 , 2 010, I G OT
d o w n on my knees in an emergency
room cubicle and begged to be locked up.
Having lived with bipolar disorder for
almost a decade, I knew my illness well enough
to recognize the signs of relapse, and was willing to trade my freedom for a week on a secure
psychiatric unit to ensure my safety.
But my safety was not ensured. An hour
after being admitted, I was sexually assaulted
by a young man whose hallucinations

43

commanded him to molest women.
In the aftermath of that attack, I struggled
with questions about what justice should look
like. Who was at fault, the hospital or my assailant? Was a civil suit against the hospital worth
jeopardizing future treatment or signing away
my right to speak freely about my ordeal?
Would forcing a mentally incapacitated man
to stand trial serve as anything more than a retraumatizing exercise in futility?
As I pondered these dilemmas, I studied
the robust body of work produced by grassroots activists with lived experience of mental
illness, and I came to realize that my attacker
and I were both failed by a broken system often
hostile to alternative models of care.
In the end, I did report my assault to police,
but focused my attention upon the hospital.
We settled out of court after several state and
national investigations, but I held out little
hope of lasting institutional change.
When I admitted myself for a brief tune-up
last February, however, I was amazed at the
difference in the unit, which had previously
felt like nothing more than a chaotic holding
pen. Nurses now stepped out from behind their
desks to sit down with us and actually listen. In
the hallway, a poster displayed a graph showing
that, in the two years since I’d reported it for
negligence, the unit had implemented a recovery-oriented model of care that had resulted in
a 60 percent reduction in patient violence.
Sixty. Percent. I was so amazed I made my
husband take a photo to prove it was real. As
he snapped the picture, he jokingly suggested
I should borrow a pen from the nurses’ station
and autograph the bullet-point list of statistics
with: “You’re welcome.”
J EN N CROW EL L , Portland

Her or Me

I

KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE WOMAN
who, on a bright August day, leapt from the
roof of the building directly across from my
own: neither her name nor why she chose that
day, that building, that exact moment to step
off the edge.
I didn’t see her leave or land. I’m left with
only the space in the middle—the few moments
of free fall that, for her, must have stretched out
nearly into forever—and the aftermath: frantic
phone calls, EMS sirens, a quickly clustering

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

I was sad and angry at once. It made
me slow and dull. My objectivity was
useless, pushed aside to hold a story
I didn’t know or want.

crowd that, just as quickly, evaporated.
She haunted me, this unknown woman, in
the following days. I kept an eye on the roof of
the building, sizing it up from a distance, gauging just how far and fast she fell. I looked it up
on Google Earth, maneuvered myself to peer
over the edge. Odd triggers—turns of phrase,
innocuous questions, a quick shadow—would
start my heart racing.
I was sad and angry at once. It made me slow
and dull. My objectivity was useless, pushed
aside to hold a story I didn’t know or want. I
cycled through endless permutations of why
and who, wondering if maybe we’d passed on
the street once—anything to build something
stable out of so many broken pieces.
I couldn’t forget her. She’d altered me—or
maybe I’d let her. I’d taken her death on and
mined it for meaning. Our lives, however
briefly, were connected—I owed her a vigil,
didn’t I? I couldn’t just abandon her, could I?
So I lugged her around for weeks. But the longer
I held on, the heavier she got. And the answers
never came.
In the end, it came down to a choice: her
or me.
So I buried her.
One morning a few close friends gathered in
my backyard garden as I laid her down. There
was no eulogy, no clean end, no grave or marker.
Only more questions: of responsibility, of bearing witness, of mourning. I let them all go up in
the smoke of a small signal fire of apple wood
and sage, drifting off with the ashes I later
turned back into the dirt, where hopefully
something beautiful or nourishing, something
lively, will grow.
GR A H A M M U RTAUGH , Portland

Next theme: Fix
For the Spring 2015 issue, tell
us about something you’ve
repaired: a circumstance, an
injustice, a misunderstanding,
a relationship, yourself. Share
your insights on why making
something stable is valiant or
futile or a little bit of both.
Send your submission (400
words maximum), by February
2, 2015, to [email protected]. Submissions may
be edited for space or clarity.

44

Oregon Humanities

Read. Talk. Think.
t h i n g s t h at m a ke you say o. h m .

While the Gods
Were Sleeping: A
Journey through
Love and Rebellion
in Nepal
Elizabeth Enslin
Seal Press, 2014

Enterprise-based writer
Elizabeth Enslin brings an
anthropologist’s flair for detail
to this memoir of her research
and relationships in Nepal. The
book brings readers along for
an exploration of the nation’s
history, women’s rebellion,
social castes, home births,
and how one woman comes
to understand her village.
—A n n i e K a f f e n

Racism in America:
My Personal Stories
and Insights
Robert L. Jackson
Wasteland Press, 2013

Saint Friend
Carl Adamshick
McSweeney’s, 2014

Portlander Carl Adamshick’s wry and associative second poetry
collection is heavy but feels light. Through a range of personas,
Adamshick responds to a confusion voiced by one of his speakers:
“I wonder what it is like to fill / with another life.” This is a quiet
book that leaves a lot of space for the reader to enter and inhabit.
It’s worth going in. As another of Adamshick’s speakers suggests,
“We should enter the house/ of gratitude and help cook dinner.”    
—A d a m D av i s

In his annotated memoir, Robert
L. Jackson, a retired educator
and transportation researcher,
catalogs a lifetime of racial
discrimination from his childhood in Newark, New Jersey,
to his time in Los Angeles and
in his current home of Grants
Pass. It is an upsetting account
of the ubiquity of racism in one
American’s experience, offering
both hope for progress and a
candid view of how far we have
left to go.
—B e n Wa t e r h o u s e

45

Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

Morning Light:
Wildflowers, Night
Skies, and Other
Ordinary Joys of
Oregon Country
Life
Barbara Drake
Oregon State University Press, 2014

The subtitle of Barbara Drake’s
second memoir of Yamhill
Valley life is only a half-truth:
the book is as much about the
vexations of rural experience—
falling trees, water rights,
sheep-snatching coyotes—as
the joys. Drake, a poet and writing instructor who moved from
Portland to Yamhill in 1987,
writes fondly but not romantically about wildflowers and
poison oak alike.
—B e n Wa t e r h o u s e

Excellent Sheep
William Deresiewicz
Free Press, 2014

Portland writer and former Yale University professor William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep is an
excellent screed, a critique of our self-proclaimed
meritocracy that focuses most directly on the bad
faith and bad practices of just about everyone
involved with our elite universities. Deresiewicz
is outraged by privilege and the insidious ways
we pass it along to those closest to us. He is
also outraged by shallow strivers, of whom, in
Deresiewicz’s telling, there are many. “A real education,” Deresiewicz insists, “sends you into the
world bearing questions, not resumes.”
—Ad a m D av i s

To have a new book by an Oregon writer considered for Read.
Talk. Think., please send review copies to Oregon Humanities
magazine, 813 SW Alder St., Suite 702, Portland, OR 97205.

Utterly Heartless
Jan Underwood
CreateSpace, 2013

Jan Underwood’s second novel is set in the rainsoaked city of Bridges, a magical-realist caricature
of Portland whose streets are lined with canoes
instead of cars. The book centers on Linnea Nil,
a recently murdered Latin professor desperately
seeking admission into a different afterlife.
Utterly Heartless is part murder mystery, part
academic satire, and part Greco-Roman myth.
—H a l i E n g e l m a n

CROPPING S

46

Oregon Humanities

Roger Shimomura: An American Knockoff
January 17 to March 29, 2015
Hallie Ford Museum of Art
Willamette University
900 State Street
Salem, Oregon 97301
(503) 370-6855
willamette.edu/arts/hmfa

In his paintings and prints, Roger Shimomura sets his Japanese ancestry against
the backdrop of popular American icons. Through the bright colors and graphic
styles of Japanese ukiyo-e prints and pop art, Shimomura explores Asian-American stereotypes and discrimination. In his current series, An American Knockoff, each painting is a self-portrait in which Shimomura depicts himself battling
against a throng of Asian stereotypes, or ironically assuming identities of iconic
American figures such as Superman and George Washington. The companion
exhibition, Works on Paper, which runs through February 1, includes a range of
prints created during the past twenty-five years (including Marilyn, pictured
above), several of which address Shimomura’s childhood experiences at the
Minidoka incarceration camp in Idaho during World War II.

Oregon Humanities connects
Oregonians with ideas that change lives
and transform communities. Oregon
Humanities programs encourage
Oregonians to learn about and discuss
social, cultural, and public issues.
The Conversation Project offers Oregon nonprofits lowcost programs that engage community members in
thoughtful, challenging conversations about ideas critical to our daily lives and our state’s future.
Think & Drink is a happy-hour conversation series that
brings Oregonians together to discuss provocative
ideas.

Staff
e x e cu t i v e di r e ct or
Adam Davis
di r e ct or of pro gr a m s
Jennifer Allen
com m u n icat ions/de v el opm en t co or di nat or
Eloise Holland
edi t or /com m u n icat ions di r e ct or
Kathleen Holt
de v el opm en t di r e ct or
Kamla Hurst
pro gr a m of f icer
Annie Kaffen

Idea Lab is a summer institute for Oregon teens and
teachers who use the humanities to consider the pursuit of happiness and how it shapes our culture.

of f ice m a nager
Mikaela Schey

Humanity in Perspective (HIP) is a college-level humanities course offered in Portland. HIP provides economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals the
opportunity to study the humanities with the guidance
of college and university professors.

com m u n icat ions co or di nat or
Ben Waterhouse

di r e ct or of f i na nce a n d oper at ions
Carole Shellhart

pro gr a m co or di nat or
Kyle Weismann-Yee

Oregon Humanities magazine is a triannual publication
devoted to exploring important and timely ideas from a
variety of perspectives and to stimulating reflection and
public conversation.
Public Program Grants provide financial support for
nonprofit organizations across Oregon to conceive and
implement public humanities programs.
Oregon Humanities also convenes reading and discussion groups, and hosts panel presentations on topics of
public relevance and concern.
Oregon Humanities programs
are funded by the National
Endowment for the Humanities
and the Oregon Cultural Trust, and
by contributions from individuals,
foundations, community
organizations, and corporations.
For more information about
Oregon Humanities, or to
learn how you can help more
Oregonians get together, share
ideas, listen, think, and grow,
please contact us at:
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Portland, OR 97205
(503) 241-0543 or (800) 7350543, fax (503) 241-0024
[email protected]
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ch a i r
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v ice ch a i r
Sona Karentz Andrews, Portland
t r e a su r er
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se cr eta ry
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Jeff Cronn, Portland
Kimberly Howard, Portland
Erious Johnson Jr., Salem
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