RECENTLY ON TOL:
TOL Our Town
- A tumblr site dedicated to the people and places that make up Oregon and Southwest Washington.
TAGS:
thomboocha's comments:
on Getting Back to Work: Entrepreneurs
awesome, i had no idea! thanks vplummer
posted 3 years ago
view in context
on Getting Back to Work: Entrepreneurs
thanks roboturkey. that's really inspiring in all the right ways.
posted 3 years ago
view in context
on Getting Back to Work: Entrepreneurs
After 18 months "unemployed," i got tired of looking for odd jobs to do around the apartment between submitting resumes that were lucky to get an autoresponse. For a total of about $1500 I actually started a business, built a website and have done business with people all over the country in the past two months. The business is far from profitable, but just getting the first few orders was extremely rewarding in the sense of supporting my ability to "do it myself." Like most small businesses, it will likely fail due to lack of investment capital, but I consider every day that I have with it an opportunity to be industrious and creative. It also gives me something to update my resume with and plenty to talk about in interviews regarding "what have you been doing since 2008?"
posted 3 years ago
view in context
on The Face of Race
there's not much wrong with this argument, scott. nicely put.
but it's a whole lot easier to shed the past (especially the part you're not personally part of) and enter a new world where we're all just people. I don't need to study or even recognize the error of my ancestors' ways in order to usher in a new ethic of love and compassion that has no regard for skin color or sexual preference.
It may take practice, but it's simply a commitment to love that fuels this practice and progress. An affectation with suffering (whether due to race or sexual preference/identity) in place of an acceptance that suffering is our birthright as human beings, will always bring us down and was the main problem with the guests assembled for today's program.
posted 3 years, 1 month ago
view in context
on The Face of Race
actually you did attempt to reduce the institutional racism in this area to a conservative/liberal issue, scottmil. That is just another socially useless, false dichotomy, not to mention a gross over-simplification. At any rate, we are not talking about political preferences in this issue as much as about social equity. There will be no social equity until we cease to draw lines between white/of color from both sides of the problem. Until we're all on one side of the problem, the problem will continue.
posted 3 years, 1 month ago
view in context
on The Face of Race
Thank you for this post, it's a good splash of cool water, but to your final conclusion, I would simply reply that to see and understand this allows one to be compassionate, not to simply acknowledge difference.
Compassion does not seek to prop the man with crippled legs up on crutches and walk away, it seeks to assuage his pain and heal his sense of self from within for the rest of his life. Compassion seeks to demonstrate to this man that he is fully able to engage productively and successfully, despite his challenges as compared to others.
Institutional racism won't be a "fixed" problem in our lifetimes. We must accept that without slowing our attempts to strengthen families and teach children of their inherent worth as physical and spiritual beings on a planet with unlimited social potential for the overall good.
posted 3 years, 1 month ago
view in context
on The Face of Race
Um actually, you're wrong. Portland, as the most populous city in Oregon, does have extremely racist roots whose vestigal tendons reach into the present day. You may not know this, but from mid-19th century until 1927 it was actually illegal for an american of african descent to settle in the Oregon Territory/State of Oregon.
The reason african americans are so geographically concentrated in the N. Portland neighborhoods is that during WWII we encouraged immigration (for what amounted to indentured servitude) to a community that no longer exists called VanPort. It was built on unstable ground alongside the river and meant to give these new immigrants easy access to their new "jobs" building ships for the war effort for extremely low wages. Where did VanPort go? It washed away in a big flood because it was unsafe to begin with.
All that said, this is 2010. As a mixed-race american who is always presumed to be "white," I agree with the spirit of today's program that institutional racism exists and that it is a problem here in Multnomah County. My issue with the guests on the program is that they ALL continue to contribute to the problem by creating a false mental dichotomy between "white folks" and "people of color."
Until all our children are raised without this false dichotomy in mind, there will be no significant healing for the community or for downtrodden members thereof. Until we all recognize our spiritual nature and that that nature has no ethnicity, we won't truly believe that we are all one people.
posted 3 years, 1 month ago
view in context
on The Face of Race
hey arthur, you're simply wrong. don't you see that the "white people" you talk about are comprised of even more groups. Haven't you ever heard a white person tell a joke about jewish people and how they hoard all the money, keeping the rest of us down? It's the same stupid game. The significant things about me are
I believe in the power of belief
I have dedicated my career to human services and support of the arts and culture.
I pay rent, don't own a home or any stocks or bonds.
I pay taxes so that our government can address public service needs for all citizens and even some folks who aren't citizens...they are people too.
So you see Arthur, you look at me and you see "whitey," which is both inaccurate and racist. I look at you (at least what you have typed in response to my post) and I see someone who is holding himself back with hatred, mis-appropriated anger and self-pity.
I love you, man, but we can't address issues of institutional racism until we're on the same side of the table. Otherwise we're both seeing things upside down.
posted 3 years, 1 month ago
view in context
on The Face of Race
What i would prefer is that we start grappling with these issues as people, together rather than throwing numbers at each other, one group vs. another. i never chose the word white for myself and i am not bound by what has happened for the last 100 years. I'm a mixture of European American, Native American and who knows what else. Everyone is a person of color.
There are so many other connotations of the word "color." If "white people" aren't 'colorful" people, it implies that we are boring, dull and have no creativity, while the African American and Latino communities are described as brimming with contributions to art and culture. Further it is claimed that as colorless people we just steal from these contributions and manipulate their creators. Complete crap. Every culture has color, every culture is creative.
We can solve these problems together if we begin teaching children that there simply are no significant differences among people that are attributable to skin pigment alone. All families need to raise children with a sense of self respect and a sense of responsibility. This simply isn't happening in european american communities, latino communities or african american communities. We are a fractured society comprised of fractured families.
posted 3 years, 1 month ago
view in context
on The Face of Race
with all due respect, as long as this woman refers to her benificiaries as african american and mexican american etc. and refers to my people as "white folks" I can't see past her own racism to contribute to solving her problems. And your second guest is no better with her dichotomy of white communities and communities of color. White is a color, it's actually ALL colors if you want to get technical about the spectrum. But i'm not white, i'm more of an olivy peachy color. This dichotomy is contributing to the perpetuation of racism among the poor and that's just the way the rich want it. Ridiculous.
posted 3 years, 1 month ago
view in context
on New Police Chief
Here's a statistic i would like to know: What is the ratio of Portland Police Officer discharged firearms to kills on duty. It seems like every time i hear about a shooting, the civilian dies. Does the media only tell us about the kills or does nobody on the force know how to disarm a suspect during a shooting event? thx, thomboocha
posted 3 years, 1 month ago
view in context
