Workshop session from the State of Oregon Diversity and Inclusion Conference, Sept. 26 and 27, 2017.

1. “BAKED INTO
THE CAKE”
RACE AND POLICY IN US HISTORY

2. Don’t tell me what
you value. Show me
your budget, and
I’ll tell you what
you value.
-Former VP Joe Biden

3. Laws and policies are a window into
what a society values
…at least what those in power value
Laws and policies may not always describe
historical reality, but they do tell us what kind of
structures those who held power wanted to build.

4. What does it mean to be an “American?”
And who gets to answer that question?

9. the language used in the Declaration of
Independence, show, that neither the class of
persons who had been imported as slaves, nor
their descendants, whether they had become
free or not, were then acknowledged as a part
of the people, nor intended to be included in
the general words used in that memorable
instrument...They had for more than a century
before been regarded as beings of an inferior
order, and altogether unfit to associate with
the white race, either in social or political
relations; and so far inferior, that they had no
rights which the white man was bound to
respect; and that the negro might justly and
lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."

10. “We must now make a code that
will subject as many crimes to the
penalty of involuntary servitude,
and so reduce the Negroes under
such penalty again to practical
slavery.”
-southern white clergyman, testimony before the
Joint Congressional Committee on
Reconstruction, 1866

13. “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which
obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all
mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and
independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health,
liberty, or possessions… (and) when his own preservation comes
not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the
rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an
offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the
preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of
another.”
John Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government

19. GI Bill (1944)
Federal Housing
Administration (1934)
Social Security Act (1935):
excluded agricultural &
domestic workers
1790 Naturalization Act:
“Free, white persons”
Homestead Act, 1862 (First) Morrill Land
Grant Act, 1862
Exclusion Laws—land
ownership and mining (1800s-
1840s)
Immigration Acts, 1921 and
1924 (quotas)
Chinese
Exclusion
Act, 1882
When Affirmative Action was…. WHITE

21. “Yellow areas [C] are characterized by age, obsolescence, and change of style;
expiring restrictions or lack of them; infiltration of a lower grade population; ...
inadequate transportation, insufficient utilities, perhaps heavy tax burdens, poor
maintenance of homes, etc. "Jerry" built areas are included, as well as
neighborhoods lacking homogeneity. Generally, these areas have reached the
transition period. Good mortgage lenders are more conservative in the Yellow
areas...”
“Red areas [D] ... are characterized by detrimental influences in a pronounced
degree, undesirable population or infiltration of it. Low percentage of home
ownership, very poor maintenance and often vandalism prevail. Unstable incomes
of the people and difficult collections are usually prevalent.... Some mortgage
lenders may refuse to make loans in these neighborhoods and others will lend only
on a conservative basis.”
Federal Housing Authority (FHA) Descriptions accompanying FHA city maps, 1937

25. 228 YEARS

26. “I don’t see color”

31. If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet
deprecate agitation, are men who want
crops without plowing up the ground. They
want rain without thunder and lightning.
They want the ocean without the awful roar
of its many waters. This struggle may be a
moral one, or it may be both moral and
physical, but it must be a struggle. Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It
never did and it never will.
-Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

32. If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet
deprecate agitation, are men who want
crops without plowing up the ground. They
want rain without thunder and lightning.
They want the ocean without the awful roar
of its many waters. This struggle may be a
moral one, or it may be both moral and
physical, but it must be a struggle. Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It
never did and it never will.
-Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

33. “…change begins when people see
things differently and attain ‘cognitive’
and ‘emotional liberation’ from the
often wrong common sense.”
-Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

37. Flickr user ume-y
Structures of inequality will always reproduce themselves
until we intervene to stop that reproduction.