It has been a tumultuous week in the United States. I am beyond grateful for the safe spaces Lewis & Clark has provided me this past week to process, ask questions, and ponder what steps we can take next year when we enter the workforce. I am also grateful for the serendipitous timing of the Ray Warren Symposium on Race and Ethnic Studies this week, which focused on the very relevant issue of Home. After the election, the United States, where I have lived my entire life, no longer felt like much of a home. This post isn’t meant to be politically focused, so although there is plenty to say about how Trump’s election has torn up many people’s perceptions of home and belonging overnight, I won’t go into that now. Regardless of who won or lost, this election has brought to light the vast, sharp, uncompromising divide within our country. Even if Hillary won, there would be at least 60 million people just as angry and distraught as we are now. This kind of single-minded animosity is the opposite of what I consider home — when I think of home, I think of individuals who are free to their own ideas but hold enough respect for each other that they are able to be flexible and compromise.
A theme that I noticed throughout the two Ray Warren keynotes and panel discussion I attended was the importance of community. One question an audience member asked keynote speaker Jeff Chang was (paraphrased), “In a nation where minorities are projected to become the majority by the year 2042, how do we ensure that the oppressed don’t become the oppressors?” This is relevant not only in terms of race, but I would argue also holds relevance in this election. The Democrats were sure that they were the majority opinion in the United States (and technically with 2 million more popular votes for Hillary Clinton, they were) but were confronted by the reality that another group will hold political power. We need to make sure that no matter who is in power, whether Democrats, Republicans or People of Color, we don’t forget the minority, whoever that is at the time, for power is always shifting. Chang used the example of my high school in San Francisco, with an overwhelming majority of Asian students. When he asked a San Francisco activist when the rights and representation of Asian Americans would be enough, she was outraged and said it was never enough. Although there is injustice everywhere, we need to watch out for our fellow humans who have farther to come than we do. We need to fight for an agenda that benefits all of us, not just a particular majority or minority. When asked about how to move forward with love to overcome the amount of hate that has been surfacing in our country, and the world right now, he urged us to be active in our communities and listen to different perspectives. Community organizing was a theme in the keynote panel about housing in Portland as well. The three speakers who worked for various housing non-profits in Portland advocated for the power of neighborhoods coming together and demanding for change. Communities being cognizant of insiders and outsiders was also emphasized in the panel on Friday morning, speaking specifically about the inclusion of Filipinos into communities in Hawaii.
The day after the election, my history class spent the first forty minutes of our class discussing the outcome of the election and what it means for us moving forward. We asked Andy, our professor, for some historical perspective on the election, since for many of us this was the first election we were able to vote in and understand the implications of its result. Andy described the AIDS movement in the 80s, largely discounted by the government but brought to light by a huge successful grassroots movement. In my geology class, a student mentioned that the director of an environmental non-profit she worked for over the summer eased her fears that a Trump presidency would destroy the environment by saying that they noticed a huge increase in donations during Republican regimes from concerned citizens not seeing change happening from the above. This focus on community organizing gave me some hope for the future — it won’t be easy, but it gives us a chance to DO something for once, and to see change happening all around us instead of being mandated from the top down.
The implications this focus on community has on my thesis is also exciting. I’m basically examining how (and if) communities are formed through Trusted Organizations/Third Places, and if this is possible digitally via the app Nextdoor. Although I’m focusing on disaster preparedness, one could argue that a disaster could range from the Cascadia earthquake to this kind of social political crisis many people are experiencing. An article I just read mentions the importance of Third Places as safe spaces for people to be introduced to differing world views, and I think this is exactly what we need in our communities right now. We need places for people who we respect to exchange ideas and build respect for each other. I am more motivated than ever to pursue this thesis research.
This week I began the laborious task of screen-shotting high-traffic Nextdoor posts in Collins View. After surveying average replies, I decided six replies seemed like a significant number to analyze. It’s difficult to categorize posts past that, since each reply fits into a different category (insider/outsider, trust-building/eroding, etc.), so I’ll need to come up with a new system of categorization, or perhaps this section of my research will be more qualitative than putting posts into quantitative categories. It has been interesting seeing a theme of LC students being outsiders in our community, since it was something I wasn’t expecting. I will continue to monitor Nextdoor, and have a meeting scheduled with Liz for later this week.