May 15, 2024

My family found their way to Salem fifteen years ago. Coming from a rural upbringing in the Willamette Valley, Oregon’s capital is a place that always felt big but whose downtown streetscapes had all the trappings of a cozier nineteenth-century Italianate style. It’s also the namesake of perhaps the most notorious piece of short fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin. (Omelas, the place from which the ones walked away, is Salem backward with an O-twist.) In the language of the Kalapuya, the original peoples of the mid-Valley, this is a place known as Chemeketa. The meeting or gathering place.

So it was that this spring—as with more than a hundred cities around the country—Salem residents gathered to grapple with the crisis happening in Gaza some 6,965 miles away. 

At the center of our community conversations has been Salem’s Human Rights Commission where I have served for more than two years. We joined places as different as Seattle and Atlanta, or a community perched in the hollows of southern Vermont, where much has been noted about the diverse local governments adopting ceasefire resolutions. Now, as the ink of our own city’s resolution dries, I’m left to reflect on the place of local language in national discourse. 

Our experience began in early April when the Mayor approached us regarding the siege in the Gaza Strip that has continued to unfold on the world stage for more than half a year. A catastrophe plainly accessible to anyone with a mobile device and a tough stomach. Crafting language, however defined, was the Commission’s task. 

I first felt a foreboding. Concerns about any public process that mapped language onto an international disaster that persistently cracks the United States’ vision of the world. I was raised in an oral tradition with stories that encompass the intimate to the legendary. The central value of naming and placing words in an ecosystem of relationships is at the core of my family’s way of life. And to enter the Commission room on April 17, with loose instructions and a cursory guess about how such a diverse group of city advisors might approach the task, felt daunting. 

What stories were going to be told and tossed out? I did the only thing I knew to do. I thought on far-away family.

In the hills of my people’s ancestral lands, the scorpions crawl out of their caves after the watery swelter of heavy rain. My grandmothers made life in those distant upland landscapes for centuries: harvests, open-air markets, prayerful conversations with the sky pleading for rainfall. Rain that would feed our crops and invite those scorpions out from their cavernous slumbers to play. My memories of these lands, strong and formative though they remain, are today undeniably old. The hills and scorpions of my childhood have been supplemented with stories of gunfire in our community. Stories of aunts suspended in prolonged illness because casual violence, state intimidation, and cartel cruelty, were rendered routine. Harsh murmurs of a slain cousin were met by stories of newborns and neighbors wailing in the night. 

I reflected on how over time the stories we tell, and the language we use, shape who we are as well as our sacrosanct relationship to precious places. 

In the months since early October, as the waters of atrocity continue to come down in deluge, like so many other Indigenous folks, I have laid awake at night dreaming with the youth. Nineteen thousand new orphans in half a year born out of collective punishment that rhymes of losses closer to home. 

Back in April, I was sensitive to the fact that these distilled truths habitually get muddied by our political rhetoric. Our thirty-second, couple-hundred-character attention span, and cliched ideologies. Misunderstanding the uncomfortable role of social protest, for example, or getting the difference between war and annihilation wrong, does more than inflame distrust in the social fabric. Muddled thinking produces more than just alternative facts: it creates alternative worlds. It also allows a celebrated novelist—one whose writing I have for years enjoyed—to pen stylish whataboutery on language as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as every one of Gaza’s twelve universities lie in ruin.

So the language-making process began. The Commission went on to meet three times over three weeks and held some six hours of public discussion on the question we were called upon to consider. In the course of its public engagement, the Commission performed outreach to faith communities, received more pages of public input than it ever had before, well over one hundred members of the public attended the sessions, and nearly half provided spoken testimony.

Our pocket of the valley, though diverse in perspective, asked again and again, how do we process breathtaking violence? And each time, the public centered on a concern for decency. 

A grassroots petition sprung up and gathered more than three hundred signatures calling for a resolution. This coalition, supportive of a resolution process, was affecting in no small part because it was a medley. There were folks born before 1948 who had traveled to Palestine, there were college students for whom this was a new, impassioned cause. There were Jewish youth and elders, a Unitarian minister, and devout Muslims. Palestinian youth living in diaspora. Older Palestinians raising families. One gentleman was living in Salem while attending law school. Another woman had just exited homelessness and professed pride in having this public conversation be her first. 

There were also members of the community who solemnly communicated their trepidation. Others who asked us not to move forward with any language, regardless of intention, out of concern for what they perceived to be the well-being of the Jewish community. There was a rabbi who branded the Commission as being party to a shadowy network of global jihad. Most of the people who took issue with the idea of a resolution asked a necessary question: what does the City, and therefore the Commission, have to do with foreign affairs? In one person’s testimony, we were told authoritatively that the process we were undertaking flew in the face of the U.S. Constitution. 

I considered that they may be right. Our day-to-day work was important: advocating for our unsheltered neighbors, changing city code to more fully serve marginalized communities, public-facing resource fairs, and resolving complaints of discrimination that reached the Mayor’s Office. And this did somehow feel exterior to that project.

One major obstacle to common vocabulary was the use of the word genocide. Proponents of its use invoked its apparency in the events that were unfolding. The destruction was industrial. And the hateful, anti-Palestinian rhetoric of some members of the Knesset and the Cabinet of Israel only served to establish intent. Others dismissed the idea altogether. Associating the concept of genocide with the actions of the State of Israel, some suggested, was categorically antisemitic. 

It is necessary to be specific about the questions and concerns articulated by a few members of local Jewish communities. Namely, Why a resolution? Why does this issue matter in Salem? Why ‘genocide’? What are your credentials? Did you know anything about Israel/Palestine before today? When put in practice, these questions seemed to confound the public process by placing expression, especially terminology invoked by the public in testimony, in a tug-of-war with harm. In particular, the charge of antisemitism, as levied by a handful in the community, struck me as a mechanism of self-defense that had roots in legitimate generational anxiety regarding public conversations on issues they did not feel others had license to speak about—or in a way sensitive to their worldview. Serious concern about public conversations where there were unknown actors. Where there was no established tradition of interfaith or cultural conciliation—even in the many months after October 7. Where trust, that is, had not been established. Similarly, Palestinian Americans approached the Commission with fears of being erased, dismissed entirely, or treated unseriously. Most communicated profound distrust even of local government entities when faced with what they saw as the totalizing and numbing non-concern with the rights and conditions of the Palestinian people. An orientation that saturated the federal government and national conversation.

There were immobilizing social injuries being inflicted through our collective and selective aphasia.  

Another rabbi, whose sincerity and thought-provoking commentaries I appreciated throughout, lamented what he thought was the divisive nature of a resolution. He insisted that if a resolution process was to be explored at all, then months of coalition-building was necessary, and the language-crafting process could no longer move forward. Besides, he reminded us, the City had already waited six months. While everyone involved agreed that building community was an essential part of the work we do at the local level (indeed, the Commission reaffirmed its commitment to such a practice in the resolution), Commissioners felt the urgency to exercise their advisory role when asked, especially now that residents had turned to their city. Personally, I maintained that resolutions and coalition-building were important and complementary, albeit independent commitments. He and the Commission ultimately recognized that it was possible to take steps toward building community while also denouncing hate and atrocities.

Discomfort—perhaps even graduating into anxiety—is a tense and strenuous but common part of many public processes. On this issue, I am left unable to imagine a public process, whether in my community or any other, that would not be fraught. How are local entities, for example, to weigh the apprehension experienced by one group over the dismay felt by another over the choice to remain silent?

In the Commission’s letter to our elected leadership, we acknowledged that a resolution process on issues of foreign affairs may, at first, appear extraordinary. But by the end of our public engagement, the Commission concluded that it was justified. Salem taxpayers collectively subsidize (to the tune of $2 million) the actions of a foreign government that in the judgment of the United Nations, and a majority of the international community, is committing egregious violations of the rules of war, including genocide, against the Palestinian people. The Commission held that these issues were intimately entangled with the experience of community in Salem. And that a necessary precondition to harmony, locally or otherwise, was the recognition of the situation's dire reality. The centering of human life and dignity. The language presented for their consideration, we argued, was a serious effort on the part of the Commission to telegraph Salem’s core value of compassion: promoting peace, standing against bigotry, and celebrating our cultural diversity.

While local mistrust ate away at the language-making process, the issue at hand was ultimately about our purchase as taxpayers on the lives of people far away. In that exchange, it was important that a public body feel free to use the most accurate language available in describing the conditions and circumstances of the world. If we could not imagine or articulate a present, then we were prohibited from putting language to a future, and would be eventually rendered unable to materialize it. And at a local level, even if we could not agree on what constituted the right language, we at least needed to still be having the same conversation—something that in Salem, like communities everywhere, we are still working on. 

Before the Commission began its work, I had no idea who in Salem, a place whose very name makes allusions to peace, would even be paying attention or care about far-away families. Though not always easy, it has been a privilege to do the necessary work that public service expects of us: hearing from everyone who hopes to express themselves; consistently meeting with community leaders; fielding feedback that sometimes scorched from its intensity; and attending to peace and understanding (a bottom line, occasionally disregarded by members of the public, that needed reinforced). Fundamentally, elevating difficult dialogue into the public arena, while striving to center the importance of language and respect among peoples, has been the most generative product of the resolution process I experienced. And given my early doubts, it felt like a relief.

As local leaders, we are still left to contend with the role that local governments ought to play in adopting resolutions amid national and international calamities—even the ones that we pay for out of pocket.  Intense public processes, regardless of the merits of a resolution, can be prohibitive. And what, after all, does it matter if we are starting hundreds of conversations around the country if these efforts are thought to be merely symbolic?

In the United States, outside of voting or running for elected office, there are few ways for individuals to directly influence decision-making. For local governments to materially communicate their values at the federal level, certainly in areas not immediately within their authority, there are fewer mechanisms still. As a representative republic, our democracy is precious and vital—and in practice, not unlike a virtual exercise. That is to say, there are numerous dilution points between you and the political class. An average congressional district, for example, represents 700,000 voters. On any given day, the neighborly district resident is not coming face-to-face with their congressperson. Likewise, Israel’s actions in Palestine are not itemized in the ballot box. Voters are left to pick between their moral commitments and the promise of forgiven student loans, or else risk an alarming embrace of unencumbered homegrown white nationalism. College protests are scrutinized as juvenile obscurantism and mobilizations that shut down heavily trafficked bridges are made to appear out of touch. So, with this understanding of civic participation, and our relationship to it, how else do we as local leaders expect to serve our constituencies?

We could remain silent or point residents elsewhere. But something that our experience in Salem taught me was that silences, vacuums of vision, breed distrust and resentment.

Folks want to hear from their elected officials. When people experience uncertainty for any one of many reasons, they should expect to be taken seriously by leaders who are also their neighbors. And as the last half-year has demonstrated, residents will approach us. What formal role other than engaging in a public process, embarking on those challenging community discussions, do we have to play in an unfolding national conversation when they do? 

Having not been a part of the more than one hundred resolution processes across the nation, I cannot speak to the intention of each council. I suspect, however, given that I don’t believe Salem to be a dazzling outlier in the American consciousness, that the point of these resolutions is not to bring about some amorphous undertaking by which cities take the reins of moral superiority. Or even necessarily dictate foreign policy. But instead, as proximal polities, we are interested in capturing the spirit of our neighbors. It is to all of our benefit that communities allow for painful conversations and let them mature.

When our taxpayer dollars are involved—when heart-wrenching loss is met with disproportionate, indiscriminate, and heinous violence—communities need to be able to exercise their best language to call upon leaders in a position to make a change to do what is within their power to enact that change.

By now, it has taken over two hundred days for more than one hundred cities to name a truth that was unambiguous to the world community not long after Israel’s retaliation began in response to the brutal and anguishing Hamas insurgency on October 7. The inspiring capacity of ordinary folks of all backgrounds across the United States to organize themselves, and their representative governments, around decency serves as a reminder of our responsibility as humans with heart to either make the circumstances that leave people carrying these catalogs of blood and memory as few in number as possible, or else make the burden of carrying them lighter through solidarity. It is an impulse that seems to fade the further you get away from the heartbeat of neighborhoods and wade into the seas of shibboleth. 

Solidarity, in part, begins with the language we do, or don’t, use. As we sit here together, the Israeli right-nationalist leadership recently rejected an agreement, again becoming the obstacle to peace it often blames on others, and marches into the last receding corner of refuge that is Rafah. To my fellow city leaders across the country: our imperative—to hold conversations, denounce genocide and call for a ceasefire, but also refute Palestinian misery as an American value—our imperative for the language of peace only grows.

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August 8, 2023

There is a warning in Shawn Strobl’s experiences navigating houselessness with a disability, (“Oregonians with disabilities struggle amid homeless crisis: ‘It was just impossible,” July 24).

When we see an increasing number of disabled folks slipping out of secure housing—as the article notes, the poverty rate for adults with disabilities is twice that of adults without disabilities—we must wake up to the alarming violence faced by our disabled unhoused neighbors.

As a member of Salem’s Human Rights Commission, I have been startled by reported assaults against unsheltered Salemites. The commission often hears about the verbal harassment unhoused community members receive. Our Community Belonging Survey reveals growing instances of public humiliation. The most recent attack against an unsheltered neighbor in late June resulted in his death—a first for which none of us were prepared.

These episodes of life-threatening violence resemble one another in revealing ways. While the victims have been aging and disabled, the perpetrators have consistently been adolescents or young men. The hostility that leads to these public assaults runs deep and is not arbitrary. It derives its legitimacy from a culture and discourse that regards our unhoused neighbors as burdens. Our findings show that nearly 80% of folks experiencing houselessness report experiencing discrimination on a daily or weekly basis. Mr. Strobl’s story reminds us that every month many Oregonians teeter on the edge of facing the same.

It is time to regard this issue facing our communities—the one in which some feel compelled to assault and kill a neighbor due to circumstance and power—with the urgency it demands.

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August 7, 2022

The repudiation of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey awakens fears around the repercussions of an unchecked and compromised high court. Now as a result, in a period when the protections against the deprivations of privacy and liberty are weakened, the U.S. must brace itself as the legacy of eugenics threatens to break forth.

Recall Carrie Buck, a 16-year-old in a muggy Virginia town, almost a century ago. In the summer of 1923, Buck—who had lived her whole life under the guardianship of foster parents, John and Alice Dobbs—was raped by a Dobbs family nephew. Buck’s mother, Emma, was locked away at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg under the auspices of clinical “immorality,” prostitution and the crime of having syphilis.

Carrie Buck became pregnant as a result of the rape. In her third trimester, Buck was committed to the very same Virginia State Colony as her mother, on the basis of “mental incompetence,” “incorrigibility” and “promiscuity.” By early 1924, Virginia had passed the Eugenical Sterilization Act, meant to protect the state’s right to strip “defective” and “socially inadequate” people of their reproductive potential. Early that same year, against her will, Carrie Buck’s fallopian tubes were gutted.

In a cruel legal wile, Buck’s attorney, Irving Whitehead, was not only a vehement eugenicist but also a close friend of the superintendent of the residential facility that had sterilized her. He called no witnesses. He made no effort to dispute claims, later revealed to be false, that questioned Buck’s intelligence and mental fortitude, nor did he challenge the idea that people’s reproductive capacity should be forcibly excised due to disability. His counsel was a sham.

Robert Shelton, a justice of the peace who served as Buck’s guardian while she was institutionalized, appealed the Amherst County judge’s decision to side with the Virginia State Colony. By 1927, Buck v. Bell had reached the Supreme Court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in an 8-to-1 decision, delivered the now-infamous majority opinion.

The Court found that, under the Fourteenth Amendment, the State is within its right to sterilize somebody should they become institutionalized and found to be “afflicted with a hereditary form of insanity or imbecility.” The “imbecility” in the Buck case was a euphemism for her involuntary pregnancy. In his measly 1,000-word opinion, Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he concluded.

It is almost a century later and Buck v. Bell, while weakened, has not been overruled. States retain the right to sterilize their citizenry on the basis of “defect” or disability. In its most pernicious interpretation, the state may determine defect to include, as it did in the 1920s, categories as unspecific and sinister as social inadequacy, immorality and promiscuity. Buck remains one of the most twisted cases in U.S. history—and today, in a world of judicial dynamism and precariousness, is a latent tool in service of the ugliest currents of society.

With Roe v. Wade being nullified on the basis of a narrowed Fourteenth Amendment, it is imperative to remember the ways in which, when it is not providing equal protection under the law, the Fourteenth Amendment has been weaponized as a tool of oppression and state control. More than 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized in the wake of the Buck ruling. This century, under the Trump administration, immigrant women were detained and carved outthrough medically unnecessary hysterectomies.

As of June 2022, a new generation has fewer constitutional rights than the one who preceded it. Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson outlines a path for rescinding a string of rights—some long protected under the Fourteenth Amendment—such as a right to contraceptives, gay marriage, sexual privacy and even interracial marriage.

These efforts are rooted in the very same legal illogic as Buck and motivated by the same contempt for justice that Irving Whitehead harbored.

We mustn’t forget this soft mandate, handed down by the courts, for states to intervene, not in pregnancy, but in the ability to reproduce in anybody institutionalized with anything the state deems an inadequacy. Historically, the communities that have been violated and exploited the most by this mandate include Black and Indigenous women, immigrants, trans folks—and, critically, people with disabilities.

In a post-Roe world, the promises of societal progress and bodily liberty, long the roar of a country constantly seeking to better itself, are duller. Today, 31 states unabashedly have laws sanctioning the sterilization of disabled people. In Nevada and Iowa, these laws, only three years old, are fresh. Seventeen of these states consider disabled children eligible for forced sterilization. This most recent assault on reproductive rights, decades in the making, renders conceiving of a future free from state control of our bodies, persecution of disability and intolerance of difference markedly more difficult.

Carrie Buck’s story reminds us that draconian laws last. It is not only a question of abortion and forced sterilization. The role that eugenics can play in an era of conservative and quasi-theological judicial activism is expansive: medical experimentation, forced institutionalization, marriage equality for people with disabilities, access to health care, and beyond. At a time when the court of the land has the appetite to obliterate half a century of precedent and progress, we are faced with immediate uncertainty. The legal apparatus that has, for over a century, functioned as a bludgeon for disabled Americans (and others) now threatens indiscriminately—and no one has the luxury of not knowing the consequences.

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