By Jake Thomas, Staff Writer
On Dec. 10, Kathleen Saadat accepted the Lifetime
Achievement from the Portland Human Rights Commission. The award comes as
Saadat, 72, prepares to retire from her position as diversity
development/affirmative action manager for the city of Portland.
Saadat has long been a presence in Oregon working to advance
equality and social justice. Originally born in St. Louis, Saadat passed
through Oregon on a trip to Anchorage, Alaska, in the late 1960s to visit her
brother who was stationed there in the military. She fell in love with the
beauty of the area and moved to Portland in 1970.
She has occupied a litany of positions during her career.
She has worked at the Cascade AIDS Project, served as the state director of
affirmative action, was an assistant to Portland City Commissioner Gretchen
Kafoury and strategic plan coordinator for Multnomah County’s Department of
Community and Family Services. She has also served on Portland’s Human Rights
Commission, and has sat on a range of boards and committees.
Saadat also helped organize Portland’s first gay rights
march and was active in opposing Measure 9, an anti-gay ballot initiative that
was voted down in 1992.
Jake Thomas: You’ve worked with Cascade Aids
Project. You’ve been working on the issue of AIDS for a long time. What are we
getting right and what still needs improving?
Kathleen Saadat: The thing that needs to
happen, from my perspective, to more effectively address AIDS is to give better
sex education starting with children. It isn’t just about AIDS. AIDS is a
sexually transmitted disease, but we don’t protect our children by letting them
know about sex, sexuality, sexual behavior, the consequences of their sexual
behavior and the politics of their sexual behavior. So we need to start there.
We need to remove the stigma. That means more of us need to be talking about it
with our friends about what we think we could do. People need to get tested,
too.
J.T.: What did you mean by the politics
of sexual behavior?
K.S.: Well, sex is a big political issue in
this country. I mean just look at the past election and all this stuff around
women and whether or not we should have trans-vaginal ultrasounds. Gender and
sex are all through everything, and it’s a struggle when you are laboring under
stereotypes about your sexual behavior, and then something touches you like
AIDS or HIV and the stereotype is exploited to your disadvantage. So if you’re
seen as promiscuous, as gay men are, period, then that stereotype comes to
haunt you when you begin to talk about remedies for HIV and AIDS. If you’re
seen as oversexed, as many African American men are, then that stereotype
begins to haunt you when you begin to talk about education and preventative
measures in the African American community.
J.T.: Portland’s demographics have
changed considerably over the last two decades. Do you think Portland, as a
city and culture, has a good grasp on how to celebrate or even engage that
diversity?
K.S.: No. But I don’t think they’re the worst
on the block. I think Portland works hard at trying to celebrate, embrace and
live with diversity. Portland is certainly ahead of a lot of places, in that we
have lots of conversations going on here about diversity and the impact of
racism and the impact of sexism. There’s lots going on here, which means
there’s an opportunity for dialogue. You can go to McMenamins once a month and
listen to Race Talks, which is the program that McMenamins support. You can go almost anywhere in this
city and find somebody talking about lesbian and gay issues or women’s issues
or older people’s issues.
The problem is not the dialogue. The dialogue is good. The
dialogue frequently does not point toward some action that will remedy the
situation. That is one of the problems. The other problem is people tend to
think that these issues are simplistic: that all one has to do is raise your
hand shout, let it be done, and it’s done. It’s not true.
These are deeply rooted emotional and psychological [pause]
infections that have us look at the world in certain ways. To rid ourselves of
these we need to talk. We need to think, and we need to do high levels of
introspection. So I think we are ahead of the game in some things, but we still
haven’t learned yet what to do about application of the theory we hold.
J.T.: You said that the dialogue does
not direct itself to solutions. What kind of solutions do we need and what kind
of problems would they address?
K.S.: [Sighs] Solutions have to do with
changing the systems in which we operate. So that means you need to look at
those systems on several levels. Look at the history, look at the policies,
look at the procedures, look at the people. If you can find within those things
barriers to equity, barriers to equal treatment, then that’s where you focus
your efforts to change.
You can move a policy. You can rewrite a policy. You can say
it blocks, for instance, people from disabilities from getting through your
hallways, then you change it.
But there’s a piece that we don’t touch very well, and
that’s the personal piece. That’s the piece that requires me to do
introspection. That’s the piece that requires that I do some sort of acceptance
of the reality of the history of this country as it has treated people of color
and women as it has treated the mentally ill and the physically disabled. There
is a history there that we refuse to acknowledge because we absolve ourselves
of any responsibility. Now I’m not saying that people are responsible for the past,
but they benefit from it or they suffer from it. And that’s a conversation that
we don’t have very well, the one that requires us to look at ourselves and see
what our role is in all this.
J.T.: You served on the city’s Human
Relations Committee. In retrospect, do you think it helped?
K.S.: Yes. Yes. It was a place that was
willing, where the people were courageous enough to say, let’s look at
immigration, or, let’s have a hard look at how our local government is
interacting with the federal government with these immigration cases. It was
courageous; it was public. It would say, let’s have a look at what’s going on
with the police here in Portland. So, yes, I think they’re an incredibly
important as a voice that reminds us of the direction we say we want to go and
that holds us accountable by ensuring that people who ordinarily wouldn’t be
heard are heard.
J.T.: Affirmative action has become a
loaded term over the years. What does it mean to you?
K.S.: Affirmative action is a tool. It’s a tool
that was introduced as a remedy to past discrimination and the impact of past
discrimination. The people who have been resistant to equalize things have
often made it sound like a program where all you had to do was be a person of
color and you’d get a job. And I would challenge them and say, well why aren’t
all of us working? Why is the unemployment rate among blacks and Latinos so
high if it’s that way?
Also, people have used affirmative action to say that it’s a
special right given to people. People who say that are people who have so
little understanding of history, so little knowledge of history that they don’t
know that Thomas Jefferson, while an advocate for freedom, also had a slave as
his mistress and had several children by her and never set her free. This
advocate for freedom owned people. They don’t know that the government had a
policy of non-integrated neighborhoods, so when the men came back from World
War II and wanted to get loans for housing, the government policy was that they
wouldn’t grant those loans in places where there would be integrated living.
When you don’t know that, it’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to something
like affirmative action.
Again, it’s a tool. It’s a tool by which you measure the
extent to which the institution or the agency has been able to try and equalize
its workforce, not only in terms of people of color and women. It’s never been
people of color who have been the biggest beneficiaries, it’s always been white
women, not black women. So when you look at where those people are placed in
the hierarchy of any place, you should be able to see some sort of reasonable
disbursement of color and gender or ethnicity in the dimensions of that
organization. You use it as a tool.
J.T.: So affirmative action is a
measuring tool?
K.S.: It’s a monitoring tool.
J.T.: What sort of standard should it
be used to meet?
K.S.: That’s a really complicated issue and
that’s another place where people don’t know very much. The standard has to do
with the availability of people in a particular field. Let’s see if you can
follow this. If the city wants to hire engineers, and we find that we don’t
have any American Indian engineers we need to find out how many are available
to us. What if there aren’t any coming out of engineering school? But when we
do find out that there is an American Indian engineering society we can find
out how many are available to us, and we can go to universities and go all
around and find out how many are coming on the marketplace and make some
focused efforts to recruit. The standards are what is available in the area. It
could be the local area. It could be the region, the state, the country. It
could be international. What are the standards has to do with what’s available.
J.T.: Because affirmative action has
become such a loaded term, should we use different language?
K.S.: No. We can’t keep changing the language
and think that will solve the problem. It just means you’ll have a new set of
words with a negative load. We don’t need to change the language. Let’s get
educated about what it really means.
J.T.: So how is the city doing?
K.S.: The city’s doing pretty good. We still
have some places we need to look and work harder, but we have internal
discussions and we have an affirmative action plan. We have an Office of Equity
that will look at those plans and look at those agencies and look at their
internal processes and procedures to see if they can be either support or
obstacles for equity in the work place.
J.T.: What could it be doing better?
K.S.: [Pause] It could be doing a better job of
promoting itself as an employer interested in issues of equity and equal
opportunity. It could have signs on the sides of buses saying, your city: the
place to work.
J.T.: I was hoping we could reminisce a
little bit. You say a lot of people are ignorant of history. Portland is
regarded as a relatively friendly place for gay rights, but long ago it wasn’t.
You were involved with the campaign against Measure 9 and helped organize Portland’s
first gay rights march. What was that like?
K.S.: Scary. The march was less than 200
people, and we marched in downtown Portland and we were scared to death. The
religious right was there with a big sign saying, turn or burn. And they came
and they stood in the midst of the group celebrating gay rights.
While it’s been, in some ways, a haven for gay and lesbian
people, it hasn’t been all sweetness. Ballot Measure 9 and before it Ballot
Measure 8 rescinded then Governor Neil Goldschmidt’s executive order for
nondiscrimination in state government. Ballot Measure 9 was an amazing piece of
work to be presented to the people in this state about what people’s rights
are. It said that you couldn’t even be friends with or support someone who was
gay. That’s pretty awful.
I believe that the people who do this are as adamant about
their beliefs as I am about mine. But I believe, ultimately, the problem is
that each of us in a marginalized group has to fight our way into the human
race via the courts, etc. That should not be. There should be no vote on
whether or not I get to have equal rights. All that does is allow people to
vote their existing prejudices. If I am a citizen here and I pay my taxes and
vote, and I do vote, what is the issue? Who gets to say that I don’t get to
have what other people have? How does that happen?
Well go back to the Constitution. Have a look. The
constitution of South Africa protects me as a black person, as a lesbian
person, as a woman. How come that isn’t true in the U.S.?
J.T.: How come?
K.S.: Go back to the Constitution. It was
written biased. Derrick Bell, who is now dead, who was the dean of the
University of Oregon law school, raised that issue. Our Constitution was
written for straight, white, land-owning men. It wasn’t written for even poor
white men. But everybody who has wanted full participation in our country has
had to fight their way into legitimacy because we were not included in the
first place. That’s why.
Why would this ridiculous conversation with women getting
raped, and legitimate rape happen? How the hell did that happen? And it’s not
the women talking about it, it’s the men deciding. And it’s the men deciding
about what men do to women. It’s insane. It should make everybody in this
country crazy. Why the hell do we have to vote on whether or not women get to
have an abortion? That’s not anyone’s business but hers.
J.T.: What are you going to do in
retirement?
K.S.: Raise hell.
This article appears in 2012-12-21.