What began as a routine trip to the grocery store became a poignant reminder to Carmen Bauer that racism still exists even in the relatively culturally tolerant Eugene community.
At a Community Alliance for Lane County (CALC) public forum on racism Tuesday night located in the Eugene Water and Electric Board building, Bauer said she and her mother were standing at a check-out line chatting when a man standing nearby criticized her for speaking Spanish in America.
Bauer, executive director of the social service agency Centro Latino Americano, responded by telling the man she spoke English fluently and asked him if he “had a problem.” The man then stormed out of the store muttering that he was standing in “the wrong-colored line,” she said.
Bauer said she was outraged to hear such a blatantly racist comment, made more than three decades after the death of the segregationist Jim Crow laws.
Before an audience of about 150 people, Bauer, along with four other panelists at the forum, called upon Eugene residents to work together and continue combating racism and intolerance.
The forum “is in response to increased hate crimes in our community,” CALC development director Rod Rigues said. “Hate crimes that happened in other parts of the U.S. have triggered a response from white supremacy groups here in Eugene.”
Rigues said the forum was intended to help Eugene residents recognize and work toward eliminating the “insidious racist acts that are pervasive in our community every day.”
All five of the panelists advocated people respond quickly to protest all acts of racism.
“Don’t let it go 24 hours or a week or a month,” Jefferson Middle School principal Paul Jorgenson said. When an act of racism occurs in his school, Jorgenson said that “everything else drops” and he immediately works to resolve the situation.
Another panelist, city of Eugene diversity coordinator Marilyn Mays said that before significant progress can be made, “we have to first look at ourselves.” She recommended people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds analyze their prejudices and assumptions.
Mays said that common misconceptions about people of color in America include the belief they all act and behave in the same ways, that they are overly sensitive about racial issues and that they’re looking for a free ride, be it through affirmative action or other anti-discrimination legislation.
On the other hand, Mays said, minorities often assume that all Caucasians hold prejudices against minorities, don’t understand minority issues and cling to feelings of racial superiority.
Such assumptions “cause confrontations too early and too harshly,” Mays said.
She advocated people of all racial decent not ignore racism and prejudice but instead work together to resolve conflict and dispel misconceptions.
“We need to start putting past differences behind us,” Mays said, “and start to rebuild and renew past relationships and start working together.”