Angela Uherbelau

Jo Ann Hardesty speaking at a rally for tenants rights and affordable housing
Jo Ann Hardesty and Our Continued Fight for a Portland for All
Last fall, I joined more than 40 other Black, Indigenous and other Portland-area women of color denouncing People for Portland’s $1.5 million dark money campaign: “Scapegoating breeds self-righteousness, but it doesn’t lead to lasting solutions to gun violence and homelessness. We should be setting our collective sights on the real threat among us: an en...

Angela Uherbelau
Uherbelau, a writer, is a former elementary school PTA president and creator of oregonkidsread.com. She lives in Portland.
If you’re an elementary school student excited about reading, you look forward to third grade and your first chance to join a team of classmates for Oregon’s Battle of the Books. Together, you meet for practices to answer questions about the stories you’ve read and prep for competition against other groups. You get a chance to stretch yourself academicall...

Angela Uherbelau, Sharon Joy Gary-Smith and Andrea Valderrama
Uherbelau is founder of Oregon Kids Read. Gary-Smith is president of the Portland NAACP. Valderrama represents House District 47-East Portland in the Oregon Legislature. They all live in Portland. More than 40 Black, Indigenous and other Portland-area women of color signed an expanded version of this letter available online.
People for Portland’s $1.5 million dark money campaign has some publicly stated goals: more police, (althoug...

Spaces
With pro bono help from a local designer, Family Village has soft curves, open sight lines, and a sense of place.

In a Southeast Portland church-turned-residence, a children’s play area painted in gentle grays, blues, and apricots anchors what was once a cavernous worship space. Plants cascade from hanging baskets in the dining room, and a great vase of sunflowers graces the counter of a white-tiled bathroom. The living space mixes openness and refuge—you can curl up in the corner on a...

Angela Uherbelau
Uherbelau, a writer, is a former elementary school PTA president and creator of oregonkidsread.com. She lives in Portland.
Last November I helped launch a grassroots initiative, Oregon Kids Read, to address a statewide disgrace: over 70% of Black, Indigenous and other Oregon third-graders of color are not meeting reading benchmarks. Research shows that if a child does not reach reading proficiency by the third grade, they may never catch up.
In meeting after meeting - whether...

By Angela Uherbelau
Uherbelau, a writer, lives in Portland and is a former elementary school PTA president. She is also the creator of oregonkidsread.com.

Oregon’s amazing elementary school students are capable of becoming readers. Oregon’s equally amazing teachers are capable of teaching them how. It’s time for the state to give them what they need to succeed.

By Angela Uherbelau

Portland Public Schools needs a clear-eyed disrupter to immediately address a five-alarm fact: Our city’s historically-underserved students with the highest-needs are still not getting the education they deserve.

Many people have abandoned traditional media because we're hungry for other perspectives, other insights, other voices. Paying women of color even a nominal amount per guest column could have a significant impact on submissions and published pieces.

By ANGELA UHERBELAU
The Portland Art Museum is dangerously close to convincing city elected officials to effectively privatize a public space that belongs to all of us. Last week, the Portland City Council took a step towards allowing the museum to obliterate an accessible, open space in the heart of our city. This decision runs directly counter to a stated, codified promise: that equity and equal opportunity is a priority of the Portland City government.
Last year, the Portland Art Museum an...

In his news conference Tuesday, responding to the violence in Charlottesville President Donald Trump once again encouraged us to look upon our country and see nothing but a sea of moral relativism.

Applying his “many sides” argument to our history, both recent and long-past, Americans might well ask ourselves: Southern slave owners? Imagine how hard it was for them to lose their culture. White mobs spitting on black schoolchildren? Think how difficult it was to share their neighborhood. A white man hurling racist speech at two teenage girls, one black, one wearing a hijab — and then stabbing three white men coming to their rescue? As one “alt-right” protester saw it, Jeremy Christian did “everything right up until the moment he started killing people.”

It's a gorgeous summer evening at Dawson Park.

Families laugh across picnic blankets, children monkey up ropes on the playground, couples sway to the sounds of Locarno, a Mexican folk band from Vancouver, British Columbia.

The crowd, like Portland itself, skews white but there's ethnic diversity here: Asians, Latinos, African-Americans, everyone enjoying the night. The nexus feels especially meaningful given the city's soul-searching on race following the MAX attack in May, when two men were fatally stabbed after confronting a fellow train rider shouting racist and anti-Muslim slurs at two teenage girls.

Outside the window of our Coast Starlight compartment, little towns along the track flicker in and out of view. They look forsaken and forlorn, but here in our private Superliner Roomette, we're feeling free.

Give it up for love.

How do we do that? How can we possibly do that, given the terrible serpent of a line running from the top of Micah David-Cole Fletcher's jaw down to the middle of his neck? Or the wife and four children left to grieve Ricky John Best?

Or the golden laurel on Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche's graduation cap, celebrating the hours of learning and labor devoted to his Reed College thesis?

How do we give it up for love when hate took away so much, in a matter of minutes?

When I was 20 years old, I got pregnant. For the first eleven weeks, I pretended it wasn’t happening. I made excuses for my missed periods. I rushed past pregnancy tests at the drugstore. I refused to acknowledge the changes in my body. If I did nothing, maybe it would all just go away. The one thing I couldn’t escape was a growing sense of dread. For two nights in a row, I was stalked in my dreams by a man with a cage for a mouth.

Anyone paying attention to the news on Monday could be forgiven for thinking that our country is going to hell in a Russian hand basket. FBI Director James Comey confirmed to the House Intelligence Committee that his bureau is actively investigating President Trump’s ties to Russia.