Oregon’s governor and medical board proposed a bill with a controversial word in it. BIPOC legislators objected

A seemingly innocuous bill to revise the definition of acupuncture that was proposed by Gov. Tina Kotek on behalf of the Oregon Medical Board ignited controversy because of a term the governor and board chose to use in it: “Oriental medicine.”

Senate Bill 874

unanimously passed the Senate this session and appeared poised to cruise to approval in the House until it met a wall of opposition from four members of the Legislature’s BIPOC Caucus, who were adamant that the term should be removed. Even though the bill used the term to describe a branch of medicine, not a person or group of people, the representatives said the hurtful historical connotations that the term carries meant it must be removed from state law.

Rep. Hai Pham

, a Hillsboro Democrat who is Vietnamese American, said the word stirs memories from his childhood in the 1980s and ’90s in Oregon of the negative caricatures cast upon Asian Americans, frequently using that term.

“Being Asian American, growing up, the term ‘Oriental’ was used in a derogatory manner,” said Pham, who describes the “discomfort, the stereotypes” that it also engenders.

Rep. Travis Nelson

, a Democrat from Portland, said he and three other Democratic colleagues on the Behavior Health and Health Care Committee, who are all people of color, were not willing to let the bill advance to the House floor without what they considered an essential change.

“We don’t need to be codifying terms that we now know to be offensive and perhaps even racist,” said Nelson, who is Black. “It really is an outdated term. To me, using the word ‘Oriental’ is akin to using the word ‘negro’ or ‘colored.’”

Kotek’s office declined to answer questions this week from The Oregonian/OregonLive about why the governor introduced a bill containing the term, whether she considered it derogatory or even whether she had been personally aware that the bill used the term or if it instead had only been examined by staff. The term already had been used in the section of law that the Medical Board proposed updating.

The bill states that it was introduced “at the request of Governor Tina Kotek for Oregon Medical Board.” But a spokesperson for Kotek’s office, Lucas Bezerra, emphasized the word “for” — telling The Oregonian/OregonLive in an email that “it would be most accurate to say that the Oregon Medical Board introduced the bill.”

Bezerra then referred questions about whether the governor was aware the term was in the bill and whether she viewed it as derogatory to the Oregon Medical Board’s executive director, Nicole Krishnaswami.

Krishnaswami told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an email that “the original bill language was OKed by the Executive Branch to allow the OMB to introduce the bill, but I do not have knowledge as to whether or not Governor Kotek had any opinion on the bill or the term.”

Krishnaswami said in drafting the bill, the Oregon Medical Board asked the Oregon Association of Acupuncturists “whether they would like us to replace this outdated term; however, they were reluctant to do so because there is not a universally accepted substitute.”

Amber Reding-Gazzini, the association’s president, told the news organization that her association originally didn’t want the bill to open up a wide section of Oregon law regulating acupuncture to large-scale vetting. All the bill set out to update was the definition of acupuncture and its oversight by the Oregon Medical Board, she noted. The industry has struggled to gain standing over the years as a recognized medical profession, and Reding-Gazzini said she wanted to keep changes to the law to the bare minimum.

She said when she learned Pham had objected to using the term in law, the association was supportive of the proposed fix: replacing the term the lawmakers objected to with “traditional Eastern medicine.”

“We as a professional association do agree that Oriental is antiquated, it’s derogatory and even if it only offends 1% of the population, it’s time to change the language,” Reding-Gazzini said.

It was about a decade ago that the association changed its name to remove the offending term, Reding-Gazzini said. She said the term first showed up in state statute regulating acupuncture in the 1970s.

The term nevertheless remains in use in numerous references to acupuncture, including in the degrees that some acupuncturists receive and in the name of the organization that certifies them.

Rep. Hai Pham​, a Democrat from Hillsboro, said he considers the original term in Senate Bill 874 “derogatory” but “not outright racist.” He knows of no other references in Oregon law, but if the word is uncovered in other statutes, he believes it should be removed.

Mark Graves/The Oregonian

While many Asian Americans say it’s impossible to uncouple any use of the term with the historical baggage it carries, others say

they’re not offended

, in part because the Orient was a geographical reference. Today in Oregon, the term is used in the name of a handful of businesses, mostly restaurants serving Asian cuisine, including one just three miles from the Capitol in Salem.

But use of the term clearly has been on the steep decline in recent years, with its removal from the names of

theaters

,

museums

, organizations, Asian studies programs, laws and even a

brand of ramen

. In 2009,

New York rid

state documents of the word.

In 2016,

Congress unanimously passed

a bill removing “Oriental” and “negro” from all federal statutes, or, as an article in The Atlantic put it,

“U.S. Laws Will No Longer Sound Like a Vaguely Racist Uncle.”

Rep. Rob Nosse

, a Portland Democrat and chair of the committee that could have ended up blocking Senate Bill 874, said he was faced with a dilemma: The bill had already passed the Senate and landed in his committee. Nosse, who is white, had initially questioned the use of the term in the bill during a public hearing, but accepted the Oregon Medical Board’s explanation that it wanted to keep the term for now. Nosse said he hoped another bill would update the term in a future session.

But Nosse said the four other Democratic members of his nine-member committee, all people of color, told him they wouldn’t vote for the bill if the offending term remained in it. He said he asked the committee’s four Republicans for their support.

“It became a thing for a hot minute because I think sometimes the Republicans think we’re being politically correct,” Nosse said of him and his Democratic colleagues. “But cooler heads prevailed. Maybe smarter heads. And people got to work and figured it out.”

Republicans rejected the

first amendment

that Democrats on the committee proposed. It laid out the numerous reasons for rejecting the term, including that it “has been used to racialize and portray Asian peoples and cultures as perpetually foreign, exotic and ‘other’ in American society.” Nosse and at least one Republican on the committee told The Oregonian/OregonLive that that was too much for Republicans.

A

second amendment

removed those explanations.

Rep. Cyrus Javadi

, a Republican from Tillamook, said he and his Republican colleagues on the committee disapproved of the original amendment “not because anyone thought the term ‘Oriental medicine’ should stick around” but because the explanations in the amendment “felt more like a political statement than a necessary fix. One of my colleagues put it plainly: It read like a moral lecture.”

Javadi, who is white and the grandchild of a Persian immigrant, said he thought that the amendment that removed the explanations struck the right balance — “respectful without being political theater.”

That version passed unanimously out of committee last month and the House floor on Tuesday. The amended bill must return to the Senate for a second vote before awaiting the governor’s signature to become law.

Nosse said he can’t speak to the specifics of how the bill got as far as it did with that term in it. But he does think the legislative process worked.

“This is what happens when you have a more diverse Legislature, which I think is a good thing,” Nosse said. “My nonwhite colleagues took a look at ‘Oriental medicine’ …and they said ‘Why are we using this outdated term in our statute?’”

He added: “Good for them. It was an appropriate stand.”

—

Aimee Green covers the Oregon Legislature. Reach her at 503-294-5119,


agreen@oregonian.com


or on


Bluesky


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