Generalist_Practice

Generalist Practice Assignment 1 10/3/2011 In today’s society there are many difficult and challenging things taking place that many of us are dealing with. It seems that the economy is not getting any better and people are struggling with the adjustments that they are making to make in order to cut back and to survive. In the 1990’s in my teenage years that economy was doing well and Bill Clinton was president which represented the greatest growth the economy had seen in quite some time. However I still noticed things in my neighborhood that didn’t sit well with me as I also noticed things in my own life which made me feel that my society was more than just the status of the economy. My background is of mixed decent. My mother is Swedish decent and my father is African American decent which makes me what they used to call “Mulatto.” I grew up in West Salem, Oregon and in 1990 there weren’t many like me. It didn’t take long for me to see that people, including teachers, were curious about me and what my “ethnicity” was. As I grew up I came across more African American friends and I started to realize that for being such a small population in Oregon, they all seemed to have a family who was in jail. I quickly realized that this was not the case with my many white friends, most of whom had never seen the inside of a jail. My father worked as the head chaplain at the (OSP) Oregon State penitentiary for men from 1988-1990 and I had the privilege to go inside the “Pen” to see where my father worked. I finally found out where all the African Americans were located in Oregon. For how small a percentage that blacks make up Oregon, it appeared that they were the dominant number in the “Pen.” As I got older I realized that there was something more to the number of blacks in the state pen then just simply crimes gone wrong. As I talked to family members and friends about what had happened it seemed like the punishments for the crime were quite severe. In hindsight this is why I became interested in social work. Not only were many of these people doing hard time but they had families on the outside including little children and grandparents.