'Multnomah County is acting lawfully,' spokesperson declares.
In a daily report dedicated to news updates and guidance for county employees fighting the coronavirus, an Oregon county in the Portland area said it was creating a safe "grounding space" for minority staff to escape a predominant “whiteness.”
The April 5 "situation report" from the Multnomah County Office of Emergency Operations Center announced that the "Emergency Operations Center Equity Officer is hosting a grounding space for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) employees to share, heal, connect, and get grounded in a space that is not dominated by whiteness."

Heather Mac Donald, a Stanford-trained attorney and fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research who writes about policing, homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform and race relations, told Just the News that Multnomah County’s actions are particularly disturbing during a time of emergency.
“Identity politics long ago jumped from the university into the world at large, above all, into highly receptive government agencies and social service groups,” Mac Donald said. “It is of course outrageous that any alleged public health or service organization would spend any energy on reinforcing racial victimology and racial discrimination during this time of allegedly overburdened public health systems. But race hatred has been so baked into many government agencies by now that it is par for the course.”
Ron Christie, an African-American and senior staffer in the George W. Bush administration who was instrumental in getting federal backing for the The National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution, told Just the News that he found Multnomah County’s initiative to be "unconscionable.”
“If what has been reported in Portland is true, that people are being identified and classified based on racial or ethnic characteristics, it continues a disturbing trend that we've seen for the past several years, where public and private institutions are seemingly self-segregating in a time when we just had the first African-American president for eight years,” Christie said in...