Portland, Oregon is the bastion of locally sourced and artisanal progressivism; where unconventional is the norm and where “post-Scandinavian folk-punk” is playing at the coffee shops. At least that is the perception received after watching the IFC television show Portlandia. The show starts off with a song with the lyrics, “the spirit of the nineties is alive in Portland,” and ends with the group of 20+ characters moving to the city to peruse it’s counter-culture friendly lifestyle. One striking feature of the show is it’s lack of diversity. Nearly all of the shows characters are white. However, the show’s deficiency of cross-culturalism is not another example of white-washing, it’s fairly representative of the city. The white population of
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Kamau Bell, comedian and the host of show United Shades of America describes his encounters with white Portland residents like, “Hipster – ‘YAY, PORTLAND!’ Me – ‘Where are all the black people?’ Hipster - "Oh yeah..." Hipster looks down at their feet until I go away.” In the 70’s and 80’s, Portland’s political culture was known for perpetuating the status-quo. But recently artsy people like those featured in Portlandia began their takeover of the political scene. The city is now run under the mantra, “Keep Portland Weird,” and is ripe with liberal policies. However, this takeover did not seem to coexist with a conversation about the city’s racist past. It’s not that the current residents mean to add to the destruction of black communities. They just have not had the chance to interact with those people who have experienced it. New Portland residents who move to the communities in and around Albania may never encounter a black resident that lived there in the 1970s. In order to curb the effects of the discriminatory practices and policies, the city government needs to make efforts educate the white residents about the history of the area. In order to do so, there needs to be an increase in communication between the displaced populations and the new residents. It is impossible to right the wrongs of previous generations, but we can alleviate the
Kamau Bell, comedian and the host of show United Shades of America describes his encounters with white Portland residents like, “Hipster – ‘YAY, PORTLAND!’ Me – ‘Where are all the black people?’ Hipster - "Oh yeah..." Hipster looks down at their feet until I go away.” In the 70’s and 80’s, Portland’s political culture was known for perpetuating the status-quo. But recently artsy people like those featured in Portlandia began their takeover of the political scene. The city is now run under the mantra, “Keep Portland Weird,” and is ripe with liberal policies. However, this takeover did not seem to coexist with a conversation about the city’s racist past. It’s not that the current residents mean to add to the destruction of black communities. They just have not had the chance to interact with those people who have experienced it. New Portland residents who move to the communities in and around Albania may never encounter a black resident that lived there in the 1970s. In order to curb the effects of the discriminatory practices and policies, the city government needs to make efforts educate the white residents about the history of the area. In order to do so, there needs to be an increase in communication between the displaced populations and the new residents. It is impossible to right the wrongs of previous generations, but we can alleviate the