One notable moment over the weekend was when a Black Lives Matter/“defund the police” demonstrator downtown (I was watching on KPTV’s secondary channel) cautioned against letting Portland’s reputation as the whitest big city in the United States effectively erase the black people who do live here. It’s a good warning, because I think sometimes white Oregonians, or at least those in the Willamette Valley, have this weird sense of self-flagellating pride in confessing Oregon’s sins, in a sort of backwards way that’s more about showing off how they are confessing than it is about the actual sins or their reverberations into the present.
At any rate, OPB News has a conversation with Walidah Imarisha about that history that’s one of the more concise and incisive looks out of the many that have been done over the years.
“This is an ideology that is not only alive, it’s serving as the foundation for the institutions of Oregon,” said Imarisha. “Oregon is a useful case study for the rest of the nation because the only thing unique about Oregon is [it] was bold enough to write it down. The same policies, practices and ideologies that shaped Oregon, shaped the nation as a whole.”
Emphasis added. If we’re going to talk about Oregon’s sin, at least let a black Oregonian do the talking. Off her blog, I also found this Portland Monthly piece from earlier this year in which Imarisha describes her “eight years of talking about the brutal history of race in Oregon”
Addenda
- Guess who slipped up and used the white default? I’ve changed “sometimes Oregonians” to “sometimes white Oregonians”.