theracialproblemspdx-blog

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This is still happening, we just don’t talk about it...

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Segregation in Schools

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7 C’s Example 3- Controversy with Civility

In the video it uses controversy with civility to confront the idea that segregation in schools is long gone and over with. It tackles the idea that the modern segregation in our school systems has to do with a sort of free market that parents can choose where to send their kids to instead of racial and income inequality. It is important that the video addresses these issues because if the problem of modern school segregation was just presented as a racial issue some people might not pay any attention to it because they believe that there are other reasons for it. By addressing these other reasons and showing people why they might not be true, it allows the conversation to move forward. It connects modern segregation in schools, and now although it is talked about it never reaches everyday society. We know that segregation is a continuous movement in America, and yet we don’t do anything to change it. We live our lives in constant ignorance, to which we do not acknowledge that this is constant and happening everyday. It is a controversial statement to say that segregation is still constant, it connects with society and the need to talk about it.

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7 C example 2

This is an example of how Twitter enables rapid, small scale collaboration and development of common purpose across huge networks of people. Matthew Yglesias was able to reach at least one hundred additional people with a valuable tool to help educate themselves on school segregation issues, while also himself contributing to the popularity of another tweet which reached almost a thousand people (not to mention the retweets). These sorts of lightening fast, uninhibited sharing of information helps develop a group understanding of core issues and can therefore develop common purpose and collaboration.

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7 C example 1

https://www.colorlines.com/articles/gentrification-spotlight-how-portland-pushing-out-its-black-residents-part-2 This article demonstrates both the failures of the non-conscious-self and collaboration in Portland’s anemic response to the on-going gentrification crises, as well as the great power of citizenship and common purpose exhibited by the black community.

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The video discusses funding sources for school districts, the block-by-block redistricting to corral poor students, a personal explanation by one of the panelists, the way school segregation is incentivized thought property taxes, and various ways it occurs in different contexts.

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Gentrification in Portland, two methods of analysis.

Retail Gentrification and Race: The Case of Alberta Street in Portland, Oregon In this article it is explaining that Alberta street is know for trying to make Portland diverse and yet it seems that black businesses are declining and there has been an increase in white businesses. This is why we are having trouble with gentrification in Portland. We are taking business that were once black owned and practically handing it to the majority on a silver platter.  This begins to create a discord between the different ethnicities, when one sees it as an exciting step, the other see it as repressive and that it does nothing to improve the community. This labels the majority as the “creative class” when they have been using the minorities ideas, titles and business to further their own interests. This article explains that the mainstream white residents embrace this change because they do not know better. They expect to get what they want and they do, but the black people in this neighborhood disagree. They are taking our businesses, jacking up the prices therefore the black families that owned them before can no longer afford to rent the places their shops are in. This promotes an unequal divide and it begins to cause gentrification.

Riding tandem: Does cycling infrastructure investment mirror gentrification and privilege in Portland, OR and Chicago, IL

There are many ways that researchers use to measure gentrification and most of the ‘official’ number-based sources are insufficient. In neighborhoods that have been ‘laissez-faire diverse’ (as the Alberta article puts it) you can’t simply measure a ratio of black to white businesses as there are already plenty of both. As such researchers have gone as far as using google street view and counting new coffee shops in an effort to identify gentrification. One contested symbol of gentrification is the amount of investment in bike infrastructure, as bike services are strongly associated with an upper-class / educated demographic despite there being a larger percentage of usage among hispanic residents. This paper sets out to discover if bike investment and gentrification are linked.

The model used to examine this question takes a number of different economic indicators, such as percent college graduates and household income, from the census years 1990 to 2010 in Portland and Chicago, to estimate the amount of privilege in an area. They control for population density, historical investment, and many other variables with linear regressions. They find that bike investment is heavily class and education linked in both cities, but that only chicago shows a distinctly racial bias. However, the authors warn this could be due to the small population of POC in portland compared to chicago.

Comparison

Gentrification is not a simple subject and these two articles perfectly demonstrate that. Despite covering the same area and similar time periods, they are polar opposites in the basis of their techniques. The first is based on interviews and focuses on the relationship between residents and their space and how much they feel it reflects their cultural norms. The second is a purely numbers based approach that completely disregards this soft feeling of belonging and I personally feel that the study is much the worse for it. These kinds of investments, if made flippantly without consulting the target community, send a strong message as to who the city wants in their space and those messages most often have a racist origin and legacy.

Works Cited:

Flanagan, et al. “Riding Tandem: Does Cycling Infrastructure Investment Mirror Gentrification and Privilege in Portland, OR and Chicago, IL?” Research in Transportation Economics, vol. 60, 2016, pp. 14–24.

Monroe Sullivan, Daniel, and Samuel C Shaw. “Retail Gentrification and Race: The Case of Alberta Street in Portland, Oregon.” Urban Affairs Review, vol. 47, no. 3, 2011, pp. 413–432.

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Transcript of interview with Keela Johnson

Can you give us a run down on who you are and what your background is in relation to portland and minority issues?

My name is Keela Johnson, I am currently working on my PHD in social work, I’ve been in portland for about 11 years. I’m originally from the east coast but I’ve lived everywhere and as far as being here in portland… I kinda got involved doing social justice work immediately upon my arrival when I started working for an attorney and he was just kinda like ‘no, get out, you’re too smart to be my assistant, go to school’. So I did, and that led me down the path of teaching and being involved in other organizations around the community. I’m a dialog specialist and facilitator and trainer by trade. So that’s kind of how I kind of got into all this. I got into school and I realized I needed to teach people some stuff because they weren’t hearing what.

How has Portland’s gentrification and segregation affected your life?

It affects my life everyday. What really bothers me is understanding that there’s such a rich history in Portland of African Americans and the African Diaspora that’s been completely stripped and people have been displaced. It’s very difficult to build spaces for individuals to build spaces to talk about their experiences. Since I’m not a native portlander it hasn’t affected me in a negative way as much as it has with the way I’ve been able to navigate in the community and spending many days, hours, and months, talking with people and realizing how they’ve been completely displaced, complete areas where they grew up and have all these great memories of their childhood replaced by Trader Joe's, or Whole foods, and it doesn’t look like the community they knew. Hearing their stories effected, how they had to figure it out on their own and be displaced and put so far out that it’s not only affecting them personally but it’s also about their economic viability and receiving the services that they need. And it’s just not there anymore.

What forces do you think are creating or maintaining portland’s de facto segregation?

The fact that portland in itself is passive-progressive. Portland speaks a very good game, they say a lot about a racially equitable state of being but they take no action. All systems are affected by it because all systems are part of a bigger institution and they’ve not made any major changes. By being so complacent, Portland has been complicit in maintaining segregation.

What sort of major changes would be useful?

First and foremost, people should acknowledge that they are completely displacing individuals. Create more affordable housing areas and more historic areas. People of color in portland don’t feel like city hall is on their side. They aren’t comfortable enough to go in and speak their truth. But when they do city hall just goes ‘Ok, ok, we heard you’ and then city hall moves on to the next thing. Until someone someone from the national news comes by with a critique, then city hall says ‘Oh yes, we had someone talk to us about this’; it’s a tokenizing response. That’s a huge problem that can be changed right now. If you’re truly concerned about communities of color, racially marginalized identities, why don’t you go into those communities, ask for permission to be part of those communities, and ask for those individuals to share their experiences with you and ask them what they would like to see happen? Rather than assuming you know what’s best for them because you hold some kind of degree or hold some position of power in the government. But these individuals actually do nothing to benefit people of color and don’t make any lasting change.

When you worked in the Office of Neighborhood Involvement (ONI), did your experience highlight any of the racial issues in portland (specifically in terms of what we’ve discussed)?

I didn’t really work in ONI but a lot of the contract work I do allows me to be involved with ONI. But in my time I know ONI was truly trying to connect with communities of racially marginalized communities and other community group members. But that is also problematic because if you look at the individuals that run the organizations, they don’t look like the communities they’re actually trying to serve. That can be a problem, you can’t expect people to open up to you if you look like the party that’s done nothing but oppress them.

What about when you worked with the Independent Police Review (IPR)?

I love the IPR, they’re genuinely trying to figure out every avenue they can to find the best way to make individuals know that they are a part of the greater community and that these services are there for them. One part that I really appreciated was that the independent review sought me out, to ask me if there’s something I could do to assist them, because they knew they needed to find a way to connect with people on a personal level. The IPR wants their communities to feel like there’s an interpersonal relationship being developed and that people are gaining the information that they need to know, that these services are here for you just like everyone else. When you walk through those doors, you’re not going to be treated any differently. It also allowed them to realize what they were lacking. For example, when someone calls the independent police review board, they may not speak english and so these people chose not to reach out. They IPR realized they needed multilingual people to help them assist anyone who comes in, to make sure their materials have multiple languages. And I don’t just mean spanish and english, I mean English, Spanish Japanese, Chinese, mandarin, African languages, and all of that. Because they know the communities they’re trying to serve, they reached out to members of these communities and asked them to help make their services more accessible to community members. So that’s a thing that I applaud them for. They went above and beyond to reach out themselves, to see what they can do, and not based on what they feel they could do but based on what the communities tell them they need.

So would you say that’s a good counterexample to the ONI case?

Yes but I know ONI is trying, one of the people you could talk to about ONI is your former professor arianna [...]

Who typically attends your equity workshops?

Generally it’s white women between the ages of 18 and 45. People who want the workshop and who want to know how to do the work; but there’s also this other fear of ‘am I just teaching you to be a better racist’, or are you actively participating to understand how we eradicate this? So unless my workshops are contracted for a specific organization it generally is just white women. Rarely do I have participants from marginalized identities because they already know it. They live it daily and the last thing I want to do is put them on the spot, make them tokens, and have them tell their story to people who will do nothing with it but utilize it against them.

How do we get more portlanders or students involved or engaged with discourse?

By having the real conversations, acknowledging that people of color and women and others from oppressed and marginalized communities should not be put on display to tell you their lived experience. You see it, maybe if you pay attention to it and become OK with discomfort and start putting the onus on yourself to start to have some real in depth conversations but as long as one group is always allowed to be comfortable none of this will happen.

There’s this organization called BICEP that wants to develop MLK road and bring in a lot of black businesses and help black people get access to finances. It’s a different path than the usual discourse based solutions I hear and there where some worries about ‘black gentrification’ as well. What do you think about it?

I love it. It’s very difficult for black Americans to have any sort of economic viability so when it comes to a point where we can set up shop and we can have our own businesses and our own communities and spend our money in those areas, that helps build the generational wealth which has been stripped from us for hundreds of years. To me, it’s something that’s needed and it’s past time that it should have been done. And I think another thing we don’t think about is that part of the way our nation state thrives is because we were able to get so much free labor out of so many people. But now because of that, we have white bodied individuals who are holding on to all of the wealth. There’s no kind of ‘reverse gentrifying’, they’re taking back their land and their areas that are their communities and that land being sold out from under them. I think it’s amazing that people are starting to buy that land back and starting to push for black and brown businesses to be in that area.

The reason I used the phrase black gentrifying’ is because I saw some worries that, if black people create this really vibrant space downtown, all the white people are going to move in and gentrify it.

This is something that really needs to be talked about. Like if you think about what used to be old japantown or old chinatown, that’s kind of what happened. It becomes fetishized so then people move in and the individuals that live there start to realize that ‘I’m just this thing to these people and they’re trampling all over my ethnic identity and heritage’. But those from the dominant culture don’t see that, they see themselves as being inquisitive and being curious and wanting to be a part of without realizing that sometimes being a part of means you’re tearing down and building back up what seems comfortable to you. And that seems to happen quite a bit, especially in the Portland area, there is a lot of cultural appropriation that is beyond belief. And just being able to have those conversations around, say, why I have a problem when I see a white woman walking down the street with cornrows. I don’t have a problem with the cornrows, I have a problem because you don’t even understand what that represents. And then when the conversation comes up, even though it’s about hair, it’s a symbol of what that hair and that style meant for people in the african american community. There’s just a lot of cultural appropriation going on. And I think that’s something we need to talk about, and cultural appropriation doesnt lead to social change and equity. It actually vilifies the culture appropriating everyone’s stuff because they’re not willing to have a conversation around why it’s not ok.

Kind of like the discomfort point you mentioned? Exactly. That’s the problem with this city. ‘Keep Portland Weird’ is a great moniker but ‘Keep Portland Honest’ would change a lot. Because if they were honest they would understand that there’s an acceptance of what is considered to be abnormal beyond the normative but there’s no acceptance to how you are playing into that and perpetuating and feeding it.

Portland has a long history of legal discrimination. For example, a lot of deeds around Portland and Beaverton have racial exclusion clauses and the government passed a law fast tracking the removal of these clauses for homeowners who wished to do so. Do you think this is an example of Portland sweeping racism under the rug, or is it actually beneficial?

Well, a lot of people don’t even understand the real history of Oregon. People don’t realize that Oregon was founded as a white utopia. It was in the constitution until 2001 that black people where illegal aliens. This is the history of this state. We have this proper way of saying things but Portland did a lot to harm indigenous bodies and black bodies and brown bodies, and there’s no accountability for it in anyway shape or form. There’s always a way of sweeping it under the rug as if we’re past that. But trauma is intergenerational, trauma stays with you and then when you’re seeing the same shit that was harming your ancestors continuing to this day, nothing has changed. There’s just better ways of hiding it. It’s still the same racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, ideology that we’re fighting against. But those that suffer from it are always supposed to be OK with this discomfort and those that are privileged from it are never supposed to be in discomfort. And flipping that is a huge part of the work that I do; everybody is in discomfort. Because we should not be comfortable talking about the shit that is happening because we haven’t done enough to change it. So if you’re coming to my workshops and think it’s about comfort and non-shaming or blaming, nope. Everybody should be ashamed that we live in the society we live in and everyone’s to blame for not doing enough and the dominant culture has to take a lot of that blame on themselves because you all get to dictate what the narrative is. But when the narrative doesn’t fit the traditional tropes that you’re used to hearing, there’s a disconnect and when that disconnect happens the only people that suffer are those that already continually suffer daily to begin with. And that’s what I mean by honest, real conversations. Sit in it, be in discomfort, we didn’t create it, we didn’t ask for it, but we can’t also sit around and say ��what can we do to change it” and not actively do a damn thing about it.

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Stakeholders

BICEP is one of the main stakeholders with interest in the modern segregation of Portland. BICEP stands for the Black Investment Consortium for Economic Progress and according to their website, they are “a group of African-American professionals who came together to envision a plan for more socially responsible commercial development and revitalization in the North / Northeast of Portland, Oregon” (Soul District PDX). They were impacted because of gentrification and this is their solution to taking what was theirs back. Another stakeholder is Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives. They also are trying to fight back against gentrification and they state, “PCRI has reinvested in Portland’s neighborhoods, preserved their diversity and provided tools to help low-income Portland families and individuals achieve stability and self-sufficiency” (PCRI) 

Although both organizations are fighting against the same thing they are going about it in slightly different ways. BICEP is putting emphasis on black owned and run businesses and developing a place where they can all be. PCRI on the other hand is focused on giving tools and help to people so that they can own their own homes in the neighborhoods they were forced out of due to gentrification. Both organizations however are going about their plans by buying and investing in real estate that was once part of places that were affected by redlining. The main goal is to take back the historically black parts of town because African Americans were once forced to live there and are now being pushed out. It is reclaiming what once was theirs. 

Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives Inc. · Meeting the Affordable Housing Needs of the Community. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://pcrihome.org/

The SOUL DISTRICT. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.souldistrictpdx.com/

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How does gentrification  affect your life?

“ It affects my life everyday,I think one of the things that truly bothers me is understanding that there is such a rich history in Portland of African Americans and the African diaspora.Then to realize that it's been completely stripped and people have been displaced. It's very difficult whenever i'm in spaces to talk to individuals about their lived experiences and yeah. SInce I'm not a native Portlander it's not like it's ever really affected me in a negative way as much as it has with the way that I have been able to navigate my way into the community. Spending many days, hours and months looking for and realizing that they have been completely displaced in complete areas where they grew up in”

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I think it is really cool that an entertainer like Macklemore is calling this specific thing out. Especially because drug use is a common topic in his genre. I know he has also called out drug addiction in his song Otherside, which is also really hard hitting.He seems to attack the problem of addiction from multiple sides, one from the pharmaceutical and the other from recreational. Big Pharma seems especially sinister in this respect because the health industry is supposed to be the ones that are taking care of us. Props to Macklemore using his influence for good and to call out things he think should be changed

BLOG DELIVERABLE #4- SONG

This song discusses the overprescription problem in America. It gives the unique, heartfelt perspective of a loved one of an addict. Macklemore spits a lot of real stuff in this song and it’s groovy so I encourage everyone to listen, really hear, and decide what you think about the Big Pharma and our complicity in it. This is touching more lives than most care to acknowledge, and if we don’t stand up to stop it who will? “America, is it worth it?”

#BigPharma #Macklemore #Overprescription #AmericanOpioidCrisis

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This podcast is about the Vanport, Oregon Flood in 1948 and its racial background. In 1943 there was a need for workers in the shipyards as most of the able bodied white men were off fighting in the war. There were African Americans able to fill the spaces needed but because Oregon had a clause in its constitution that prohibited them from owning property or houses Kaiser Shipyards needed to build temporary housing so that they could have their workforce. On top of being built in a flood zone the houses were shoddily built and lacked many necessities. On May 30th the dikes in the area burst due to heavy rainfall, the whole town was flooded and destroyed but thankfully only 15 people were killed (the casualties could have been higher but many people were out of town for Memorial Day). Suddenly many people were homeless and this disaster actually contributed to starting to integrate Portland as the city had nowhere to “put” the African American population.

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Blog Deliverable #4

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5fts7bj-so&feature=youtu.be 

 The NWA were a very influential group that often made songs that reflected their experiences with racism and this was a song about police brutality and racial profiling. "cause I'm brown and not the other color so police think they have the authority to kill a minority”

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This is Blog Deliverable 4, by Mikayla. One part of modern segregation that kept coming back up again and again, is how gentrification leads to de facto segregation by pushing out black communities. So for this deliverable, I chose a podcast that took a wide angle view of the entire U.S. and examined what the full story is at all levels. The results where shocking, people aren’t displaced by gentrification. People don’t leave gentrifying neighborhoods any faster than they do normally, but if a neighborhood is gentrifying the person who moves into the vacant space tends to be whiter/richer than the one who left. It also is quite beneficial for any business owner and property holders in the area and tends to lead to an increase in available services like doctors. Gentrification also comes with a lot of negative cultural effects such as increased police presence and an influx of upper-middle-class/white businesses like Starbucks. All in all, it’s a deep issue with a lot of complex facets. Over the next two blog deliverables I’m going to see if I can apply this to Portland and then I plan to research one of the most blatant examples of all: school segregation.

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CW: discussions on racism and it’s debilitating economic effects by a dumb white girl student. (also, I flash my hands at the screen rudely at 10:46)

I talk for 15 minutes about this week’s deliverable  link to the podcast that also includes sources for everything in the podcast and half of my videos.

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Blog Deliverable #3

Writers note: this assignment has been difficult as there is near universal support for anti-segregation efforts. Therefore I’ve chosen to examine two different approaches to the issue and compare and contrast them using the social change model.

Given it’s deeply racist history and progressive politics, people in every corner of portland are working to alleviate the suffering faced by people of color. We can use the serving/helping model to analyze these tactics to determine how effectively they support the people in need.

The first attempt we wish to highlight is BICEP, an initiative by a portland native to create a Soul District around MLK blvd. It’s been in operation for three years and has successfully run three ‘PitchBlack’ startup events and is working on providing the financial and legal support that the african american community has been denied for so long. This is a strong example of service oriented leadership that demonstrates strong congruence and collaboration to effect change. BICEP isn’t creating a product or demanding that people move to certain areas, it’s instead offering a service that the community desperately needs to empower the people in it’s area.

Now contrast this with another local issue that came up last year: racial exclusion clauses in property deeds. Many homes in the portland area explicitly ban people of non-white races from owning and even though these have been unenforceable since the ‘50s but they’ve persisted due to the difficulty of legally removing them. Recently, a law was passed fast tracking the removal of these clauses but it’s caused something of a stir among historians. Portland’s racist history is deeply embedded and they fear that quietly removing these clauses erases this historical legacy of oppression and let’s modern portland off the hook for these problems. This is an example of a governmental ‘fixing’ mindset; the government wants to simply fix this problem and have it go away rather than addressing the fundamental issues that caused it.

The serving / fixing dichotomy is at the heart of anti-segregation / anti-racism activism and everyone involved needs to be aware of it if they want to truly solve these issues.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/23/portland-soul-district-gentrification Work by the black community to reclaim their space.

https://expo.oregonlive.com/erry-2018/05/fcd13cb4387071/racist_restrictions_now_illega.html

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A group of historians working to right the wrongs of portland’s racist past.