Feature
Aug 23, 2017
Comments are closed.
Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.
All contents © Index Newspapers LLC
PO Box 86208, Portland, OR 97286
Comments
But of course, it's a comment in response to yet another badly written essay that is a list of minor annoyances conflated to major injustices, so who's surprised?
I am also Indian American and live in Portland. I do get asked about my ethnicity sometimes and people often comment on my name ( oh where’s that from, what an unusual name, I’ve never heard that name before, etc). I don’t consider that offensive, they are curious. If I lived in many places that weren’t India, I would get similar comments. I have also lived in Ohio and comments I got there about my background were actually offensive and not driven by curiosity. In Ohio, I have been asked if I lived in a hut instead of a house in India (by my school teacher in front of the entire class), if people in India owned TVs, and when I said my name they said it was too hard to pronounce and asked if they call me Debbie instead.
Portland has its problem but this article really failed to articulate any of them. Personally, any hostility that I feel here from the progressives isn’t based on being a person of color, it comes from the fact that I has moderate political views instead of super liberal ones. There is intolerance for political beliefs here in Portland when they go against the progressives ones.
This article was crap, and people have the right to say so: As many noted, his examples were poor, and his generalizations undermined his points further. The fact that several people he interviewed identify him as part of the problem, and rightfully so.
The worst part is that this is how The Merc always approaches race. It really oughta stop.
As far as Portland goes, there's all sorts of people here; they come from all over. So a couple of anecdotes about some time you felt vaguely uncomfortable don't really mean a damn thing as regards the city. You might well have been talking to someone who just moved here, say.
I'm not gong to be asking you questions about ethnicity, race, religion largely speaking until you bring it up. But - I'm always gonna treat an idiot like an idiot, regardless of who.
The real miracle, by the way, would be if we ever had an honest conversation about Class in America. That'd be a hoot.
What the hell does "white person" even mean anyway? Can we please get a working definition of the term?
Are we meant to believe that every Albanian, Belgian, Cypriot, Dane, Egyptian, Frenchman, German, Hungarian, Italian, Jordanian, Kulak, Lithuanian, Montenegrin, Norwegian, Ossetian, Pole, Québécois, Russian, Spaniard, Turk, Ukrainian, Venetian, Welshman, Yemeni, and New Zealander (just to name a few) are all part of the same monolithic culture?
Why not live in a predominantly black/Asian/Muslim/Jewish/Hindu/Native American community?
My goodness, you have the entire WORLD to choose from.
Try Bombay, Detroit, Calcutta, East St. Louis, Lahore, Compton, Mexico City, Baltimore, Peking, Camden, Dehli, Tel Aviv, or tens of thousands of vibrant, white-free zones.
If you're an officially designated 'oppressed minority', your life will suck for eternity regardless of what you do. If you're white, especially a white hetero male; you are scum.... evil scum regardless of any good works you might have done.
This is the environment of the left and if you don't buy into it.... you're a racist or a traitor to your race. Such a lovely life.
Imagine the foaming SJW outrage if a white woman had said the same thing about black people. It would rightly be called racism.
The sum total of this piece is that Portland would be nice -- with fewer white people The fundamental problem seems to be that white people have the temerity to exist:
“Her fix for enduring the city was to “avoid white people at all costs.’”
“The thing that trips me out about Portland is not that it’s so white.”
“Living in Portland made me hate white people!”
So the solution to this poor author's suffering is immediate reduction in the existence of white people, then?
When a heart is so hardened by being asked where he’s from, is there any hope?
Evidence of mind-reading too: “The issue is that for many white people, they walk into an office meeting or classroom, see no people of color around, and feel like there’s nothing wrong about that.” How could that be? They don’t look around the room, see individuals but representatives of race, and say ‘Something’s wrong! We aren’t individuals, we are either part of a tribe or nothing!’?
“I feel normal again cause I see people like me around everywhere.” Ah, race-specific bias: in-group preference, out-group abhorrence.
“In Portland the most painful experience was that my white friends and colleagues very much resisted and refuted the idea that it was a difficult place for people of color.” You had white friends?-- but I thought you hated them? Maybe they refuted the idea because they didn’t adhere to your exemplary point of view, namely that they can only “feel normal again” when they see people like themselves.
In other words, they have had racism driven out of them by cultural stigmatization of your kind of bigotry, and strive to eradicate it, while you’re only too happy to indulge in it.
“Basically the Pacific Northwest is super toxic for people of color... it’s been great to be around so many Black and brown folks in the Bay Area.” (Away from those icky whites). Toxic, as in deadly? Face the truth: you just hate non-POC, and love to indulge in hate--so their very existence/co-existence is “toxic” to you... just by being themselves. If you spew venom and poison, don’t be surprised if your environment becomes toxic.
“One Black woman I interviewed regards new Portlanders of color like me to be just as annoying as the white gentrifiers who plant Black Lives Matter signs on their lawn while pushing out longtime Black residents.”
Were there incidents of white pro-civil rights activists on a surreptitious Gentrification mission, grabbing Black residents and pushing them out? No? If a white individual buys a black person’s house, this is “pushing them out”? When white people move away, it’s racist: “white flight.” When they move back, it’s Gentrification (also racist).
White supremacists in the region of George Wallace refused to drink from the same water fountain as a Black person. Presumably, these bigots wouldn’t eat on the same plate, sit in the same chair, or use the same toilet seat. Now, if a white person moves into a home owned by a black person, this is somehow just as negative, although by any lights this is a rejection of the supremacist resistance to “miscegenation.”
Sometimes a white person who treats a Black person badly is simply a jerk, but an interaction is transmogrified into evidence of racism; the disrespect might just be that person’s fundamental nature. Even so, a paranoiac will add this to a litany of racial grievances.
The only way to know if there’s a racial component to disrespect is how you’re treated by this individual relative to others of a different race. What if Portland is simply filled with jerks/ smug idiots? When you’re a Black person surrounded by sneering white pompous snobs, who sneer at other whites just as much, give it try and say “it’s all relative.”
And that truth goes both ways: if a lot of people treat you like you’re a creep, maybe, just maybe, you’re a creep. If POC are the only people who treat you well, maybe they, on a group basis, are consciously overriding their honest opinion of you, in some kind solidarity, overriding their real feelings.
I hope most people of all races reject this author's divisive, nasty, self-righteous hypocrisy and myopia.