I didn’t want to get out of the car in Portland, Oregon. The strange people crowding the sidewalk with aimless stares and wayward beards made me nervous. We had been warned about the cult of odd that hung about Portland like a flannel shirt. The city embraces the weird like a brand: a marketing coup celebrating hipsters and thrift store sweaters, black rimmed glasses and messenger bags. We drove up and down the streets with the windows rolled up tightly, avoiding eye contact, understanding fully why Sasquatch sightings have been reported nearby. I have never seen so many bearded, barefoot men in one place walking around.
I think Oregon welcomes drifters, hikers, bikers, outsiders, vagabonds, hippies, and wanderers to cross their borders for a dreamland of peace and progressivism. But, I didn’t even want to visit Powell’s Books, the world’s largest independent bookstore, a true city of books, after driving past the entrance several times and seeing intense verbal exchanges between groups of men standing just outside. Something was amiss, and it took me awhile to figure out exactly what was causing the cognitive dissonance in the City of Roses. Wasn’t Portland supposed to be a Mecca for open-mindedness, diversity, and liberalism? I sensed a rot in Portland stemming from something other than the lack of deodorant use by some of its citizens.
The realization came as a series of questions, like stones in our mouths. Ummm, are there only white people living in this city? Are there any African Americans living here?
Despite my adolescent era’s (error) call for colorblindness, I always see the color of skin when my eyes rove. I admire the variety of hue as lovely as a dusky sky turning a thousand different shades before dark descends. Where I live and work, the color spectrum of skin seems as limitless and unique as a fingerprint or a snowflake, with no two shades being exactly alike.
Here on the streets of Portland, I only see varying shades of pale, what cosmetic companies call fair skin, soft pink and tawny, ruddy and warm and light. It’s not like I was looking for shades of brown for the sake of the view or a vain desire for a more beautiful human landscape; but, maybe that’s the first necessary belief. Maybe it begins with appreciation, admiration for darker skin, what cosmetic companies call sandy beige, mocha, toffee, mahogany, deep cool, sable, and soft honey. Then, beyond appreciation comes expectation. If I expect to see diversity in a setting, if that is my normal, then the whiteness is amplified for me, jarring. I notice when people of color aren’t in the room.
Fantasy writers are known for world building. Like anthropologists, they dig into a place and construct the culture, describe the people and set the norms of life. Driving through Portland, I wondered what kind of world has been built here? Is this place homogenous by design or by mere immigration patterns or simply benign preference for the Pacific Northwest land?
George Lucas is known for building worlds filled with imaginary places and races of people. Star Wars’ famous cantina scene is filled with a wild mix of characters of all colors, oddities and sizes from across the galaxies. As the camera glides through the bar scene settling on faces, scanning wide set eyes and scaly foreheads, alluring aliens and gun slinging bounty hunters, the universe begins to feel expansive and inclusive. I find myself looking for something far, far away here in Portland.
I wish I could drive through a town without analyzing and scrutinizing it. I wish I could not notice and just drive around without context or criticism. I wish my brain were light without the weight of wonder. I wish I could just go to a city, find a nice restaurant like the Country Cat on the outskirts of town, eat well, and be merry. But it’s just not in my librarian DNA. I have to ask questions. I need to pull back the curtain. I want to know why.
We spent so little time in Oregon. We connected with a wonderful teaching friend from Argentina for a lovely memory-filled breakfast, stopped at the University of Oregon for a glance at the football stadium, and literally passed through Portland in a matter of minutes. Perhaps our first impressions could be completely wrong.
It was only on our return home and months later that I began to read a little about Portland’s history with racism and its earned label as the whitest city in America. It’s possible we didn’t see many black people in Portland because they weren’t even allowed in Oregon beginning in 1844. The government banned slavery but also kicked out African-Americans, flogged any that stayed and forbade free black people from entering the state. Oregon was trying to build a world without black people.
I wonder, did they know, these Oregonian worldbuilders, that their actions would weave into the future binding and braiding like a network of live wires, like a system? While white people began building their system of land ownership and home ownership and inheritances and generational wealth and upward mobility, black people were shut out and caught in a system of lost opportunities and cycles of poverty. As the generations for all tick tock through time, lives are impacted and worlds keep building upon worlds upon worlds. The past feels embedded forever in the present and destined to hold on into the future. Is there ever any way to truly start anew and build a different world?
Whatever the answer to that question turns out to be, one thing is for sure, we have to keep trying. For me, part of that means I likely will never just drive through a place without thinking. I will never just blindly show up without asking the questions: how did we get here and where are we going next?