Tag: gentrification

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#snowblindness

I highly recommend this feature in the Atlantic – The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America. We can learn a lot about racism by looking at those places that are the whitest.

In Portland, the belief that we are “post-racial” is largely unopposed, and those who point out problems of racial injustice are often treated as if they are just seeing things, as delusional or “divisive.”

In Portland, the city I’ve often referred to as Whitelandia over the 30 years since I first moved here in 1986, there is very little to contradict these ideas and,

… Read more “#snowblindness”
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Racial Tension in the City

Yesterday I had a conversation about race and gentrification in a cab. I ride in a lot of cabs, and this was the third conversation I’ve had on this topic with drivers. But this time was different. Normally, the conversation starts with some version of “there goes the city…” This time, the conversation began with “what’s that?!”

“That” referred to a construction site in downtown Oakland, California, the city across the Bay from San Francisco, the fourth fastest gentrifying city in the country. Oakland is the destination for San Francisco’s rent refugees, myself among them, who’ve escaped to the East … Read more “Racial Tension in the City”

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Welcome to the Hunger Games: Ferguson, Gentrification, and Power

I wrote a post about Ferguson earlier in the week that got me thinking of The Hunger Games. Not the movies. I mean the books. You can call them “Young Adult” if you like, but I loved those books. And now, I feel like the author, Suzanne Collins, may be a prophet.

Play along with me for a minute. The Hunger Games is set in a dystopian future land called Panem. The center of Panem is a wealthy capitol city surrounded in concentric circles by 12 districts, each poorer and browner than the last. In order to maintain order, … Read more “Welcome to the Hunger Games: Ferguson, Gentrification, and Power”

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What Goes Down in Ferguson is an Asian American Concern – In Fact, It’s a 99% Issue

Precariat: A social class defined by the shared experience of precarity, a condition of existence without predictability or stability, particularly as pertains to employment and economic security

What the news media has euphemistically referred to as the “situation” in Ferguson, Missouri is driving home a point that too many of us have managed to miss before Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. The Black body count resulting from police actions against unarmed African Americans is mounting. To view the situation as merely tragic (if, indeed, one can rightly put “merely” and “tragic” together) is to downplay the broad scope of … Read more “What Goes Down in Ferguson is an Asian American Concern – In Fact, It’s a 99% Issue”