Portland is white. Portland is, in fact, 70.4% white, according to the most recent U.S. Census. Last Saturday, the white-nationalist, far-right group “Patriot Prayer” conducted a racist protest in Portland. When Portland police officers were called to the scene, they responded with pepper spray and stun grenades, attacking not the white-supremacists, but the anti-facist, anti-racist, counter-protesters instead.
I missed the commotion. I was on a Saturday morning 10-miler organized by the Portland Running Company, weaving through wooded trails, crossing the Hawthorne Bridge to capture the morning sun glinting off the Willamette River, chatting with marathoners and ultra-marathoners about mileage peaks and destination races. We logged blissful, sun-kissed, trail miles, rambling on about our greatest worries of the moment, like fitting in training with a full time career, how much weight lifting, and how much cross-training. All of us were white.
The best description I’ve heard of Portland’s whiteness came from a young, white man working at Lents International Farmers Market. “Portland is interiorly white,” he remarked, referring to the segregation of non-white people into the outskirts of the city, such as the Lents neighborhood. I realized that if I based my understanding of Portland’s inclusivity solely off of my Sunday morning spent volunteering at Lents International Farmers Market, I might gain a skewed perception. I felt such an ambiance of community, such a sentiment of welcomeness encompassed within that vendor-filled parking lot on SE 92nd and Reedway. But, then again, I’m white.
That morning, a young girl helped her mother sell the family’s traditional Dominican sweets, smiling with pride, waving her hands over the layers of Nutella, the powdered cookies, the tres leches, and the bizcocho dominicano. “Should I be in it?!” she eagerly inquired when I asked to take a picture of the duo’s market stand, her smile already locked in a parallel with my iPhone’s camera lens, her body already fixed into the frame. A farmer from Mexico cooked chili peppers in a cylindrical grill, the green vegetable flesh sizzling and crackling under a bright flame, challenging the 90 degree day. Vendors spoke in Russian mixed with Spanish mixed with Thai. The vast majority of their customers spoke English. Those customers were mostly white.
Live music followed poetry readings. Community members filled the tables and chairs that faced the performance stand. Harmonies and metaphors drifted through the air, tempering the spice of chili peppers and sweetening the kale. Audience members tapped their toes, hummed and nodded along, closed their eyes, and succumbed to the absent-minded smiles that drifted over their lips. A talented, teenaged, Japanese-American girl performed a flowing rendition of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” the English words intertwined with a Japanese translation. Her father and little sister sang along, proud in the front row. I watched six other performers read their poetry and strum their guitars. They were all white.
At the info tent, the market managers showed me fliers in English, Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin. At a nearby tent, a representative from Food Scouts worked to mitigate the childhood food-insecurity that plagues many low-income families in the neighborhood. She handed free, produce tokens to children between the ages of 3-13, lent pig-tailed elementary-schoolers rainbow chalk and coloring book pages, and showed them how to pickle bite-sized cucumbers in miniature cups. She, along with all of the Portland Farmers Market employees, were white.
Of course, I do not mean to criticize this market. I could never criticize efforts to bring a sense of belonging to international community members, especially in the midst of such a homogeneous city. I could never criticize such a commitment to community sustainability, to offering food that is both sustainability-produced and culturally-appropriate. I could never call into question the smile of pride on the young Dominican girl’s face as she sold her homemade sweets, or deny the audience members’ humming and tapping, the peaceful symphony of poetry drifting through the humid air, mixing with the spicy aroma of chili peppers, together blending seamlessly into the Portland August heat.
At the same time, I begin to wonder about my own perceptions. Can I even comment on the feeling of welcomeness I perceived at the international market? Can I even make these judgements when I enter every space I occupy feeling welcome? When I’ve felt a sense of community in every place I’ve ever lived? When I am a white person surrounded almost entirely by white people?
And I’m sitting here writing this wondering if it’s okay for me to write about Portland being white, if it’s ok for me to write anything about skin color, and I want to send this to my sister to ask if it’s alright to post, but I hate that the one person I can think to send this to is white, but I need to know if it’s ok, because I don’t know how to talk about being white, because everyone around me is so damn white.
