Bringing context and critique to the cultural moment. Deep dives, reviews, and debate encouraged.
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© 2020 Relevant Protocols Inc.
Bringing context and critique to the cultural moment. Deep dives, reviews, and debate encouraged.
40652 Members
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© 2020 Relevant Protocols Inc.
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Occupying the homelands of the Chinook people, as well as areas belonging to the Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tualatin, Kalapuya, and Molalla, Portland was named after a city in the east, named after a city in England. Prior to 2020, ‘Stumptown’ was known for a self-parodying television show, an exceptional basketball team and as the birthplace of a handful of indie saints (Mark Rothko, Kathleen Hanna). It surprises me still when people on the other side of the world have heard about my hometown since it topped the list of “The Top Five Coolest Cities to Move to with Sour Coffee and Freezing Rainforest Winters” in the years since I left. My youth there became novel in retrospect. Portlanders lament “Old Portland” as a fabled time before the 2008 crash when the Californians were forced North and rents became speculative assets. Or maybe it was in 2011 when the Satyricon closed. Or maybe it was earlier in the 1990s when white Portlanders started moving into the historically Black Albina neighborhood in North Portland where the refugees from Vanport had built a resilient and vibrant community against all odds. And when I say “odds” I mean the violent blend of redlining, planned segregation and community divestment from city hall in a state that was conceived as a white utopia with Sundown Laws. Up until the late 1990s there were laws on the books prohibiting POC from owning property in Lake Oswego, an affluent suburb of Portland, and when I was in high school we colloquially accepted that Portland was “sooooo white”: A statement that effectively erased the experience of communities in North Portland or the multiple languages spoken in homes East of 82nd. Portland has the largest white majority of any major US city; a dangerously ignorant whiteness flavored by a liberalism that prefers passive lawn signs to anti-racist action. A whiteness that would pull their kids from the Jefferson or Benson neighborhood schools or bully a young Adam Daniel then turn around and try to claim Aminé.
Occupying the homelands of the Chinook people, as well as areas belonging to the Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tualatin, Kalapuya, and Molalla, Portland was named after a city in the east, named after a city in England. Prior to 2020, ‘Stumptown’ was known for a self-parodying television show, an exceptional basketball team and as the birthplace of a handful of indie saints (Mark Rothko, Kathleen Hanna). It surprises me still when people on the other side of the world have heard about my hometown since it topped the list of “The Top Five Coolest Cities to Move to with Sour Coffee and Freezing Rainforest Winters” in the years since I left. My youth there became novel in retrospect. Portlanders lament “Old Portland” as a fabled time before the 2008 crash when the Californians were forced North and rents became speculative assets. Or maybe it was in 2011 when the Satyricon closed. Or maybe it was earlier in the 1990s when white Portlanders started moving into the historically Black Albina neighborhood in North Portland where the refugees from Vanport had built a resilient and vibrant community against all odds. And when I say “odds” I mean the violent blend of redlining, planned segregation and community divestment from city hall in a state that was conceived as a white utopia with Sundown Laws. Up until the late 1990s there were laws on the books prohibiting POC from owning property in Lake Oswego, an affluent suburb of Portland, and when I was in high school we colloquially accepted that Portland was “sooooo white”: A statement that effectively erased the experience of communities in North Portland or the multiple languages spoken in homes East of 82nd. Portland has the largest white majority of any major US city; a dangerously ignorant whiteness flavored by a liberalism that prefers passive lawn signs to anti-racist action. A whiteness that would pull their kids from the Jefferson or Benson neighborhood schools or bully a young Adam Daniel then turn around and try to claim Aminé.
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