From the Internet!

• OREGONIAN writer Betsy Hammond calls Portland “star­tlingly white” but assures us that:

“Portland will grow less white and more diverse — just more slowly than the rest of the country…”

• A blog­ger named Stumptown Girl feels immense pain due to Portland’s white­ness:

“I’m writ­ing this from a rel­a­tively new cof­fee shop in NE Portland on the cor­ner of Shaver and Mississippi, which was in the recent past the core of Portland’s black neigh­bor­hood. This area, plus the Alberta District and now St. Johns are also going through gen­tri­fi­ca­tion. New busi­nesses, remod­eled store­fronts and homes, are sprout­ing up – all with mostly white money or loans to white peo­ple try­ing to get an edge in a grow­ing market.”

• Portland bicy­clists con­tem­plate whether their bike scene is too white:

“The peo­ple rid­ing and mak­ing deci­sions about bicy­cles is a white, mid­dle class group.”

• Queer Woman of Color plays the white card in a May 2007 blog post:

“One thing I really would have to think about is about rais­ing chil­dren of color here in Portland. It’s the whitest town in America & many a day I ques­tion why I’m here because it sucks to be so sur­rounded by peo­ple who don’t look like me and can barely under­stand any­thing about being a racial minor­ity. It’s a town filled with semi-well mean­ing folks who think because they vote demo­c­ra­tic they’re down with POC and that just isn’t the case.”

• In 2007, a new­comer from Boston sought non-white, vegetable-friendly, some­what queer room­mates:

“I’m veg­e­tar­ian, and it’s con­ve­nient to live with other veg­e­tar­i­ans, but I don’t actu­ally know how impor­tant it is to me. I’d like this bunch of peo­ple to have a rea­son­able gen­der bal­ance and rea­son­able queer/straight bal­ance. I feel like racial diver­sity is the ele­phant in the room with respect to that last sen­tence, but, well, from what I’ve seen Portland is way too white of a city to make that desire reasonable.”

• A San Francisco vis­i­tor is hor­ri­fied by con­fed­er­ate flags and Bush/Cheney signs in Northeast Portland neig­bor­hood:

“I am used [to]living in and enjoy­ing the racial diver­sity of the Bay Area, California. My hus­band and I are an inter-racial cou­ple, who, before this week­end were look­ing to move to Portland, OR. When I got there, I was over­whelmed by the won­der­ful par­al­lel of the West side to my beau­ti­ful San Francisco. Trees lines the streets and it was like nowhere else I had been. The urban life hugged trees and clean air-brilliant. However, it was not until the real estate agent drove us around the North East Side that I was com­pletely heart­bro­ken. I saw atleast four win­dows with con­fed­er­ate flags and a few Bush/Cheney signs nailed to some des­per­ate lawns.”

• How can pro­gres­sive Portlanders accept racism?

• Portland’s “White People Gone Wild” love Obama

• Obamatown, a.k.a. Portland, is 80% white

• Portland white per­son who voted for Obama is now dis­gusted with him and is switch­ing to the Green Party…

• The Caucasian Wingnut Tree can be found on the cam­pus of Reed College

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