Oregon has been the most popular state to move to for the last three years running (http://ift.tt/1Z3xxu1). The culture and economy of the state, and most especially the city of Portland, is being remade by this influx in population—and those who come to Oregon, and most especially to Portland, which takes the bulk of the immigration, are remaking whatever was in their own image. Home prices have soared (up an incredible 11% from one year ago), yet the migration has not halted—those who seek Portland are not deterred by pesky details like housing affordability. What Oregon offers is ‘culture’ of a sort the white twenty-something wants: food, food, and more food as long as it is gourmet, organic, sustainable, local, and actively marketed as such; beer, liquor, and wine, flowing plentifully from bars and restaurants; music of a sort that gets their twee souls shook, which is to say indie, indie, indie, in the style of the Decembrists or Blitzen Trapper or Pink Martini.
Perhaps in understanding the city of Portland and the state of Oregon, it is important to note that Portland is not really Portland, and most of Oregon is unlike Portland. Oregon is the large, rural, unpopulous (barely four million) Western state sandwiched between its far more populous and important neighbors; the urban center and suburban satellites of Portland make up nearly 2/3 of the state’s population, with the other major cities (Salem and Eugene) both settled within a hundred miles. Meanwhile, most of the state’s rural counties are nearly entirely white and immensely conservative—Trump country. With the long-standing exceptions of rural Hispanics in agricultural work, the concentrated black population of North Portland, and the latino and Russian populations of Woodburn, Oregon is exceptionally white (83%), and according to The Atlantic, Portland is the whitest major city in America (http://ift.tt/29QtKgL). Many who move to Oregon fail to understand that the state was the ONLY state in the union to form with an explicit exclusion of minorities in its charter—that is, it was conceived of as a white utopia. Yet they certainly know who and what they seek when they move to Portland—they seek their conception of the good life. And so it is worth asking just what vision these seekers bear with them as they remake the city in their own image.
This question leads me to a thesis that is as provocative as it is unproven and unprovable: to Most Americans and most new Portlanders, the city is a contemporary cultural ideal of America drawn from cultural experiences and representations of the new left. It is as if the children of the Oregon Country Fair met the children of the new Nike generation, and after everyone went to Burning Man together and raved on Molly, they watched a couple episodes of Portlandia and dreamed a city of sisterhood based in craft beer, taxed marijuana, and passive-aggressively agreed concensus among their tattooed brethren who also commute by bike. Portland is the new boheme for those outpriced by San Francisco Baytech bros, squeezed out of Oakland by the sheer mania and volume of sustainable organic local urban renewal, or parched dry by the unrelenting Southern California sun. The Willamette Valley is the valley to replace the San Fernando, cheap-ish in comparison and comparatively unruined: the air is still clean, the water mostly pure, the traffic only intermittently impossible. Portland awaits, the promised land where principled anti-capitalism and food justice and focusing on one’s own art is possible for all-comers who have means and similar leanings.
While that last paragraph is likely to be the clickbait (and I fully expect hate mail to fill my box, as it did when I wrote about the gentrification of North Portland (http://ift.tt/20IZJki), let me hasten to add: the values and culture of this new Portland that never was, are not themselves bad, nor are the problems with this imagined Portland-topia the fault of those who come to Portland seeking a better and more principled life.
The problem with Portland is a part of the problem of America, which never has been the city on the hill it claimed; its contradictions and injustices, its shallowness and inherent ugliness tends to drive each new generation to turn toward escapes and utopian ideals, where living in harmony with others and the earth might be possible. In the neo-liberal America in which we live, seekers of beauty and truth who would throw off materialism and violence have chosen Portland, Oregon, as their destination, and this is not itself a bad thing—except for the overwhelming lack of diversity in the population which has the luxury of leaving home behind to seek the good life. Portland has declared itself a sanctuary city from the forces of Trump, and it is nice that Portlanders would like to protect the most vulnerable among them. Yet it is hard to ignore the absurdity of the whitest city in America declaring itself safe haven for brown people—just as it is hard to imagine Portland as offering us a model for how we should live in an America which is not white and mono-culturally liberal, but white and Trumpian: nationalist, militaristic, provincial, fascist, scapegoating of Latinos and Muslims, racist toward blacks, dismissive of Natives, willing to consider women only in terms of the attractiveness of their bodies, discriminatory toward people of varied genders and abilities.
Given the America that is and will be for these next years, flight Portland-ward will only accelerate. Perhaps Portland, rather than embodying an image, can show us how to survive this coming administration’s regressions and oppressions. To do so, it will have to be more than a utopia for white people to enjoy the bounties of privilege.
Since people themselves always exceed critical and structural and ideological critique, and since I myself am always searching for meaning, I went looking in the belly of the beast.
Alberta, in Northeast Portland, is the epicenter of Portland’s recent gentrification. The neighborhood, which begins off one end of Martin Luther King Blvd, was the city’s only black majority neighborhood as a result of redlining practices in the city that restricted and concentrated blacks in one area. In the last two decades, all of Northeast and especially the Alberta neighborhood have seen a flood of whites buying cheap residential property, remaking the area adjoining Martin Luther King Blvd and Rosa Parks Park into hipster paradise. Alberta street is now a two mile queue of one story, street-facing facades, co-op groceries and whiskey bars and punk rock clubs, pizzerias and sushi joints and Indian buffets, tea shops and kitsch resale boutiques and metal bars and juiceries abutting squares of food-cart roulette.
Out the residential side of Alberta where it abuts Thirty-third is a bar named Binks. Humble of concept, they welcome all with a heavy pour, remember names and faces, open their pool table to the street and night air to accept all challengers, accommodate drunkenness, which they accept complicity in, but not impoliteness or bad behavior. The cash jukebox is pre-digital, filled with homemade CD mixes brought in by bartenders and patrons. Johnny Cash is as likely as Tupac; Blind Melon and the Pixies play counterpoint with Tom Petty and AC/DC and Pearl Jam; the same night can bring Dr. Dre and James Brown, Jack White, Tenacious D and Aretha Franklin. Genre arrives in runs of hip-hop, rock, punk, grunge, pop, r&b and country Americana; the miracle of the bar is its mix of race, age, and station, lexicons of overlapping soundtrack.
In the last two decades, this neighborhood has seen a flood of whites buying cheap residential property, remaking the historically black neighborhood into hipster paradise. Alberta street is now a two mile queue of one story, street-facing facades, co-op groceries and whiskey bars and punk rock clubs, pizzerias and sushi joints and Indian buffets, tea shops and kitsch resale boutiques and metal bars and juiceries abutting squares of food-cart roulette.
The clientele at Binks is perhaps half black, a thorough cross-section of the community: young men returned from college with black-rimmed glasses and collared button-down dress-shirts joke with a forty-year old steelworker from Detroit back to tend his ill-mother, blue-collar construction workers and cooks and men working installation for the cable company flirt with women who work counters, waittress, clerk at law firms. They blend with a white clientele also of the neighborhood: servers and bar-backs who ride up on fixies and wear sleeveless shirts so their tattoos are visible, serious men in their forties with cuffed denim and slicked hair and small paunches held in with upright carriage who roll up front in rebuilt Mustangs and Stingrays, honor and identity parked at the curb. Hard-drinking women sidle up in sleeveless tanks, hair in buns and faces free of makeup, carrying pool cues in cases slung across their shoulders like rifles; they swear like sailors when they miss a shot. Men who could pass for fraternity boys watch them shoot and comment, the only tell-tale of sexuality their coiffure too well-tended, their glances a bit long in the direction of the men with their muscle cars. Young women back from college and newly of age skip up in sundresses to show off summer tans, flaunting newfound worldliness found in trips to South America and Europe. Older men, steel-haired, linger in groups of two or three watching the young women without intention, contractors and plumbers and professionals out for a night, but aware their youth is beyond recapture.
Sometimes, too, there are Latinos, usually clustered together at the bar speaking Spanish and drinking cervezas, the rhythm and cadence of their voices like music to me, since I speak only poor French, the spell of tongue broken only when they resort to English for a word or noun, like, “Timbers,” if they are fans of MLS, or, “Obama,” if the subject is politics. Asians come too, most often Vietnamese and Koreans in a group with blacks, twenty-somethings and old friends who went to the local high school that pools Alberta and Albina with immigrants along Broadway nearer the city center. The bar is a little bit of everything that the neighborhood is, and nothing that the neighborhood is: not a scene, devoid of cutting-edge concept, unexclusively inclusive, doggedly cheap, intrusively friendly.
This night I’m speaking of at Binks it’s slow, perhaps due to the lingering July heat. The tables out front are full of smokers lingering in shallow disks of shade cast by overhanging umbrellas, loud with the jukebox in the background playing Biggie and the whirr and swoosh of two swiveling table fans. Dark fell an hour ago, but the sidewalks and tarmac still radiate heat. I approach the bar, set my elbows to worn oak. Biggie ends; Sam Cooke croons soulful longing. The bartender, a well-scrubbed woman in her thirties who wears tonight an emerald dress belted with a sash leans over the bar. I have been served by her before. One quiet night a year ago, she explained to me how she came to be bartending in Portland: she moved at twenty-two fleeing a bad boyfriend in Denver, discovered after a week here that she was pregnant. The same day she was offered a bartending position here at the end of the interview. Eight years later, she and her son consider the Bink’s staff and regulars family. She was the one who told me how this place was different—how early on, the owner made a choice to welcome blacks from the neighborhood who came in, and make them feel at home. How ‘Honey,’ a thin old black man who often sharks the table all night, was one of the first regulars, but has taught a whole generation of white acolytes now how to play. How they filled the makeshift jukebox with good music—especially music from their black regulars. How here, misunderstandings between blacks and whites get worked out with honest conversation, and whiskey shots, not confrontations and foolishness.
The bartender is listening to a pair of young men, one black and one white, tell a story, and so I settle into a stool and wait. The black man is dressed conservatively, a black polo belted into khakis, while the white guy wears a flat-brimmed Blazers cap and jersey. Both are perhaps in their late twenties; they are an unlikely pair, but their body language speaks of ease and familiarity, not posturing. The black man is telling the story:
“…so I was standing there behind Leroy the whole time,” he says. “Just listening to him talk. And when he’s done I tap his shoulder. Nigger turns, looks, turns back, looks. His eyes big as saucers cause he ain’t knowed I was there. Then, real slow, he takes one step, another step off, and up and runs away. I ain’t even said nothing.”
“Niggas never known how to catch his feet up with his mouth,” the white guy says with a rueful shake of his head. “Good thing he walked away.”
“Nigga don’t know how good.”
“Amazing,” says the bartender with a smile. “Some people.”
She touches each man’s arm, as if to say, I’d rather stay but have obligations, and comes to take my order.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.”
I glance at the two men, at her, thinking about the context, the complications of ‘nigga’ used in public, that word which white people in Trump’s America so hunger to say and not be racist in their racist statements. So many white millenials seem to want nothing more than to have so much ‘cred’ with black friends that they can gain the Eminem pass and use nigga around black people to confirm their coolness. Usually, I listen to such conversations with unease and consternation, but this interaction seemed different.
I nod at the two men, who are looking at something on the black guy’s phone. “Are the two of them good friends?”
“Oh, yes. Once in the big winter storm a couple years back when I was stuck trying to get to work, I called here, and they heard. The two of them hopped in Devonte’s truck and came and towed my car out of the ditch clear out on I-5!”
She pauses, then smiles seeing I meant the question about the two men. “As for the two them,” she says, “they grew up together. Next door neighbors just down the street, when this neighborhood was different.”
The New Year beckons, and Trump’s ascension is nigh. So perhaps it is time for new reckonings and resolutions, in Portland and beyond. Maybe all of us where we are can become Binks, and offer each other friendship and shelter, and a hand to safety in the storm. If Portland would be a sanctuary, perhaps each of us must work to make our own sanctuaries for the threatened: an afternoon at the soup kitchen for the poor, a Mexican flag pinned in the window of the Irish pub, a smile for the young woman in the hijab who at any moment will be told yet again to look and act ‘American.’ The patience to listen to a young black or native activist who does indeed have reason to be angry without insisting on trying to solve issues or refine their expression or hurt to some milquetoast, self-serving cumbaya.
Because I believe in immanence, which is to say, that in absence lies imminence, maybe this is already being set in motion. Maybe America will become great in some future we’ve never seen, where everything we know of decorum and history has been remade by bonds of friendship and decency, awareness and unity, love and generosity. Maybe all throughout this country, this year amid the growing dark, we will create sanctuary. The Bink-ness of Portland can become its new ethos. The new Portland jukebox will fill with hip-hop and cumbia and reggaeton, native songs and country songs of protest and solidarity, and the poet laureate Bob Dylan will don a purple cape for Prince and George Michael and tell us once more how it is and how it should be, and as his song comes on and his broken voice rises all the vulnerable and threatened and dispossessed will be serenaded with respect, given shelter from this storm. This can happen right now, if we will it.
(posted from Facebook)
Recent Comments