Whitest city in the USA

A protester at a Portland rally against the reinstatement of a police officer who shot a black man (Rick Bowmer/AP)

The US seems more racially divided than for many years - and is less than 100 days from the end of eight years in office for Barack Obama, the nation's first black President.

In recent months the US has reverberated with protest over the shootings of black people by police officers - and black people fighting back by killing cops. It is unedifying and deeply worrying.

The country had a civil war to end slavery and yet 150 years on, the US seems as riven as ever - if not more so, with predictions that by 205 Hispanics will outnumber whites.

If you want to know how deep the issue of race goes, look no further than Portland, Oregon.

Victor Pierce has worked on the assembly line of a Daimler Trucks North America plant there since 1994. But in recent years he’s experienced things that seem straight out of another time.

White co-workers have challenged him to fights, mounted “hangman’s nooses” around the factory, referred to him as “boy” on a daily basis, sabotaged his work station by hiding his tools, carved swastikas in the bathroom, and written the word “nigger” on walls in the factory, according to allegations filed in a complaint to the Multnomah County Circuit Court in February of 2015.

Pierce is one of six African Americans working in the plant whom lawyer Mark Morrell is representing in lawsuits against Daimler Trucks.

“They have all complained about being treated poorly because of their race,” Morrell said.

The allegations may seem at odds with the reputation of a city known for progressivism. But many African Americans in Portland say they’re not surprised when they hear about racial incidents in the city and state.

That’s because racism has been entrenched in Oregon for nearly two centuries.

When the state entered the Union in 1859, Oregon forbade black people from living in its borders - the only state to do so.

In more recent times, the city repeatedly undertook “urban renewal” projects that decimated the small black community that existed here. And racism persists.

2011 audit found that landlords and leasing agents here discriminated against black and Latino renters 64 percent of the time, charging them higher rents or deposits and adding on additional fees. In schools, African American students are suspended and expelled at a rate four to five times higher than that of their white peers.

Oregon has never been particularly welcoming to minorities. Portland is the whitest big city in America, with a population that is 72.2 percent white and only 6.3 percent African American.

Because Oregon, and specifically Portland, its biggest city, are not diverse, many white people may not even begin to think about, let alone understand, the inequalities.

A blog, “Shit White People Say to Black and Brown Folks in PDX,” details how racist Portland residents can be to people of colour.

As the city becomes more popular and real estate prices rise, it is Portland’s tiny African American population that is being displaced to the far-off fringes, leading to even less diversity in the city’s centre.

There are around 38,000 African Americans in Portland; in recent years, 10,000 have had to move out because of rising prices. The gentrification of the historically black neighbourhood in central Portland, Albina, has led to conflicts between white Portlanders and long-time black residents. And the spate of alleged incidents at Daimler Trucks is evidence of tensions that are far less subtle.

In 1844, the provisional government of the territory passed a law banning slavery, and at the same time required any African American in Oregon leave. Any remaining would be flogged publicly every six months until he left.

Five years later, another law was passed that forbade free African Americans from entering into Oregon. The black-exclusion laws sent a very clear message nationwide. By 1890, there were slightly more than 1,000 blacks in Oregon. By 1920, there were about 2,000.

The rise of the Ku Klux Klan made Oregon even more inhospitable for black people.

Klansmen marching in Portland in the 1920s (AP)

The state had the highest per capita Klan membership in the country. Democrat Walter M. Pierce was elected to the governorship of the state in 1922 with the support of the Klan.

It wasn’t until World War II that a sizable black population moved to Oregon, lured by jobs in the shipyards and the majority lived in Vanport, nestled between Portland and Vancouver, Washington. Yet after the war, blacks were encouraged to leave Oregon, with the mayor of Portland commenting in a newspaper article that black people were not welcome.

The Housing Authority of Portland mulled dismantling Vanport, and jobs for black people disappeared as white soldiers returned from war and displaced the men and women who had found jobs in the shipyards.

Dismantling Vanport proved unnecessary. In May 1948, the Columbia River flooded, wiping out Vanport in a day. Residents had been assured that the dykes protecting the housing were safe, and some lost everything in the flood. At least 15 residents died, though some locals formulated a theory that the housing authority had quietly disposed of hundreds more bodies to cover up its slow response. The 18,500 residents of Vanport—6,300 of whom were black—had to find somewhere else to live.

For blacks, the only choice, if they wanted to stay in Portland, was a neighbourhood called Albina that had emerged as a popular place to live for the black porters who worked in nearby Union Station.

It was the only place they were allowed to buy homes.

As they did, whites moved out. Albina began to be the center of black life in Portland. But for outsiders, it was something else: a blighted slum in need of repair.

Today, North Williams Avenue, which cuts through the heart of what was once Albina, is emblematic of the “new” Portland. Fancy condos with balconies line the street, next to juice stores and hipster bars with shuffleboard courts. Half a century ago, every house on the street, bar one, was owned by black families.

Since the postwar boom, Albina has been the target of a decades of “renewal” and redevelopment plans, like many black neighbourhoods across the country.

The urban-renewal efforts made it difficult for black residents to maintain a close-knit community; the institutions that they used kept being displaced. A generation of black people had grown up hearing about the “wicked white people who took away their neighbourhoods.”

An investigation by The Oregonian in 1990 revealed all the banks in Portland together had made just 10 mortgage loans in the heart of Albina in a year. The inability of blacks to get mortgages to buy homes there led, once again, to the further decimation of the black community. Homes were abandoned, and residents couldn’t get mortgages to buy them and fix them up. As more and more houses fell into decay, values plummeted, and those who could left.

By the Nineties, Albina was known for its housing abandonment, crack-cocaine activity, and gang warfare. Absentee landlordism was rampant.

When property prices hit rock bottom, white people moved in and started buying up homes and businesses.

This gave rise to racial tensions. Black residents felt they had been shouting for decades for better city policy in Albina, but it wasn’t until white residents moved in that the city started to pay attention.

Many might think that, as a progressive city known for its hyper-consciousness about its own problems, Portland would be addressing its racial history or at least its current problems with racial inequality and displacement.

The city had a series of police shootings of black men in the 1970s, and in the 1980s, the police department was investigated after officers ran over possums and then put the dead animals in front of black-owned restaurants.

Yet as the city became more progressive and “weird,” full of artists and techies and bikers, it did not have a conversation about its racist past. It still tends not to, even as gentrification and displacement continue in Albina and elsewhere.

People in Oregon just don't like to talk about it," locals say.

The overt racism of the past has abated, residents say, but it can still be uncomfortable. Paul Knauls, who is African American, moved to Portland to open a nightclub in the 1960s. He used to face the sight of “whites-only” signs in stores, prohibitions on buying real estate, and once, even a bomb threat in his jazz club because of its black patrons.

Now, he says he notices racial tensions when he walks into a restaurant full of white people and it goes silent, or when he tries to visit friends who once lived in Albina and who have now been displaced to “the numbers,” which is what Portlanders call the low-income far-off neighbourhoods on the outskirts of town.

“Everything is kind of under the carpet,” he said. “The racism is still very, very subtle.”

(Courtesy of The Atlantic)