Page 87 - Microsoft Word - resource book.doc

Dismantling Racism Resource Book

them.’ So I took what he said for years and then I said, ‘OK, I’m going to pray for them. And
then I’m going to kick the crap out of them! I’m tired of this!’”

Building Power in Portland

In Portland, Oregon—the whitest city of its size in the country—Sisters in Action for Power runs
direct action organizing campaigns with a largely African-American membership of young
women and girls. Last year, Sisters forced the metropolitan transportation agency (Tri-Met) to
create a new low-fare youth pass for middle and high school members who lacked access to
yellow bus service. The campaign saw young black girls testifying before the city council and
storming the office of Tri-Met’s general manager to demand accountability to transit-dependent
communities.

Portland, seen as a national leader in urban planning, calls itself “the city that works” and claims
a culture of community input on city projects. It’s a town in which liberal advocacy groups work
to make change by educating “enlightened policy makers” on the issues. “Diversity” is duly
celebrated and confrontation is, well, impolite. Sisters’ director, Amara Pérez, found that
government agencies, elected officials and even some community leaders were upset and
stunned at such direct and persistent confrontation by people of color.

“Especially in our early days, there were community leaders who saw our model of doing direct
action as very foreign and unfamiliar, which was cause for suspicion,” remembers Pérez. “The
culture here is very much about relationships with individual people. Deals get made behind
closed doors, but it’s not about building power for communities of color. Then you add sexism
on top of it—the fact that we’re a women-and-girls organization and we do this kind of work. If
men were running the organization it would be really different.

“It’s a very strange thing, the racial dynamic in the Northwest,” she continues. “There’s a culture
of assimilation which is different from the East Coast or where I grew up in Florida. Part of it is
about what it’s meant for people of color to survive here—about not openly advocating on
‘people of color issues,’ because doing that would somehow reinforce this marginality you’re
trying to get rid of. Building power and taking on the system goes against the culture here.”

The fear is not entirely unwarranted. Oregon was colonized, in part, by white flight from the
South following the Civil War. Exclusion laws forbade blacks to live in the state during that
conflict, and in the 1920s Oregon had the highest rate of Klan membership in the Union. Chinese
immigrants were largely run out on the rails they had laid, and there was no significant African-
American community until World War II shipyard jobs brought blacks to Portland during the
same war that confined Japanese citizens to concentration camps. Portland’s communities of
color have been extremely small and vulnerable and are, with some exceptions, recent. Most
African-Americans families have been in Portland for two or three generations at most and two
out of three Latin@s have arrived in just the last decade. Blacks account for about 7% of
Portland’s residents, with Asians and Latin@s each at about 6% and Native Americans making
up less than one percent of city dwellers.

Dismantling Racism Project 85 Western States Center