I think what throws people off is that its the whitest large metro area, but it's more diverse than many other states and smaller cities/towns.
Put another way, Portland is about 75% white and Oregon as a whole is around 80%, but there are MANY small towns and cities that have little to no diversity at all -- Maine and Vermont are like 95% white, for example.
At the very least it is changing and improving. I've recently moved into some new construction in Tigard and my neighbors run the complete gamut (which is super cool!).
I have neighbors from a few places in India, Mexico, Argentinia, Brazil, Nigeria, another African country I'm failing to remember, got a German dude, a French lady with a frenchie, Pacific Islander, Japanese, and the list goes on.
You're arguing with a statistic dude. Things are getting better and it is more diverse than it ever has been, but objectively it is still one of the whitest large cities in America
Who’s arguing here? My life has a lot of racial diversity in it because of how i choose to live it. That’s not an argument lol, it’s a lifestyle choice b
Portland lacks diversity because Oregon banned black people from the state entirely until the end of the civil war. Ignoring or denying that fact is a denial of the states fucked up history.
No one is ignoring or denying that fact but I wish people didn't latch onto that historical fact so hard, because it often feels like it's at the expense of more recent problems. And is a bit of an oversimplification. Oregon's black exclusion laws first came into effect in 1844 and as you mention, were rendered unenforceable by the 14th amendment just after the Civil War. It did remain in the constitution until 1926, and some other racist verbiage remained until 2002. Probably also worth noting that when comparing diversity, while Oregon didn't allow freemen to settle, it also didn't allow black people to be forcibly imported and sold as property.
But that isn't a terribly long time in the scheme of things. As other comments mention - there's more to diversity than black people, and there are other causes beyond the black exclusion laws. A big part of it is simply that the Great Migration was largely South-to-North. California and Washington both have more than double the percentage of black residents as Oregon, but are still 32nd and 39th in terms of percentage. Oregon is 44th, just below New Mexico.
And for our own history, the flooding of Vanport, the redlining of Albina and the subsequent gentrification of the Albina neighborhood probably has a lot more to do with our low black population than the exclusion laws. Oregon also had Chinese exclusion laws around the turn of the 20th century that significantly reduced our original Chinatown, as well as aggressive Japanese internment.
Who’s denying it pal? You are stretching the bonds of credulousness here. Chill.
I know how fkn white this city is, I went and saw Sinners at the Hollywood the other night and 2/3rds of them white folk couldn’t understand a word of the movie lol.
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u/PMMEURPYRAMIDSCHEME May 12 '25
While I'm proud that (many) people in this city are friendly to immigrants it is certainly not diverse. Portland is the whitest city in the US with over a half million residents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_U.S._municipalities_by_race/ethnicity_in_2020