Great production on the video/audio.  Cop more of Shorty Boy!

Williams Avenue - Portland, Oregon

In Portland, a transportation project has raised the ire of historic neighborhood residents, many who feel the city’s sudden will to improve safety on the street is conveniently timed, as most of the neighborhood’s historically black community have now been dispersed to other neighborhoods and a new, more affluent white community has taken their place. Along with those changes have come a neighborhood unlike it was even five  years ago, replete with bustling white-owned shops, bars and restaurants where black-owned businesses once thrived.

The city has responded to this community’s outcry, and a lot of positive and innovative things are now happening as part of the public process around this project, mostly involving discussions of race and class, the historic trampling of the black community by city officials over the past 70 years, the painful wounds still not healed.  Powerful stuff for transportation planners and process facilitators to tackle, but the city deserves some credit for taking the community’s concerns seriously and not ignoring the elephant in the room.

One piece of jargon that has come up a lot through the process is Dominant Culture. What is Dominant Culture?  This is a question anti-racist whites must ask in perpetuity. Below is an excerpt and link outlining how white supremacy has seeped into every aspect of our organizations, businesses, schools and churches.  These characteristics are so prevalent they are often referred to as “normal” or “professional” by white-led groups.

Dominant Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify. The characteristics are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group.

They are damaging because they promote dominant ways of thinking to the exclusion of differing ways of being and thinking. The overall effects of these dominant cultural norms is to stop us from talking about power imbalances between individuals and groups …. which stops us from creating cultures supportive of transformation towards justice.

Continue reading Elements of White Middle-Class Dominant Culture.

What’s important to understand is that we aren’t simply talking about PAST injustices, we are also talking about PRESENT injustice.  This is extremely pertinent as many whites do not have a good understanding of white privilege and lack the necessary tools of understanding to actually dismantle systems of racism.  Read the handout, resist an immediate temptation to get defensive, and just take it in.  Going forward, see if you can identify these characteristics in your personal behavior, at work, at home, in your activism.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has succeeded in challenging many tenets of Dominant Culture at a populist level, but the work has only begun.  My hope for the Williams Avenue process is that it will compel more Portlanders to confront their own privilege and racial identity, and help usher in a new era of restorative justice locally.  To hope for such an outcome from a transportation project is why I live in Portland.

Referenced work above is reproduced here for educational purposes only.  If anyone has a better version of this document, I would appreciate receiving a copy.

Related posts:

1. The Shared Cause of Protestors Occupying Wall Street

City Council seats, as well as the City Auditor, are non-partisan, elected positions; each carries a four-year term. As with all non-partisan positions in Oregon, candidates face off in a primary election (typically in May of even-numbered years); if no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, the top two finishers face off in a runoff election (typically the following November.)
Source: Wikipedia

Turns out the Mayor’s seat, along with the rest of City Council and the City Auditor are “non-partisan” positions.

How do they do that?  My best guess is through the city’s charter, but I haven’t found the answer yet.

Quoted from a Democracy Now interview, part of their coverage of the Occupy Wall Street Protests, now in their second week.

Teaching and youth development are intense professions, I’m thankful for having a few great leaders and thought provokers in my development, and now I’m finding my own rhythm for knowledge outside of the classroom.  You know who you are.

Thanks to Rebecca & Karl for pulling it together for some spontaneous video interviews. It was fun putting together the prototype of this parklet with other people’s detritus.

Me and Karl joined Rebecca after we met the day before on the Transport Your Activism ride.  Learn more about Rethinking the Right-Of-Way.