pierce the veil concert 2016 oregon portland

And white-supremacist sentiment is not uncommon in the state. Yes, the city is politically progressive, she said, but its government has facilitated the dominance of whites in business, housing, and culture.

“I think that Portland has, in many ways, perfected neoliberal racism,” Walidah Imarisha, an African American educator and expert on black history in Oregon, told me. Portland is the whitest big city in America, with a population that is 72.2 percent white and only 6.3 percent African American. Perhaps that’s why there have never been very many. In area schools, African American students are suspended and expelled at a rate four to five times higher than that of their white peers.Īll in all, historians and residents say, Oregon has never been particularly welcoming to minorities. A 2011 audit found that landlords and leasing agents here discriminated against black and Latino renters 64 percent of the time, citing them higher rents or deposits and adding on additional fees. In more recent times, the city repeatedly undertook “urban renewal” projects (such as the construction of Legacy Emanuel Hospital) that decimated the small black community that existed here. When the state entered the union in 1859, for example, Oregon explicitly forbade black people from living in its borders, the only state to do so.

That’s because racism has been entrenched in Oregon, maybe more than any state in the north, for nearly two centuries. But many African Americans in Portland say they’re not surprised when they hear about racial incidents in this city and state. The allegations may seem at odds with the reputation of this city known for its progressivism. “It’s a sad story-it’s pretty ugly on the floor there.” (Daimler said it could not comment on pending litigation, but spokesman David Giroux said that the company prohibits discrimination and investigates any allegations of harassment.) “They have all complained about being treated poorly because of their race,” Morrell told me. The cases have been combined and a trial is scheduled for January 2017. Pierce is one of six African Americans working in the Portland plant whom the lawyer Mark Morrell is representing in a series of lawsuits against Daimler Trucks North America. 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 2015. But he says that in recent years he’s experienced things that seem straight out of another time. PORTLAND, Ore.-Victor Pierce has worked on the assembly line of a Daimler Trucks North America plant here since 1994.

Pierce the veil concert 2016 oregon portland