I had to flip a coin this morning. Because it’s not ten comments of the week, or two, it’s just one.
Friday’s story about BikeLoud PDX’s decision not to protest the removal of the bike lane on Northeast 33rd Avenue continued the avalanche of strongly-felt opinions about this PBOT screw-up. Maybe you think the issue has already been adequately hashed out. But you might have missed a comment that came in Sunday afternoon, one of the most insightful perspectives on Portland I’ve read.
Here’s ITOTS’s take on how our city handles some racial conversations:
“This time, that conflict happened on NE 33rd, but it is not an isolated instance, and is in fact an ongoing experience for our neighbors of color, particularly Black people.” — BikeLoud PDX
This phrase emerged in the last few years, but we need to get even more specific here, because as lovely as it is to “center” black voices, that’s not a specific enough description of who is experiencing these conflicts negatively. Reversing this project doesn’t center black voices and doesn’t provide a pathway to resolve these kinds of conflicts (when they actually are substantive) in the future.
Once again for the people in the back (or the ones in the front who are hard of listening): the black community is only a monolithic community insofar as it has been and continues to be treated as such by culture, discussion, and policy. Viewing black people as all somehow alike led to and justified slavery, Jim Crow, housing discrimination, urban renewal targeting, financial discrimination, and the war on drugs. Doing it here doesn’t help us parse the situation and how to address it and similars.
Portland’s struggle to understand and constructively work with black people is actually due to the fact that there aren’t enough black people in Portland to interact with for everyone else to organically recognize there is no black community; there are many. And that black perspective and opinion is just as fractured and varied as that of the people any other demographic box is drawn around. Asking a random group of black people what they think about bike lanes or the government and expecting a coherent answer to emerge is just as absurd as expecting a coherent answer to emerge from a group of white people.
For every black person that takes each slight, mistake, omission, turn of phrase, or look from a stranger and places it into the context of just another example of a racist society or system, there’s another black person that connects all those events differently and tells another story about their lives and how other people relate to them, e.g. a racist government chasing a black family out to the edge of the city and trying to push them out vs. a city organization screwing up, failing to follow its own notification procedure for a run-of-the-mill project.
It’s irresponsible and unhelpful to give any oxygen to that first way of viewing the world when an action is not actually part of the trend and neither PBOT nor BikeLoud should be going out of its way to do so. You can validate feelings and worldview while still communicating the facts of the situation — the plan, the function, the normalcy* of the action in the city context, the slip up, the remorse — and that, despite the feelings of some individuals, because in reality this action doesn’t uniquely or disproportionately target black people, isn’t part of some system-wide decades-long strategy to make it hard for black families to live in Portland, and it’s normal and okay for projects to create some inconvenience, the project is moving ahead, or in this case, staying put.
Yep it’s a complex and challenging message to deliver, but it’s honest, honors all interests, and PBOT needs to learn how to deliver it.
Or it can keep showing black people that if they evoke their membership in a racial group vs. as a disgruntled individual on a street of people of many identities, they can stop anything they don’t like.
*It’s very likely that in projects outside these higher profile bike v Black Portlander moments (Williams, 7th, 33rd), the city inconvenienced 100s of black households through parking removals for bike lanes, bus lanes, and curb extensions without anyone knowing because those individuals chose not to characterize public works projects that are visible coming online across the city as racist acts specifically targeting them when the same changes sprout up in front of their house.
Thank you ITOTS. You can read the comment in context of the full thread here. (Don’t miss the comment just below by Portland Bicycle Mapper who made an arcGIS map to explain himself!)
Thank you to everyone who contributed comments this week. If we had a “Thread of the Year” selection, several threads this week would be in the running.