How much is enough?

How small is the smallest pile?

I think that if you teach people that they are not responsible for their own situation, they will never believe in their own power to change their situation. This is a culture of victimhood.

All I see here is passing the buck. Sure, it works great in politics because people want to blame somebody else for their problems. But be serious, blaming other people isn't going to solve anything as a practical matter.

41%? The average African American income is just 41% of the average white income in Oregon? That was startling, even though I agree with Around, above.

So the counter-argument to both of us, Around, would probably be "Well, how can they have faith in their ability to better themselves, when things are that disparate?"

For once, can we not just accept that if somebody says Oregon is a difficult place to be black, then it probably is? Without layering on all this "passing the buck" rhetoric?

My question, I think, would be how we make the N/NE Economic Development Initiative an empowering process. And that's not for the panelists, but for the folks at PDC, to answer.

The Mercury staff is schizophrenic on this issue. Today the problem is "failed attempts of integration and desegregation." Another day the problem is "loss of traditional black neighborhoods," also known as segregation. Next you rail against gentrification. A day later the call goes out to invest urban renewal dollars in improving poor neighborhoods, promoting gentrification.

If schools are disproportionally funded, we have a problem. As for prisons, ending the insane war on drugs and the stealth racism that entails would go a long way into improving those statistics.

Smiley: The problems are not binary. You can improve a poor neighborhood without gentrifying it (or leaving it open to gentrification). The reason minorities tend to flee increasingly affluent neighborhoods is that they can't afford to live there anymore.

If put some money into affordable/rent controlled housing and fund realistic community services (education, job training, legal advocacy, small business grants). You can make nice neighborhoods for the people who currently live there as opposed to yuppies who want to live near downtown.

That post has some wording problems, but hey, fuck it it's Friday.

Atomic, pretty much whatever you do to a neighborhood that upgrades that area is part of the gentrification process. That area becomes more desirable, housing prices rise. For someone who makes very little, if rent were to go up even a little, they will move.

It's hard to believe that the Mercury staff and readers are trying to find a way to keep the races segregated and setting up schools and infrastructure for them that is separate but equal, but that is exactly what they are pushing. Trying to create a prosperous city within a city for our black folk sounds wrong because it is wrong.

Integration is happening all by itself, which is a positive process. If you want to improve opportunities for people at lower incomes, then fund our education system and promote job growth.

Our misguided policy of confounding gender and race in terms of "equality" has caused the exact opposite of racial and economic parity. Sex and race are not the same, in case no one has noticed.

It has proved easier to put white girls in law offices and black boys in prison--unless they get shot first.

And then there is the phenomenon of "assortative mating." People strongly tend to marry by ethnicity, class, wealth: lawyers marry lawyers; grocery clerks marry grocery clerks; homeless people marry homeless people. Our social policy is mainly responsible for the increasing stratification by ethnicity, class, wealth: anti-equality.

So we end up with lawyers driving new SUVs and living in the Pearl, grocery clerks driving beaters and living in Felony Flats, homeless people pushing carts and living anywhere they can.

Go figure!

Race is a festering issue in Portland, not least because blacks were not allowed to move here, at all, period, by state decree, and only came here to staff the shipyards when the city became desperate for their labor earlier this century. So blacks moved here in one fell swoop as an indentured class with severed roots, into a particularily alien setting.

Add to the problem our ridiculous political culture in Oregon of anything-goes, as long as the unions are OK with it, resulting in one of the longest-running segregated school situations in the COUNTRY. (And the lowest rate of high-school graduation of African American teens of ANY urban area in the nation. We're at 24%, next lowest is Detroit, at 29% of black kids graduating.)

I'm with Atomic. The New Columbia is a great example of well-spent government dollars and engagement in resetting the reference frame.

Earlier last century, not earlier this century. Hard to remember that we are already nine years into a new century.

The first eight of which we had to endure the cross of the younger Bush.

To think of the opportunities lost makes one wither. So maybe it's easy to forget that we are in a new century.

I find the response to this post and the previous post on Pdx being a "white city" to be very interesting.

The fact that so many here on one of the main "young, progressive" blogs react negatively to any suggestion that there is a race problem, seems to agree with the argument of the "white city" essay. That argument being that we all get along and agree on everything and have unipolar politics because there is no real diversity.