In cities that vote blue, no immunity from racism

Portland, Ore., is an example of a city that is focusing new economic development efforts on the black community and rethinking its housing policy, but the efforts are still a work in progress.

As she has watched white leftists engage in street battles with white nationalists on Portland’s waterfront, Debi Smith has been struck with a sense of gratitude for those willing to fight, in a sense, for her.

But for the life-long Pacific Northwest resident, who is African-American, her thankfulness comes with a caveat grounded in personal experience and history.

After all, Ms. Smith has also watched black people, by both choice and force of circumstances, leaving the City of Roses, their numbers declining since 2010. Progressive to its core, Portland is also America’s whitest big city – in part the troubling legacy of Oregon’s founding goal in the 19th century of creating a white utopia through exclusionary laws.

Here in a city of hops and hipsters, where Republicans have been all but banished, Ms. Smith’s properties have been vandalized with racist graffiti – a particularly sore point since they are one of the only black families left in what was once the core of black Portland, around the corner from where Duke Ellington used to hang out.

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