The Many Communities of Color in Portland
I used to work as a reporter for a newspaper, and space constraints were a very real thing. At the Los Angeles Times, we measured stories in inches, and if a story was too long, we’d have to cut out some inches. Now, writing for the website of The Atlantic, there are no space constraints (!). I can write as much as I want for the interwebs without having to worry about how much room I have on a newspaper page.
Still, journalistic pieces can’t go on forever. I don’t think readers want all the information on a topic; they want me, as the journalist, to pick a representative and digestible amount of information, and pull it together into a story. As a journalist, every time I write a story, I have to figure out where to draw the line, what to put in and leave out.
On a recent trip to Portland, I wrote a story about Oregon’s racist past and did not include information about Latinos, Asian-Americans, or American Indians. The responses of some readers to this oversight are below. I agree with them that there are other racist parts to Portland’s racist history that I did not include. But in my defense, I have to draw some limits, or else the stories will be even longer than they already are. And they are pretty long, by The Atlantic’s standards. Blame a former print reporter finally set free of space constraints, who is learning the limits of longform.
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This first reader, Andrew, is a longtime resident of Portland:
While your article has a fairly thorough history of anti-black racism in Portland, I am disappointed that it completely ignores the racism faced by Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and immigrant communities in Portland over the years. I don’t say this to diminish the racism faced by African Americans, but if this is “The Racist History of Portland,” you really left out some incredibly terrible things other people of color have faced in Portland past and present. A lot of your article was pulled from local scholarship and reporting others have already done, so it seems incredibly lazy to ignore the five other chapters of the Coalition of Communities of Color report you cited on racial disparities in Portland, or the notorious incidents of internment, displacement, and murder that have occurred for other communities.
More portions of that massive CCC report are featured below. Speaking of internment, another Portland resident, Lawrence, recommends a piece from The Huffington Post:
Here’s an important aspect of history regarding Portland’s hyper-support of the Japanese-American internments. It’s a story the current daily newspaper whitewashes to this very day.
From an Asian American reader and former resident of the city’s Northwest District:
Read more from The Atlantic:
This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
