OPINION
Page 6 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
January 18, 2016
Volume 26 Number 2
January 18, 2016
ISSN: 1094-9453
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TALKING STORY IN ASIAN AMERICA
n Polo
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Remixing Portland, 2016
n River City right now, about half of our school
kids go home to ethnic minority families, but no
one needs to panic. This presents us with all
kinds of upsides. Among them: Getting Portlanders
untangled from Portlandian — that lingua franca of
commonly held attitudes and idiom. The one shared
among many who’ve given us our nationally envied
scores for neighborliness, for transportation alter-
natives, and of course, for cool environmental
stewardship.
And while there are good reasons why good
Portlanders speak how we do — Monkey Year 2016
is a good year to let some of these habits go. To let
them go wherever no-longer-hip clichés go to relax,
tan, reboot.
From the perspective of ethnic-stream families
earnestly believing in better sharing River City’s
robust mainstream, there’s a world to be gained by
reforming a few of our idioms in attitude and
speech. Take Portland’s smart urban sarcasm —
better than post-modern irony, is old-school
sincerity. Simple optimism works best of all.
A good place to start our Monkey Year is
rethinking three stubborn chestnuts: Portland
Polite, Portland White, and Portland PC.
Portland Polite
You’ve heard it said. And not in a good way. It
means that I’m not saying what I’m really feeling. It
criticizes an inhibitory social habit that keeps me
from harming another’s dignity. And it preserves
our social harmony. Conflict-adverse is similar
critique, also in currency.
Pero here’s another perspective: In most of our
Arab and African, Asian and islander, Russian- and
Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, we call this
behavior: Good manners. Civility. Both in our
sending nations and right here, kids learn early
that communal harmony matters much more than
personal feelings. Teens or adults not tuned into
this expectation, we dismiss as obviously not-loved-
right (not disciplined well) by their moms, aunties,
and grandmas. Knuckleheads.
Polite Portlanders are important. Our city is a
colorful blend of communities determined to
integrate us into a global mercado of politics,
products, and ideas. Around our raucous kitchen
table, plain-speaking Harry S. Truman is always
welcome, but only if balanced by the gentle Lion of
Africa, Nelson Mandela. Only if jovial Dalai Lama
I
A good place to start our
Monkey Year is rethinking
three stubborn chestnuts:
Portland Polite, Portland White,
and Portland PC.
mixes it up too.
While this sounds like an upgrade to, say,
Portland Polite 2.0, it’s actually that plus a return to
the way confident and kind Americans talked, not
so long ago. So let’s call this, Portland Polite 3.0.
Portland White
America’s whitest city! — headlines used to shout.
Thank heaven, mainstream opinion leaders have
stopped reporting it and repeating it. Because it’s
not true. Not where we live. Citing tidy U.S. Census
Bureau tables does not make it truer. On our street,
no one marks the boxes or licks the stamps on those
government surveys. Our family hasn’t since
President Reagan busted Berlin’s Wall. Not since
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Harrison Ford’s
antics in Return of the Jedi. Quite some time. A lot of
time without shifting our official perception of how
non-white we are.
Truer is: River City has been a vigorous
intersection of many-many nations for roughly 140
centuries. U.S. Army captains Lewis and Clark
paddling up two centuries ago, did not change the
truth of this.
President Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery did,
however, put an Anglo-American POV firmly into
place. Into this place. From 1805 forward, our
official narrative has been the English-only version.
From that perspective, Portland White looks right.
But where we live, every workday morning, a crazy
mix of brown and black and blue folks pack into my
car.
Our foreign-born neighbors (1-in-5 Portlanders,
1-in-4 Beavertonians) did not happen by sneak
attack. Really not. What happened is a history of
segregated POVs. A thick mainstream point of view,
paralleled by several ethnic-stream ones. Proof:
Recall any recent instance of a bad intersection
between white and black or brown Portlanders.
Replay our irreconcilably contrasting POVs. Our
startlingly different worldviews have been built by
Continued on page 7
Opinions expressed in this newspaper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of this publication.