The City of Eminence, sadly, only exists in my mind and as a Discord server online. It is my emotional and digital home, not a physical one.
My physical home is being taken from me, by corporate landlords and county judges both more interested in profit and “the letter of the law” than in doing anything about the ever-growing crisis of homelessness both in Portland, Oregon and across America. I will soon not have a secure location to feel safe in, let alone a space that is definitively “mine.” The people who make these decisions against people like myself never seem to realize…they could very easily be on the other side of their judgements, and the more they work to knock us down, the more they undermine themselves and the community they are supposed to serve.
But yes, within the next few days I will be homeless. My hopes of avoiding this fate have been consistently frustrated if not outright thwarted by an impossible-to-navigate system constructed to remove human empathy from the equation rather than making it the centerpiece. To say I am disappointed in the “progressive” city of Portland is a gross understatement, but as I have discovered, Portland’s famed liberalism is a recently and haphazardly-constructed myth by a population that is overwhelmingly white. Less than six percent of Portland’s citizens are Black. The “largest” minority in the city, those identifying as Hispanic or Latino, only accounts for 10.3% of the population. (Historical demographics of Portland, OR.) Compare this to a place I spent the majority of my life, a purple city in a deep red state: Kansas City, MO. Kansas City’s Black population accounts for 26.5% of the city’s citizens, while 10.7% claim Hispanic or Latino heritage. (Historical demographics of Kansas City, MO.) The bumper stickers calling on us to “Keep Portland Weird” may as well be telling us to “Keep Portland White.”
I can’t be the only one who thinks its a tad disingenuous to proclaim your Pacific Northwestern town a “diverse and inclusive haven” when your population is more white than a city in Missouri.
Portland gets away with this through a steady diet of performative gestures like “land acknowledgements” and “pronoun declarations,” the kind of literally-the-least-we-can-do practices that do absolutely nothing to help or raise awareness for the people they’re supposed to. But when I hear old, white Multnomah County judges wonder why they “don’t get Columbus Day off” aloud in their courtrooms, it’s hard to feel like the land acknowledgements are having whatever intended effect they’re supposed to have. Multnomah itself is the name of a tribe indigenous to the area that was nearly wiped out white settlement and resultant disease outbreaks by the 1830s, so a county judge lamenting the lack of respect for Christopher Columbus while representing Multnomah County seems to me like an especially-delirious form of white privilege and entitlement, but that is what the Fox said.
Portland’s downtown, a picturesque and charming area, serves as a stark reminder of the canyon-like divide between the haves and the have-nots in the city. Cybertrucks parked in front of beautifully-restored 100-year-old buildings housing boutique luxury handbag shops begrudgingly share the space with homeless people in tents unable to find work, food, or adequate shelter. The disaffected and disadvantaged camp in the shadow of the very County Courthouse that does so little to protect their rights (and was completed in 2020 for a cost of $300 million). It is very clear from even a cursory glance of Portland who has actually benefited from the city’s “progressive reputation,” and it certainly isn’t the marginalized.
As a transfemme suffering from cPTSD and with a past shot through by abuse, I can’t help but be realistic about my odds of rebounding or even surviving my impeding homelessness. They’re low. They’re extremely low. But I can look out my window and see how little Portland cares about people in my situation, so I am well past expecting or even hoping for help or empathy in this town.
I fled Missouri in 2021 and came here to find a more just and inclusive community. But Portland in many ways is worse than the red state I left, so I’d advise caution in coming here.
If you would like to help me, please donate below or more importantly, join the City of Eminence community and maybe together we can all show these assholes how you really make a place by the people and for the people.
