Tag Archives: Portland

On Being a White Liberal In Portland OR

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Portland Oregon has been in the news a lot lately. Mostly for not very good things. The city has a great image generally, but that’s because the people talking about Portland, generally look and think like me. White, bearded, and generally liberal. However, there’s a history to Portland that’s rarely talked about, which is that it was essentially founded to be a White Utopia. Oregon Public Broadcasting has a great article interviewing people of color after the Max Light Rail attack, I recommend you read that here, because they do a great job explaining the background.

I think generally, it’s safe to say, that Portland encompasses both the best and worst of being a white culture. You’re able to find good high paying jobs in technology. You are able to be around other white people because you have a similar background. I can’t decided if those two sentences are the best or worst. On the one hand it means that generally white people are well off, but that also means that we are exclusive and not well integrated with the rest of the community at large. This leads to ignorance, in liberals it results in something of a White Hero mentality, regardless of good intentions. In Conservatives it can manifest itself into hate, including white supremacy and neo-nazi’s. The former wants to make friends with minorities to understand them better, but that can result in tokenism. While the latter ends having “our Mexican” who isn’t like those other Mexicans out there. Which is a justification for liking one Mexican while hating all other job stealing Mexicans.

I’ve become acutely aware of this over the past several years in Portland. I am married to a Mexican-American woman as many of you know. In Austin these issues didn’t come up as often as they do now, and I think that was more due to the people she was working with during her PhD studies and Post-Doc. However, whenever she started working at Intel, which has a big problem with diversity, these issues became a focal point of many things she does. She’s been heavily involved in Women’s groups at Intel. She’s a member of the Saturday Academy working to get under privileged and minorities involved in science and technology at an earlier age. These were things that, to be honest, are fairly new to me as a thing that needs to be done.

Growing up in Grove City, you didn’t really realize that you had it pretty well. It was a very very very White community. The school system was really good. Opportunities were there for anyone to join Saturday Science, there were ways to easily take more advanced classes in any subject if you were on the college path. Since Grove City was a really small school, our High school had 800 some odd students, we didn’t have the massive disparities due to differing socio-economic. They were there to be sure. It was a handful of kids rather than the majority of the kids as some rural or inner city schools see.

I guess it’s really fair to say i grew up sheltered and started to experience more diversity while studying at Pitt. I have been lucky since going to Pitt to marry my amazing wife, study in Europe meeting people from all over the world. People from countries the US has foreign policy issues with.

Even despite that, I’m still uncomfortable around people that I don’t know how to start a conversation. I think it’s important to be honest about that discomfort to myself and use that as an opportunity to grow. The only way to get rid of the discomfort is to meet more people. I don’t want a black friend because they are black. I want and need more friends of diverse backgrounds to grow into a better person. My wife has opened my eyes to her family’s cultural. I really enjoy Mariachi music now, Son De La Negra is one of their favorite songs and one of mine too.

So how does all this relate to being a White Liberal in Portland? Well, I think for a start, we need to meet people where they are, try to understand their world and world view. It’s very different than ours. We need to start joining groups and becoming part of the larger more complex city of Portland or whatever city you currently live in. The other thing that we must do is listen. When people are talking about their history and where they came from, you’ll hear both a lot of similarities and many defining differences. You can build bonds on the similarities, while using those differences to understand people in a way you never could before. These differences can be painful because it forces you to look into the mirror and really think about where you came from and for you to grow as a person it requires to potentially reevaluate how you got where you are. I know that I grew up in a pretty special area that gave me a huge amount of opportunity. My parents were in a position where they enabled me to go to Pitt leaving with minimal debt. This makes me very fortunate and puts me in a very different place than people who built up a lot of debt going to school or came from an area where they weren’t enabled to succeed.

Upon self-reflection, I need to do more listening and growing.

Uber might be crashing back to Earth

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Last Friday Uber decided to start operating in Portland. I know, it’s a little surprising that Uber or any of the other rideshare Taxi apps aren’t already in the city. Portland had told Uber they could not operate in the city, but Uber decided to thumb their nose at that similarly to what they have done in other cities. Even though Uber was recently valued at $40 Billion they have had some serious issues lately, like rape of a woman in Delhi while illegally operating in the city. Furthermore, as I mentioned in my last article, they have smeared women journalists with the data Uber collects.

Portland has decided to sue Uber over their illegal operation within the city. The city is following Nevada in suing the company rather than trying to fine their drivers. Uber has since ceased operations in the state due to an injunction against the company operating in the state. This appears to be the only route that will work effectively as Uber is still operating in Delhi despite the citywide ban of the service. Uber has also been banned in Spain, Thailand, and parts of the Netherlands. I think the biggest blow, however, is the fact that both San Francisco and LA are suing the company for false advertising related to their fees and background check.

These responses should not come as much of a surprise to anyone that has been watching the company over the past few years. The company is part of the Silicon Valley culture of going fast and trying to break things. The problem is that, incumbents are incumbents for a reason and they do have the ear of government. It’s not to say that they should be incumbents or that it makes them something worthy of respect, but you need to understand the cards are stacked against you. In cases where you want to go in and intentionally ruffle feathers, you must have strong safe guards in place to protect your customers and be public about how you protect them. Uber should welcome background check audits, privacy audits, and driver safety audits whenever they go into a new market. These should all be huge features that they brag about and let people under the hood to actually see.

I think it’s time that companies like Uber start treating our data as if it’s Personal Health Information, which is protected by Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (aka that HIPAA agreement you sign at the doctors’ office). The default is to not share personal information about a patient, that if someone is caught looking at the data without just cause, it typically results in a firing and a fine for the organization. Similar action must be taken at Uber to show they are a steward of our data. Now the government won’t be taking that money, but instead they should be donating the funds to a good cause at a similar rate to a HIPAA violation.

In some respect Uber is exhibiting the effects of a company that is growing too large too fast without designing processes to enable their business activities properly. For Uber to be a successful long term company they need to figure out how to both appease city governments through over protecting their users and breaking existing rules. If the company can be trusted then governments will be more willing to accept pushing boundaries.

Weather, urban planning, and regional differences

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So, you may or may not be aware, Portland got some snow. Compared to my friends in Pittsburgh, it was about the same they were getting every few weekends. We got between 5-8 inches in the span of a day or so. The impact compared to the east coast city was absolutely insane. There were 500 accidents on Thursday night alone. The public transportation system was almost completely shut down and tomorrow may not be running – I’ll be working from home tomorrow because of that risk. I’ve seen more tire chains here than I have in my entire life having grown up in part of the Snow Belt. It’s amazing the differences.

The major highway between myself and Portland had multiple inches of snow standing on it after a full day with light snowing. I’ve never seen it before. There was actually a full lane missing because of it.

Why does this happen? Well, first Portland normally doesn’t get this type of snow, this was the most since 1971 or something like that. Second, they just don’t have the infrastructure for it. To buy enough salt or trucks to deal with this once in 30 year incident isn’t really responsible buying for a government.

Compared to Pittsburgh which deals with this sort of thing on a regular basis they have designed their infrastructure around dealing with snow or enabling people to get around it. Plus, they just drive through that stuff even if they shouldn’t because they have no choice. Unlike Portland, Pittsburgh doesn’t have as robust of a public transportation system, not that it mattered since the Max was down for a bulk of the weekend.

What does this tell us about urban planning? First, because of climate change, we need to begin thinking about how we’ll be experiencing more snow and extreme storms similar to this. How can we design our mass transit systems and our highway systems to be able to handle these extreme storms? In the case of the Max in Portland, I think they should install some sort of heating element into the switches, which apparently freeze over, so these don’t stop the Max from running.

I think the interesting thing about the snow here and in other locations is that it really brings out spaces that aren’t used by vehicles. This article really pointed it out for me: What Snows Tells Us About Creating Better Public Places. I think that it’s not just snow that points out the spaces that we to design better, but rain does so as well. Thinking back to the flash flooding we’d get in Austin and how that would impact moving around the city, we need to think about how to design these spaces to minimize the impact on people and the environment around the city.

Overall, we need to think about how to plan our cities better for new weather patterns. This is going to take some serious investment into our infrastructure. This will create jobs, but unfortunately mean we need to spend more tax money on our cities. Portland shouldn’t have been shut down from 5 inches of snow, especially not the public transportation, we need to figure out how to enable public transportation no matter what. People that don’t want to drive need that, plus parking in the city costs a ton more than parking. Let’s figure this out.

The power of friendship

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Today on the Max I was unfortunate enough to hear a rather depressing conversation. During rush hour if two people are talking next to you and you don’t have headphones on you don’t really have much choice (I keep forgetting to bring mine). The conversation started out innocently enough talking about a guy that they both thought was good looking. Then it shifted to insulting the man’s girlfriend saying she wasn’t really attractive. Shortly there after the cuter of the two girls just cuts into the other one. It was absolutely brutal. I looked up from my book at that point and it looked like this girl was about to cry. Over the course of my life I’ve had a lot of female friends and I can say it was the first time I’d heard anything so unexpected, brutal, and uncaring. The girl saying this was commenting about the other girls face and how plain and simple it was because she never wore make up and didn’t know how to wear it anyway. Of course, the one making these comments was wearing plenty.

I can say that I’ve never had friends like that. This has really made me appreciate all the friends that I’ve had over the course of my life. I’ve had to say good-bye to so many because I’ve moved around several times. In some cases it’s been easier to keep in contact than others, but all of them have had a huge impact on my life. It’s my friends (wife included obviously as my best friend), that really make me work to become a better person. Dan of KBMOD fame has been and continues to be one of the major inspirations for my blogging. My friends over in The Netherlands encouraged me to write and really enjoyed it as well.

It’s because of these people that I’ve been successful and hopefully continue to be. In my most recent move in the US, I’m really beginning to realize how lucky I’ve been with my friends so far. They are fantastic people. I’ve been in Portland for 4 months now and this has been the hardest I’ve had with making new friends. Partially this is my fault because of where I live and how little time I have after work. Partially, it’s a lot of work to find people that you really want to be around. In a place where you have no family, it’s your friends that become your support network. Building the right kind of network is tough.

Friends are such a powerful influence in our lives and I think we underappreciate them too much. I’m glad my friends are who they are and I’m really glad I don’t have vicious negative people in my life. It would make life much less enjoyable to be around people that hurt you because they can.

Thanks for being who you are, you jerks.