“Listening through White Ears”: Cross-Racial Dialogues as a Strategy to Address the Racial Effects of Gentrification

ABSTRACT:

Every month residents in a gentrifying Portland neighborhood gather for a cross-racial dialogue in which the long-term African American residents explain to the new white, middle-class residents how neighborhood change, and their new neighbors’“white behaviors” are harmful. Through participant observations at these dialogues for over two years, as well as in-depth interviews, I uncovered how the Restorative Listening Project (RLP) uses dialogue as a strategy for community formation and “antiracist place-making” in Portland’s Northeast neighborhoods. The RLP attempts to mitigate the relational effects of gentrification and construct “antiracist place” by (1) positioning people of color as knowledge producers about the institutional and interpersonal effects of racism in the neighborhood; (2) confronting the tactics of white denial; and (3) promoting consciousness about systemic racism. By doing so, the project promotes antiracist awareness that responds to—perhaps reduces—the racial-relational effects of gentrification. However, it also reveals the limits of consciousness-raising projects in the absence of action that resists structural inequalities.

Notes

1 The historically black name for this neighborhood is Albina and it was not referred to as Alberta until Alberta St. itself was gentrified. See Stroud (1999) or Gibson (2008) for brief histories.

2 The body of literature about gentrification has become more attentive to the comparative experiences of different communities of color, with regard to gentrification; it is far more complicated than only involving African Americans and white people. Although the RLP organizers worked with intentionality to use a coalitional language of “people of color,” and to frequently illuminate similarities and complex differences in racial formations, the project is designed around African American and white relations.

3 For histories of this urbanization and suburbanization as both a structural and cultural process, see Jackson (1987) and Avila (2006).

4 Progressive politics in Portland, like in many cities, fails to coalesce social justice struggles around the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Instead, African Americans and mostly non-Black Queer people in Portland are in competition for space, safety, and resources.