alt Hacker NewsYou don't think the racial make-up of Portland had anything to do with racism?
That's honestly a little wild that people don't realize exactly what principles Oregon was founded on and the role Portland played in all of it.
One, the Portland municipal government explicitly admits to racism during white flight: https://www.portland.gov/bps/planning/adap/history-racist-pl...
Two, the state itself has passed multiple anti-Black exclusionary laws and was founded as a 'white utopia': https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/#...
> Any free Black person who refused to leave would be subject to lashing, a provision that was known as "Peter Burnett's lash law."
> The second exclusion law was enacted by the Territorial Legislature on September 21, 1849. This law specified that “it shall not be lawful for any n** or m*** to enter into, or reside” in Oregon, with exceptions made for those who were already in the territory.
> Voters [...] approved the exclusion clause by a wide margin. Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution.
This, too, is covered extensively: https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2020/06/oregons-founders-...
And more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53996159
I honestly don't know if you could've found a worse example.
> but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period
Yes, it was exactly my point that Portland was already the whitest metropolitan area in the country. And yes, I am well aware of the extensive redlining (my grandparents lived in Vanport before it was destroyed). And yet they still had people explode out into the suburbs through the 50s and 60s.
This is a counter-example to the thesis that urban flight was purely a racist response to "preserve apartheid".
No one is arguing that racism didn't exist. But suburbanization happened everywhere around the world where cars were introduced (even places with almost no diversity). To blame suburbanization as a purely racial phenomenon is not true.