Thirsty Thursday

Good morning folks, I am sorry I was unable to write yesterday we are in the process of moving offices at work and I needed to drive in.

That being said on to the topic at hand. Which is? I read an interesting article on another blog that I read now and then called Blue Oregon. Now Blue Oregon is a very liberal blog and centers primarily around issues within Oregon though they do address some national issues as well. There was an article last week about how Portland needs to be more diverse.

I found this interesting because it generated a large amount of comments about how bad Portland is and how there needs to be more diversity amongst its population. But I think people are missing the point completely here. The article was focused on African American diversity and the amount of African Americans in Portland is about 6% of the total population. It does not take into account the large number of Asians, Hispanics, and Europeans that live in Portland. That in and of itself is a problem for me in the article.

But I think the biggest problem for me is the idea that the diversity of a city can some how be artificially controlled by the people who live there. My first thought was how are the residents of Portland supposed to attract people. Even more how are they supposed to attract the right kind of people for the diversity that the author obviously wants? This is the article.

I do not think you can manufacture diversity and Portland and the Pacific Northwest in general is not an area that has ever attracted a large African American population. In fact I believe that the majority of people who have moved here came during WWII and were working in the shipyards. That as a matter of fact is how my family came to be here from North Dakota.

What are we going to do, start busing people in so that we can raise the diversity level to a healthy 15%? Or is that not high enough. Would it be even better if we could attract an African American educator who wants to start an African American University here? It just seems to me that only in a city like Portland would there be a discussion about how not diverse enough they are and how can we manufacture something artificially that really should not be manufactured.