3  GETTING CURIOUS

FOR SEVERAL YEARS MY HUSBAND AND I LIVED in low-income apartments surrounded by neighbors from Bhutan and Somalia and Guatemala, by single mothers who grew up in generational poverty, by people who had experienced homelessness. A year or two ago I looked up where we lived on a map created nearly a century ago by the government for the express purpose of designating real estate value to various parcels of land. In the 1930s and 1940s the US government created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and sent out mortgage lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers to create maps of 250 cities that “color-coded credit worthiness and risk.” The place where we lived was shaded in yellow, which categorized it as definitely declining: not a good investment. Across the street was a large red area: even more dangerous. The HOLC’s reasoning for risk was thus: those areas contained the greatest Italian population in the city, and because there was a prevalence of “colored races” that constituted “a subversive racial influence.” The reports, scanned and saved and uploaded to a website anyone can access today, go on to say that parts of this neighborhood would have been given a better classification if it weren’t for the presence of so many immigrants and “colored people.”1 Alas, if only they hadn’t lived there. My neighborhood would have been deemed valuable.

Curiosity made me look up this map, this website, tracing the lines of history that deemed some communities worth investing in while others were left to wilt in the absence of services and capital. What struck me was that this wasn’t an accident. Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer who works on segregation issues in education, once made the point that someone had hand-colored in those neighborhoods. Somebody, a real person just like me, had taken red and yellow markers and chosen to deem entire populations as hazardous to investors. Immigrants and Black Americans were left to struggle without bank loans or new businesses coming in, and they were strategically grouped together and then left without services afforded to White folks—a process we now call redlining, thanks to those simple pieces of paper that forged the fortunes of so many. Those maps caused some of my neighbors to live through decades of intentional disinvestment while my grandparents were busy cashing in on the American Dream of a house and a mortgage and their very own backyard. Looking at those color-coded maps was a transformative experience. It helped me—someone who grew up disconnected from both land and history—begin to see how something as small and tangible as a map and a marker can change the destinies and fortunes of generations. It was one small step on my journey of getting curious about how the world works and who it works for.

The Latin root of curiosity means “cure,” which makes me wonder if it isn’t a way to heal some of our oldest sicknesses. Like, perhaps, the “amnesia of affluence” that theologians point out in the Bible, and in our modern-day context. For myself, getting curious about the land, the actual space that I inhabit, has been the first step toward understanding where I am located in a vastly unequal economic world.

Besides the kingdom of God, the topic Jesus talked about the most was money. I think of those small, twisty, nearly inscrutable parables that Jesus told the crowds who followed him. Most of them were incredibly challenging to those who had ears to hear, especially if you had resources or thought that you had earned the right to hoard due to correct beliefs and actions. But there is an underlying sense of wonder to stories Jesus told, a sense of connection and yet also a deep unsettling of the rules we create to go through life.

Curiosity helps me pay attention to what I might otherwise want to miss: for some, the good news of the American Dream feels like bad news. I live in neighborhoods where I see the evidence of it everywhere: payday loan companies and fast food joints abound, but there are no green parks or community centers or apartments that are affordable to people working full time at minimum wage. Curiosity helps me flip the question upside down: What would good news for my lower-income neighbors feel like for me? Would it, just possibly, feel a bit like bad news to me in the beginning, if I wasn’t used to a truly equitable world?

My home of Oregon remains one of the whitest states in the United States because that is how it was designed. At the beginning of their statehood, in the 1850s, Oregon outlawed slavery. But before anyone could congratulate Oregon for being so progressive, the state excluded free Black men from entering because they were worried these men would “intermix with Indians, instilling into their minds feelings of hostility toward the white race.’’ In 1857 Oregon had the distinction of being the only free state admitted to the union with an exclusion clause—an exclusion clause in the Incorporated Bill of Rights, which prohibited Black persons from setting foot in the state without penalty of violence against their bodies.2

Although the laws were rarely enforced, the intentions worked, and the ramifications ripple onward. Currently, over 150 years after these laws were put into place, less than 2 percent of Oregon is Black. And from 1970 until 2017, the rates of homeownership for Black people in Portland plummeted by almost 40 percent.3 Are we curious about why this is? Do we accept the unequal and unjust world we live in and then simply move on? Or do we follow the lead of Christians like Oscar Romero, a Jesuit priest in El Salvador, who wrote, “Not having land is a consequence of sin. . . . The land contains much of God, and therefore it groans when the unjust monopolize it and leave no space for others.”4 His faith led him to listen to those who did not have access to land, and his faith led him to see it as sinful that some monopolized what God so freely gave—and called it good.

Others, like Dr. King, went a step further. “Men convinced themselves that the system that was so economically profitable must be morally justifiable. . . . Their rationalizations clothe obvious wrongs in the beautiful garments of righteousness. This tragic attempt to give moral sanction to an economically profitable system gave birth to the doctrine of White supremacy.”5 Dr. King was talking about chattel slavery based on a hierarchy of race, which led to the boon of American production and wealth—for certain populations. It’s the kind of economics that works so well that slave owners told themselves, much like the conquistadors, that they were doing God’s work by evangelizing and Christianizing the African people they enslaved. As Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove so eloquently points out in his book, the vestiges of this “slave-holder” religion trickle down to all of us who were born into privileged groups.6 And one of the ways White supremacy has so deeply enmeshed itself with both an economy that brutalizes and capitalizes on suffering is by getting those of us who have benefitted to not pay attention. White supremacy works by squashing curiosity that might center the voices whose backs have been broken by what others have called manifest destiny.

I have spent most of my life in the western half of the United States, but for three years my husband, small daughter, and I lived in the Midwest—in a gloriously chaotic and truly diverse city called Minneapolis. I spent those three years wandering around Somali malls and gawking at street signs in Hmong, rubbing shoulders with transplants from the South, being the minority for once in my life. When we came back to Portland after three very cold winters away, it seemed the city had changed overnight. The apartments we used to live in had long waiting lists. The surrounding rents were all out of our financial reach. The demographics had changed, or at least it seemed to us that way. We wandered on the leafy streets near our old complex, past all the shops that glittered with gentrification signposts—artisan backpack shops and soul food restaurants run by White people, hot yoga studios, and grocery stores where we couldn’t afford to buy a piece of gorgeous, GMO-free fruit. Something in me ached at what was missing. The sameness, the homogeneity of the people walking and shopping and eating was shocking, especially after living in the vibrant and eclectic Midwest (something I would never have believed I would ever write until I had lived it myself).

After being away, after living in a city where people of difference actually had to learn to live and grapple with each other every day—Minnesota as a whole has around seventy-five thousand Somali-speaking immigrants, for instance, compared to the twelve thousand that Oregon has resettled—coming back to an increasingly gentrified Portland was like living in a washed-out photograph, the colors muted, both literally and figuratively. It felt like Portland had lied to us.7

Everywhere I looked, bumper stickers implored me to Keep Portland Weird. Slowly, I started to understand what people meant when they said this or put it on their car. They meant weird in a very precise and narrow and exclusionary way—the aesthetics of difference but with the insides all the same. The intentions of the individual people might have been good: they might truly believe they welcomed diversity or otherness or weirdness, but their systems had been built for another purpose. Like so many cities, schools in Portland were unequal and segregated. There were few affordable places where families in poverty could live. Rents kept rising and people kept leaving. Maybe people noticed this, or maybe they didn’t. Maybe they felt sad and helpless and resigned. Or maybe they consoled themselves with those bumper stickers, with a few token examples of celebrating diversity while structuring their life in such a way that they didn’t have to live in proximity to it.

Portland told me it was kind, that it loved difference, celebrated it, protected it. But Portland was mistaken. Like so many well-meaning White people, Portland is puzzled that its good intentions aren’t enough in the face of strategic policies and practices designed to further inequality. And yet the myth of Portland that has captured the national imagination, the place where young and creative folks come to retire (thanks, Portlandia), continues blithely on, proud of its weirdness, even as it gets more and more consumable, generic, and homogenous. What Portland never told me, though, was that this was all very much on purpose. It had been planned long ago, back when the neighborhoods were colored red or yellow, when it first became best practice to discriminate and penalize Blackness and otherness.

When we moved back to Portland, the lack of sorrow for a city that was so homogenous, that was so truly unrepresentative of our world, shocked me. I looked at the faces walking by me, the beards and tight jeans and bicycles and expensive coffees. These are the things people normally fixate on when they want to talk about gentrification or mass displacement, when they want to talk about how things are changing. But I didn’t care about those—they were just symptoms of a larger illness. Instead, I looked at the faces all around me and noticed how happy everyone looked. I noticed how no one seemed to mind that only a certain kind of person could afford to live there.

In the book The Color of Wealth, the authors state that “income can change on a dime, but wealth changes across generations.” They go on to write that “an estimated 80 percent of assets come from transfers from prior generations.”8 Home ownership has historically been one of the most important ways to build wealth in the United States. And yet from 1930 to 1960 less than 1 percent of all mortgages were given to African Americans—precisely because of discriminatory housing practices like those red and yellow colored HOLC maps.9 Being strategically cut out from one of the most concrete ways to accrue wealth has had historic consequences. And the reverse is also true: I myself am a product of people who were able to capitalize on a system that was built and designed for them.

Once I was at a workshop for people who wanted to use writing to change the world (oh, we were all so hopeful!). Our instructor invited a visiting lecturer, a woman who had grown up in generational poverty and trauma, and who wrote beautiful and sharp poems and prose about the dignity of people who are poor.10 She went around the room and had us talk about our families—whether we grew up poor or not. Most of us hemmed and hawed, most of us tried to say that we were middle class or lower-middle class. None of us could say we were rich. I think I mentioned something about my family having an income that changed constantly—sometimes we were living in a nice suburban house, sometimes a converted trailer home, and once for a few months we lived out of an RV. But this woman, Julia, stopped the class. She pointed out how ashamed we were to talk about money. How most of us didn’t grow up poor and were trying to explain that to her.

It was the first time I realized how much I resisted talking about money or my relative wealth. I realized I needed help in order to be honest about my place in the world and what God might be asking me to do with my privilege: my parents, who were White, had some college education and were able to offer some funds for my own education through their own assets—including home ownership. I grew up listening to conservative talk radio squawk about welfare mothers, but it was strangely silent on mortgage subsidies, federal scholarships, tax breaks for businesses and corporations, and sweet deals for developers looking to attract a certain type of neighbors.

The deep and dark tragedy of affluence is how it takes away curiosity, how it accepts the world as it is, how it conforms to the talking points of empire and Pharaohs. It keeps us from wondering why people of color tend to live in concentrated urban areas with a lack of services, why White folks flock to the suburbs on the backs of subsidies (and then back to the cities when it later becomes profitable), or why our cities remain segregated by class and race. Affluence hears all of these statistics and then looks around at its own neighborhood. Everything seems to be going okay; everything seems to be working out for them. It must have been all that hard work; it must have been deserved. To be curious about any other answer is to open wide the door of responsibility, of kinship, of strings that connect our well-being to the well-being of everyone else.

Those HOLC maps changed the way I viewed my city. It made me wonder every time I saw a bumper sticker. What do we mean when we say Keep Portland Weird? Do we mean to keep it redlined? Do we mean keep excluding immigrants and people of color and in particular African Americans from gaining access to property and wealth acquisition? Do we mean that we want to clutch tightly at our myths of pioneers like Lewis and Clark, who “discovered” a place already filled with people and an indigenous culture? I hope it is clear by now I don’t have all the answers to these questions, that I am only just now starting to pay attention enough to start asking them, a thread that continues to unravel my carefully cultivated beliefs about how my world and country works. Perhaps this is why so many of us resist the discipline of getting curious. Perhaps we are rightly worried that the troubling revelations might never end.