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C Ch ha ap pt te er r 2 25 5 The Geography of Whiteness: Russian and Ukrainian “Coalitions of Color” in the Pacific Northwest SUSAN W. HARDWICK INTRODUCTION “Whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations” (G. Lipsitz, 1998, p. 1). “Denying white as a racial category, neglecting to see that whiteness has a history and a geography — as Americans have done — allows whiteness to stand as the norm” (S. Hoelscher, 2003, p. 662). Whiteness is both a historical construction and a spatial phenomenon. According to Steven Hoelscher, unmasking the processes by which whiteness is enacted and identifying the material consequences of such a construction is the first step toward formulating workable antiracist politics (2003, p. 662). In this chapter, I examine whiteness in the context of the shifting identities and related spatial expressions of a large group of white refugees in a metropolitan area long dominated by a majority white culture.1 Portland, Oregon is located in a region variously known as Cascadia, Ecotopia, and “the last Caucasian bastion in the United States” (Kaplan, 1998). Since my focus in this chapter is on the economic, social, cultural, and political implications of whiteness , I prefer to label it Caucasia. This chapter reports on the findings of a longterm multi-method project that is documenting and analyzing the post-1980s refugee diaspora in the Canadian and American Pacific Northwest. I limit my focus to the relationships between the religious networks, shifting identities, and spatial patterns of refugees in a state that surprisingly now ranks eleventh in the nation in the total numbers of migrants arriving with refugee or asylumseeker status. The largest — ethnic Russians and Ukrainians — rarely refer directly to their whiteness, although expressions of their feelings, perceptions, and use of racial categories have emerged throughout the project that can only be understood within a whiteness problematic. Their large numbers, relative economic stability, activist religious and social networks, and political savvy — along with the color of their skin — make this group an appropriate point of analysis. I focus attention on this large group of recent migrants to Portland and environs in response to Peter Jackson’s call for studies of the constructions of whiteness at a variety of scales from the nation to the neighborhood (1998, p. 100), and the earlier pioneering work of Frankenberg (1993), Jackson and Penrose (1993), Bonnett (1997), Fine et al. (1997), and Dyer (1997). Incidentally, it was Bonnett’s disturbing comment: “it is extraordinary to note that the only sustained debate about white identity ever conducted within geography took place between 1890–1930 and concerned the possibility of white acclimatization to the ‘wet tropics’” (Bonnett, 1997, p. 193 from Trewartha, 1926), that was the nudge that most encouraged me to write this chapter for a book on race, ethnicity, and place. 330 Susan W. Hardwick SPACE, PLACE, AND REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT IN PORTLAND The popular perception of Portland as a white person’s city is deeply entrenched and has been shaped by the city’s larger historical context of settlement primarily by western and northern Europeans. The dominant culture, especially in the earliest years of settlement of the city, created a homogeneous place that actively worked against incorporation of the “other” — from the earliest territorial laws prohibiting African Americans to the KKK in the 1920s to restrictions against Chinese land-ownership to anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1940s to skinhead violence in the 1980s and 1990s. These long-seated attitudes and perceptions linger among many residents of today’s new, more diverse Portland. The region’s earliest migration flows were dominated by Germans, people from the British Isles, and Scandinavians, along with Euro-American settlers from the mid-Atlantic, New England, and Midwestern states. For the past twenty-five years, new migrants from Montana, Idaho, California, and Colorado have joined other (primarily white) migrants from the northern Rockies and Great Plains. Since the mid-1980s, (primarily white) “equity immigrants” from California, in particular, have continued to flow into Portland to escape congested urban places and the high cost of living south of the state border. In the years during and after WWII, African Americans moved to Portland to work in the shipbuilding industries. Soon thereafter in the early 1950s, the city’s entire African-American community was displaced by a devastating flood that demolished the African-American settlement of Vanport, a high risk, high density housing development located on an island in...

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