Dr. Shani Adia Evans in Portland at the Black Memory Lab!

Join Don't Shoot Portland and the Black Memory Lab for an afternoon with Dr. Shani Adia Evans, author of We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place. This landmark study draws on dozens of interviews to show how longtime Black Portland residents experienced and responded to gentrification and racial neighborhood change in Northeast Portland neighborhoods.

Reading + Signing from 4:00-5:00pm
Interviewing Workshop with the Author from 5:00-6:30pm

Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods of Northeast Portland, also called “Albina,” were a haven for and a hub of Black community life. But between 1990 and 2010, Albina changed dramatically—it became majority White.
In We Belong Here, sociologist Shani Adia Evans offers an intimate look at gentrification from the inside, documenting the reactions of Albina residents as the racial demographics of their neighborhood shift. As White culture becomes centered in Northeast, Black residents recount their experiences with what Evans refers to as “White watching,” the questioning look on the faces of White people they encounter, which conveys an exclusionary message: “What are you doing here?” This, Evans shows, is a prime example of what she calls “White spacemaking”: the establishment of White space—spaces in which Whiteness is assumed to be the norm and non-Whites are treated with suspicion—in formerly non-White neighborhoods. Evans also documents Black residents’ efforts to create and maintain places for Black belonging in White-dominated Portland. While gentrification typically describes socioeconomic changes that may have racial implications, White spacemaking allows us to understand racism as a primary mechanism of neighborhood change. We Belong Here illuminates why gentrification and White spacemaking should be examined as intersecting, but not interchangeable, processes of neighborhood change.

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is author of . Dr. Evans is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rice University. She formerly taught at Reed College in Portland Oregon. She completed a PhD in Sociology and Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

is an arts and education organization that promotes social justice and civic participation. Our mission is to harness the power of creative expression to inspire, educate, and mobilize communities towards equity, justice, and transformative social impact. is an extension of this programming, centering art as activism to showcase underrepresented artists. @dontshootpdx @theblackgallerypdx

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