Feeling More Black in Portland: Diversity and the Enregisterment of Livability

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between diversity and urban livability in Portland, Oregon, as ideological and pragmatic projects. I argue that diversity enregisters the city as livable, because the progressive ideals that diversity puts forth index one of many innovative approaches that Portland has taken to resolve the challenges of urban life. Black professional women are both rhetors and subjects of this enregisterment process. They are routinely called on to make public arguments about diversity. However, I show that diversity work just as routinely creates situations where the communicable power of whiteness in the city is both evident and maintained. Women describe navigating this dynamic as “feeling more Black in Portland” than anywhere else they have lived. I contend that this feeling of racialized affect is engendered by diversity's subordination to livability—a structural relation that indexes both the neoliberal underpinnings of local belonging and how narrowly the space is constructed to include Blackness and womanhood.