by Mya Gordon
You thought you knew what the mourning doves called to, what sarcasm was, or why playing tag on the block every day brought meaning to heavy breaths and exhausted giggles. You thought you knew everything about anything, like what it meant for a place to be called home. Then, you moved, leaving behind everything you had learned and loved, to start anew across the country.
The summer before seventh grade, my family drove from the suburban sprawling Northern New Jersey to a town in Oregon, just outside of Portland. The state’s naturally beautiful landscape of rolling hills, snowy mountains, dry plains, and windy coasts reveals the essence of earthly serenity. To live amongst fir trees is a blessing, yet the captivating landscape that can make you cry tears for its beauty contains an ugly culture of exclusion. Here, I have a house and a family that makes this as much my home as anyone else’s, yet the color of the skin makes me feel like it’s not mine. Not in the town of Lake Oswego, otherwise known as “Lake No Negro.” Here, even in the tall grass oasis of my own yard, ‘home’ is a hard word to find.
Oregon—typically thought to be a fairly liberal, progressive state—holds a hidden history deeply intertwined with race that has long lived in the shadows of the nation’s narrative. In 1844, the Oregon Territory, which stretched from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains, passed its first of three Black exclusion laws. The first law banned slavery as many other Northern territories and states had done but also prohibited formerly enslaved Black people from making their homes there. Under this law, any Black person found in violation faced severe punishment, receiving 39 lashes every six months until they departed the territory. A subsequent exclusion law in 1849 further barred any new Black individuals from entering and living in the territory. In 1859, Oregon was the only free state to enter the Northern Union with Black exclusion laws, with the adoption of the Oregon Constitution that included a clause explicitly denying Black people the right to own property or enter into contracts in the newfound state.
Although the Oregon government repealed the exclusion laws in 1926, it wasn’t until 2002, the year of my birth, that officials finally removed the racist language from the Oregon Constitution. At that time, 30% of voters cast their ballots in favor of retaining the discriminatory language. Oregon’s creators wanted to establish the perfect racist white utopia for themselves, and it takes more than removing language from government documents to overpower that type of anti-Black culture embedded in the state’s foundation.
Portland, the largest city in Oregon, known for its unique and eccentric hippie culture, is ever-faithful to the slogan “Keep Portland Weird.” Despite presenting itself as a welcoming and accepting oasis of political liberalism amidst the red rural sea that surrounds it, it is far from racially inclusive. It has earned the distinction of being one of America’s whitest major cities, a status influenced by a history of hostility and exclusion that continues to permeate its culture today.
You can find Lake Oswego roughly 20 minutes from Portland amongst the suburban sprawl of outlet malls and matching beige doll houses around the city’s center. However, when you enter the town’s limits, it’s an upper-class haven with million-dollar houses on pristine streets, manicured public shrubbery, and impersonal areas gloating high-end shops for rich white moms and expensive chain restaurants.
Not only known for its wealth, Lake Oswego is also known for its whiteness. In the early 1900s, the town transitioned from the iron industry to upscale real estate developments aimed at marketing the area as a high-class living destination. As part of this effort, Lake Oswego imposed stringent restrictions on home ownership: Chinese, Japanese, and African Americans were prohibited from living within the town’s boundaries, except as servants. Notably, many property owners or legal documents in the community still maintain this original exclusionary language in the deeds, serving as a stark reminder of the town’s discriminatory ‘past.’
Today, nearly 80% of the town’s population is white, while the Black community represents just slightly above one percent. And, let me tell you from experience, one is truly the loneliest number.
Bruce Poinsette grew up in Lake Oswego as a Black man. His parents, Willie and Bruce Sr., had moved to Lake Oswego from South Carolina before his birth. I met Bruce through his mother Willie, a retired Black educator from the Portland school district, and a passionate and forceful voice in the community pushing back against the racism she saw and experienced in a sea of white, deaf ears.
In the summer of 2017, Lake Oswego became the epicenter of a racially charged confrontation when Detective Nathan Sheppard, an off-duty Black police officer, faced a bigot in a road rage altercation. The aggressor insulted him with the N-word, demeaned him with insinuations about his lack of education, and questioned his residency in Lake Oswego. The incident ignited widespread debates across the community on Nextdoor and local media. Willie and other local residents mobilized the community, which culminated in them establishing the inaugural Respond to Racism meeting and founding a local racial advocacy group to disrupt racism in Lake Oswego through education, communication, and dialogue.
Bruce became Respond to Racism’s social media and communications chair, yet held a great skepticism about the group’s ability to create change in the community. Having grown up in the thralls of white ignorance, he was concerned the white participants would show up to a meeting or two, then happily pat themselves on the back on the way home without really putting in the leg work to create change in the community.
Growing up in a Southern Black family in the white wasteland of Lake Oswego, he confronted his racial identity from a young age, constantly reminded of his difference in a community where he stood out.
In his sandbox days, when all he was supposed to be thinking about was playing games and his favorite candy, he instead faced racism daily. Not even the sandbox was safe, where groups of white children hurled sand at him, taunting him with racialized names like “chocolate chip cookie.” His peers weren’t the only ones who made him feel the difference in his skin; the teachers did as well. For instance, while the only other Black student got a book thrown at him for uttering a curse word, a white peer who punched Bruce in the face barely received a talking to. His teachers not only criminalized Bruce and the other Black student, but they also failed to teach them. Bruce’s parents vividly remember when all the parents assembled to hear their children read aloud, showcasing their new skills, and Bruce couldn’t decipher a single word. “It’s these things that, you know, they stick in my head, but they also stick in my parents’ heads,” Bruce told me.
As he aged, his peers, teachers, and neighbors reminded him that his skin color was sometimes the first and only thing people thought of him.
“You learn early, ‘Okay I’m Black’ and it’s going to be a thing. Every day in the school it’s like, ‘You’re not welcome,’ even if people say these words that you’re welcome because when you look around you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m being treated differently and being singled out,’” says Bruce.
While few students were intentionally cruel, most carelessly used humor, framing cultural respect as a matter of ridicule. Peers constantly joked about why Bruce didn’t talk like he came “straight from a BET music video” or humored that he only got into advanced AP classes because of affirmative action. His identity was a joke to them, and he wasn’t in on it. Empty laughs left him wrestling with the feelings of a perpetual outsider, looking in on a world predefined by superficial labels rather than any truth.
Such an environment necessitated he find a way to cope early on; starting in fourth grade, he discovered the practice of zoning out. In class, he would stare dreamily at the dry-wall ceiling, counting the quintessential black specks of public school skies like stars, ignoring the world that refused to treat him as a whole person. He retreated into himself. Maybe people labeled his behavior as “antisocial” or “awkward,” but it was really him doing his best not to crack in a reality that didn’t accept him for who he was and invalidated the impact these experiences had on him.
Before I moved, people always called me quiet—I never liked that word. After moving to Oregon, people called me quiet, too. Yet, there were differences between the silences I encountered in New Jersey versus the ones I found in Oregon. In Oregon, the silences stemmed from feelings of unwelcomeness I could never quite shake.
While in New Jersey, I was one of many people of color, and I was one of very, very few in Oregon. When I walked through the school halls, I felt the way people treated me like an outsider. I had never thought of my race very much. When I moved to Oregon, I more tightly claimed my Black identity because I could tell that it was one of the first things people noticed about me.
While I eventually made friends, started running track and field, and made space for myself in and outside of school, there would be moments when I was reminded why people looked at me walking down the halls like I was an alien. Like when two girls who never bothered to speak to me played with my hair like a spring toy even after I tried to move my seat, or when my classmates implied Black students weren’t smart enough for my accelerated math class, or when people separated me and my Black dad from my white mom because they didn’t think we could be a family, or when everyone, even teachers looked expectantly at me during our slavery unit. These are only a few of the many memories I carry with me, but it’s challenging to describe the true state of my experience because it permeated the subtext. It would be small yet defined moments I didn’t realize were hurtful until later, or in the tone people used when they talked to me, or just the feeling of looking around and seeing no one who looked like me.
For the longest time I thought I was too sensitive. I rarely said anything in response to things because I didn’t want to get labeled as dramatic. But my freshman year of high school I discovered that I was far from alone. A story in the local newspaper revealed a concerning incident at another high school in my town. The senior class there had established a Facebook page dedicated to organizing senior pranks, and it came to light that an anonymous individual suggested “We create a club called Ku-Klux-Klub and find every black kid and sacrifice them.” I remember reading this and almost feeling relieved because it was real, and now everyone saw it. It was real—and it was happening to other kids like me too. In some cases, there were instances much more extreme than those I had experienced, including being stabbed with pencils, receiving notes in class with the phrase “n****r dog” written on them, or being targeted by tweets filled with racial slurs.
I met with my principal to ask about the actions taken to address the issue, only to discover they were doing nothing. After that meeting, the principal asked me if I wanted to partner with her to lead a Principal’s Equity Council of students to address the issue.
At the time, it felt like an honor when someone important asked me to lead the efforts. But looking back on it now, it was far too much pressure for a group of passionate young people to fix a broken system that refused to recognize that it had a problem—all without much guidance. We held Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) assemblies, discussion groups, and spoke on panels, trying so desperately to get people in the school to realize that its marginalized populations were struggling. But to me, it felt like no one cared.
After the assemblies, I remember hearing people walking back to class complaining loudly about it being a waste of time or that the presentation was boring. When I heard that, it reaffirmed what I already knew: our community did not see me and my peers of color. While I think my peers on the council and I would have done things differently, knowing what I know about racial justice activism, at the time it was a lot of weight and responsibility to be put on the shoulders of young kids who just had hope of a changing world.
I began drifting away during my first year of high school, dissociating from the surrounding world. It felt like I was on a different temporal plane, the world’s rhythm either accelerating beyond my pace or decelerating, leaving me adrift. When my fingers brushed against the grass, it was as if my hand became a ghost, desperately reaching for a physical embrace from a world in which I no longer existed. It was agonizingly painful to exist like that. I felt helpless, not knowing how to make it stop or even why it was happening. And eventually, it did stop. Only after I got on that plane to college, back on the East Coast in Philadelphia, leaving behind a home that didn’t permit me to truly exist there.
Bruce and I found solace in connecting with Black history and literature, taking refuge in the words and stories of our people where we felt truly seen. Through these narratives, we perceived the glamor of the surrounding white world for what it was rather than what it pretended to be. I discovered James Baldwin, who taught me about Black existence, and I saw myself reflected in a reality where I existed, even if it wasn’t a physical one. Bruce discovered history books like “Forced Glory” by Ronnie Bennet, giving him a new way to look at the reality of America’s past. Consuming Blackness was our way of survival, and it gave us a tether to the reality that the white community in our town dismissed.
Like me, Bruce left Lake Oswego to go to college. “Getting away, whether it’s temporary, whether it’s permanent, I think really just helps, like, perspective, you know?” he says.
When you’re in the thick of it, all of it feels like smoke and mirrors, and you can’t see the punches that get thrown, but you sure feel them. Getting away, I can see all that it did to me, all the scars now healed that once were open for so long. Bruce and I, and I am sure many other people of color in Lake Oswego, endure racialized isolation and discrimination while the world around us manipulates us with messages that it’s ‘all in the past,’ or all in our heads. While living in Lake Oswego, I dreamed of the moment when I got to leave and go back to the East Coast; now, I don’t know if I would change anything.
Despite the difficulty of being a person of color living in that town, my experiences there made me who I am today, and I wouldn’t change that for the world. I am truly grateful for the community of activists who always worked hard to support the small but mighty community of color in Lake Oswego. While I find it difficult to call Lake Oswego home and am refinding home on the East Coast, Lake Oswego belongs to people like Bruce and Willie, who still fight every day to make it a home for others. And its long past due that the white community of Lake Oswego truly listened to the voices of people of color that have been demanding change for generations and genuinely put in the long and difficult work that it will take to establish a truly inclusive community.
Home isn’t necessarily a place, but all the things that make me feel like me. It’s the many beautiful friends that force all the air from my lungs with laughter. It’s my loving parents who have and always will support me through everything. It’s the soft snores of my two dogs when we nap on a Sunday afternoon. It’s lying in the grass, breaking open in the peaceful air, and feeling the silent buzzing of joy all around you. It’s running as fast as you can down New Jersey pavement with no shoes on. It’s in the secret garden of my house’s field against the Oregon evergreen hills. And it’s in the summer streets of Philadelphia basking in a pink-orange sunset that sets my heart ablaze.
The Woodlands 