White by Northwest

From the website "Fast Company" comes a rather fascinating series of maps that show the racial topography of a series of large U.S. cities. For example. here's my home, Portland.A red dot is 25 caucasians, blue dots are the brothers, green dots are Asians, orange are hispanic/latinos, and all "others" are gray. The data is from Census 2000.

You will note that Portland is as pink as my own skin; there's a patch of blue in NE Portland and some orange scattered about the North and Northeast and along the Sunset Highway corridor in Washington County.

But that's about it.

We really are the Great White North.

I'm not quite sure what to say about that. It keeps us from having a lot of the racial politics and racial friction other cities have. But I'll bet it also makes it damn hard to be one of those blue or orange or gray dots when everybody around here looks like red-dot Whitey McWhitebread.

That makes me feel sort of uncomfortable.

I wonder how my daughter will come to feel about that?