“Collective Forgetting” in the News: Racialized Space,Media Framing,and White Racial Ignorance

Abstract

The news media shapes public perceptions of race and society. Existing research shows that negative portrayals of Black people reinforce and activate existing stereotypes among White readers. Media portrayals of racial issues also influence readers’ willingness to support antiracist policies. This article considers another way that the media influences race and society—by fostering White racial ignorance. Theorists define racial ignorance as the strategic unknowing of systemic racism and indifference to racial matters among White Americans that contribute to the reproduction of White supremacy. This article focuses on how one newspaper portrayed a historically Black area as it transitioned to a White space. I use qualitative media framing analysis to examine how the newspaper created a reality for its audience by choosing what information to emphasize and what to omit. I find that the newspaper presents a racial and spatial reality that rendered the mechanisms of racial inequality and oppression largely invisible. This “collective forgetting” of systemic racism encourages racial ignorance.

Introduction

Many White Americans believe that anti-Black racism is no longer a problem in the United States (Peacock and Biernat 2021). In fact, a growing number of Whites contend that it is White people who are the true victims of racial bias in contemporary U.S. society (Kolber 2017). Moreover, compared to Black people, Whites are more likely to believe that racism is characterized by individual prejudice, rather than systemic oppression (Unzueta and Lowery 2008). These beliefs about racism and society are influenced by the news media that people consume (Kellstedt 2003). By denying the reality of anti-Black systemic racism, Whites facilitate the reproduction of White supremacy.

In this article, I draw on racial ignorance theory to consider the role of the news media in promoting ignorance about racial domination and the mechanisms of racial inequality (Jung 2015; Mills 2007; Mueller 2020). Central to racial ignorance theory is the claim that White people tend to adopt a stance of “not knowing” about systemic racism despite plentiful evidence that White people are systematically advantaged, while Black and other racially marginalized groups are disadvantaged in U.S. society. The benefit of this unknowing worldview is that White people can maintain their moral standing while continuing to benefit from the arrangements of White supremacy (Mueller 2020).

Principal to the reproduction of White supremacy has been the racialization of space and property. Some White Americans believe that racialized neighborhood disparities reflect differences between racial groups (e.g., work ethic, care), rather than systemic racism (Entman and Rojecki 2007). Whites draw on racial stereotypes when perceiving Black neighborhoods as undesirable (Bonam, Bergsieker, and Eberhardt 2016; Johnson and Shapiro 2003; Lewis, Emerson, and Klineberg 2011). Even when the neighborhood conditions are the same, the mere presence of Black people lowers the quality of neighborhoods in the eyes of some Whites (Krysan et al. 2009). These interpretations of Black neighborhoods ignore the fact that spatial inequality results from many decades of disinvestment. Ignorance about the causes of racialized spatial inequality reinforces the equivalence of “good” people and places with whiteness (Du Bois [1920]2014; Mueller 2020).

For most of the twentieth century, the ability of Black people to accrue wealth through property ownership was hindered first by law and then by discriminatory lending practices, biased appraisals, racial steering, racial covenants, and White violence (Brooks and Rose 2013). In addition, through their control over major institutions, such as banks, the real estate industry, and the law, White people have delineated White neighborhoods as the most valuable (Harris 1993; Howell and Korver-Glenn 2021; Low 2009). Yet, the ways that Black people are harmed, and White people benefit, from the racialization of space and the systematic exclusion of Black people from wealth accumulation, are unrecognized when White Americans claim that anti-Black racism is individualized or nonexistent (Bonam et al. 2019; Kolber 2017).

The news media influences public perceptions of race and racism (Kellstedt 2003; Mastro 2015). Much of the research about race and media focuses on how Black people are represented in news accounts (Jackson 2019; Littlefield 2008; Ramasubramanian, Riewestahl, and Ramirez 2023). In this article, I consider how the news media may contribute to the maintenance of racial ignorance through its framing of racialized space. Specifically, the analysis focuses on one newspaper’s portrayal of a majority Black area in Portland, Oregon, as it gentrified and became majority White. By choosing what information to emphasize and what to omit, the news media creates a reality for its audience about people and place (Entman 1993). A common criticism of the news media is that it silences or excludes marginalized groups (Coleman and Yochim 2008). I find that the perspectives of Black residents and community leaders were present in the reporting. Simultaneously, I find that reporting about Portland’s only Black area continually de-emphasized systemic racism as an explanation for inequality and spatial disadvantage. The analysis reveals that a newspaper may include marginalized “voices” and reference the concerns of dominated groups, while simultaneously framing a reality that advances racial ignorance (Jung 2015).

Background

Racial Ignorance Theory

Several scholars, including Joe R. Feagin (2006, 2020), Moon-Kie Jung (2015), Charles Mills (2007), and Jennifer C. Mueller (2020), have illuminated how White Americans’ strategic unknowing of systemic racism and indifference to racial matters contributes to the reproduction of White supremacy. Mueller (2020) asserts that “dominant groups hold a unique, rational investment in not understanding” racism and racial domination (p. 149). Moreover, the White racial group has “an unparalleled collective power . . . institutionally, organizationally, and in the everyday” that makes it possible to sustain a worldview that is incompatible with empirical evidence (Mueller 2020:148, 152).

Underlying racial ignorance is “collective forgetting” of “social and historical truths regarding systemic racism” (Feagin 2006:275). This forgetting is possible because people racialized as White, at the top of the racial hierarchy, control the “management of memory” and can enable “deliberate forgetting” (Mills 2007:28). According to philosopher Charles Mills (2007), this forgetting serves a practical purpose: it allows White people to ignore racial privilege and believe that their social advantages are legitimate and achieved through meritocratic means.Drawing on Burke’s (2017) research, Mueller (2020:151) notes that Whites with divergent politics “use similar ideological maneuvers to construct ‘a good white self’.” By rendering the past unknowable, racism’s role in structuring society goes unrecognized. Or, as Mills (2007:31) asserts, “The mystification of the past underwrites a mystification of the present”.

A key feature of racial ignorance is that many White people do not understand themselves to be part of a racially defined group. Rather, they understand whiteness to be the default, nonracial subjectivity. By contrast, Whites perceive non-White people as a racially marked “other” that exists on a lower “moral and ontological rung” (Mills 2007:26). Because Whites tend to not perceive themselves in racial terms, they do not recognize the advantages that are allocated based on their whiteness. The refusal to recognize that social advantage and disadvantage are patterned by race enables a “worldview that emphasizes individualistic explanations for social and economic achievement” (Doane quoted in Mills 2007:28). In addition, although White people are “central propagators” of racial oppression, the racially motivated practices of White agents are often absent in conversations about racial inequality and discrimination (Feagin 2006:5). This “non-agentive way of speaking about racial matters” downplays White participation, and investment, in the racial order (Feagin 2020:25).

White racial ignorance is also maintained when the dominant group perceives the knowledge that is produced by marginalized groups to be inherently invalid. Black people have long documented and demonstrated the reality of systemic racism (Mullane 1993). However, when a group “is discredited in advance as being epistemically suspect,” Mills (2007) writes, “testimony from the group will tend to be dismissed” (p. 31). Jung (2015) calls this process symbolic coercion. Complicating Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of symbolic violence—“the unconscious agreement of the dominated”—Jung (2015:121) defines symbolic coercion as “the conscious disagreement of the dominated that goes unconsciously unrecognized by the dominant”. Although oppressed people communicate their resistance to oppression, their words are devalued or ignored by the dominant group. This “testimonial quieting” denies racially oppressed groups the status of “knower” (Dotson 2011; Mueller 2020:154).

Evidence of systemic racism is also apparent in the knowledge produced and consumed by dominant groups. However, examples of racial inequality and oppression are often presented by the dominant group as natural, neutral, or unremarkable. Jung offers symbolic perversity to describe “the dominant’s (mostly) tacit nonrecognition of explicit discourse concerning inequality and domination.” Analyzing The New York Times’ reporting about unemployment rates, Jung (2015:167) shows that the consistently higher rates of unemployment among Black people is presented as a nonissue, revealing “a deep, banal, unknowing acceptance of Black suffering that is known and knowable”.

Racial ignorance fluctuates over time in response to the political and social context (Mueller 2020). The interest convergence principle of critical race theory suggests that the dominant groups will make changes that benefit a subordinate group when it is in their own interest to do so (Bell 1980). Applying this concept to racial ignorance, Mueller notes that “progressions and regressions in White racial consciousness are patterned by whether or not White interests align with subordinate group interest.” Moreover, “progressions are never settled, and often regress toward ignorance when conditions allow” (Mueller 2020:148).

Media Framing Race and Space

The news media contributes to public perceptions of race and racism (Entman and Rojecki 2007; Mastro 2015). Studies show that news stories both reflect and reinforce racial stereotypes (Ramasubramanian et al. 2023). Specifically, news stories overrepresent Black men as criminal suspects and are more likely to portray Black men in handcuffs or mugshots than White men (Oliver 2003). Researchers find that Black people are overrepresented in news stories about poverty, contributing to the false belief that most poor people are Black adults who do not work (Gilens 1996). Negative portrayals of Black people in the news lead readers to have more negative opinions of Black people in general (Entman and Rojecki 2007). In addition, media portrayals of racial issues shape public support for policies that might reduce racial inequality (Kellstedt 2003).

The news media also contributes to public perceptions of racialized space and neighborhood change. For example, news media frame majority Black neighborhoods as “bad” areas characterized by violence and social pathology (Dreier 2005; Rucks-Ahidiana 2025). Non-White neighborhoods are depicted as blighted in need of revitalization (Liu and Blomley 2013; Rucks-Ahidiana, Choi, and Dobreva 2025). Some research finds that the news media promotes gentrification by elevating the perspectives of political and economic elites (Modan and Wells 2016; Rofe 2004; Slater 2006). By contrast, a review of news articles from nine newspapers suggests that the media play a varied role in gentrification debates, finding that some articles promoted gentrification while others were more critical (Brown-Saracino and Rumpf 2011). This review also showed that newspaper articles about gentrification included perspectives of differently positioned actors, not just elites (Brown-Saracino and Rumpf 2011).

Media framing is an apt framework for considering the role of the news in shaping readers’ understandings of race and space. Media framing analyses consider how journalists construct a particular reality “by combining symbols, giving them relative emphasis, and attaching them to larger cultural ideas” (Gamson et al. 1992; Linstrom and Marais 2012; Reese 2001:17). Robert M. Entman (2007:64) defines media framing as “the process of culling a few elements of perceived reality and assembling a narrative that highlights the connections among them to promote a particular interpretation.” Media frames are not neutral; they reflect the worldview of journalists, editors, and publishers, and they can be sites of conflict over the construction of social reality (Carragee and Roefs 2004; Ferree et al. 2002). Media framing involves selecting certain facts and omitting others (Linstrom and Marais 2012:21). Moreover, framing can make an omission seem natural and common sense, thereby conveying that the excluded information is irrelevant to the issue at hand (Reese 2001).

By analyzing newspaper coverage of an urban area as it transitioned from predominantly Black and disinvested to majority White and prosperous, the current study asks: how might media framing about race and space contribute to the maintenance of racial ignorance? I find that accounts of historical and ongoing systemic racism were largely absent in the newspaper’s reporting. Although diverse “voices” were represented in news stories, the newspaper presented a reality that rendered the mechanisms of racial/spatial inequality and oppression largely invisible, thereby reinforcing racial ignorance.

Research Methods

Qualitative media framing is a methodology that focuses on how information is organized and presented to an audience. Using this approach, I examine “key words and metaphors in the text, identifying what was included in the frame, as well as what was left out” (Linstrom and Marais 2012:27). Framing “describes the influence on the public of news angles used by journalists” (Fourie 2001). This qualitative media framing analysis examines 418 articles that were published in The Oregonian newspaper between 1989 and 2009. This project is part of a larger qualitative study that uses interviews and participant observation to examine the experiences of Black longtime residents of historically Black Portland neighborhoods that became majority White between 1990 and 2010 (Evans 2025).

Portland, Oregon, is a favorable context in which to examine the media framing of racial neighborhood change. Less than 6 percent of Portland’s population is Black, a reality that reflects a long history of formal and informal exclusion. A clause in the Oregon constitution that banned Black people from entering the state was not removed until 1926 (it was rendered moot by the 14th Amendment). Portland’s Black population grew exponentially in the 1940s when migrants arrived to work in wartime shipyards (Abbott 2011). White Portland residents and politicians rejected the newcomers. Mere rumors that housing would be built for Black migrants and their families incited protests and formal petitions (City Auditor 1943). Many shipyard workers lived in Vanport, a planned city built outside city limits in 1942 that washed away in a flood in 1948. Black flood survivors moved into Northeast Portland, which had a small preexisting Black population. It was the only place where realtors would regularly rent or sell to Black people (Gibson 2007; Pearson 2001). Black families that attempted to desegregate other neighborhoods faced violent backlash (McElderry 2001). In the 1950s and 1960s, many Northeast residents lost their homes to eminent domain for urban renewal projects (Gibson 2007). In the 1970s and 1980s, banks provided few conventional loans, and there was minimal public investment in Northeast neighborhoods (Gibson 2007).

Until the early 2000s, most Black people who grew up in Portland continued to live in Northeast, also called “Albina.” Albina was never entirely Black; however, its salience as the Black section of the city was particularly strong in the 1980s and 1990s. Increased public and private investment in the 1990s facilitated a demographic shift whereby Whites became the majority group in every census tract in Northeast Portland by 2010. Census tracts that had been more than 70 percent Black in 1990 declined to less than 30 percent Black by 2010 (Burke and Jeffries 2016). During this period, median property values tripled or quadrupled in Northeast neighborhoods (Gibson 2007). No other Black neighborhood emerged in the city as Northeast became majority White. Thus, the racial transition in Northeast Portland represented the eradication of a majority Black neighborhood in Portland.

My analytical approach draws on insights from Margaret Linstrom and Willemien Marias’s (2012) comprehensive review, “Qualitative News Frame Analysis: A Methodology”. I began the project by choosing a topic, determining a timeframe for the analysis, drawing a sample, and determining the unit of analysis. By reading and re-reading articles, I inductively identified recurring themes and interpretations in the news articles. I then conducted an in-depth analysis of the articles using the frames. During this process, I noted that the framing largely ignored systemic racism. Thus, rather than presenting the dominant media frames below, I show how journalists framed a reality that ignored systemic racism and promoted racial ignorance.

I chose to sample articles from The Oregonian because it is a daily newspaper that has the largest circulation in the state of Oregon (Hart 2007). My objective was to analyze the newspaper that had the most potential to influence the perceptions of local residents. The Oregonian provides a large and varied sample of concise articles that depict and interpret neighborhood change. In addition, the archives of The Oregonian are easily searchable, while other Portland newspapers do not have complete and accessible archives. I refer to The Oregonian as a mainstream newspaper because it is owned by Advance Local Media, one of the largest media conglomerates in the United States. “Mainstream” also indicates that the newspaper’s primary audience is White and middle class.

I selected 1989 to 2009 as the time frame because the major demographic shift in Northeast Portland took place between the 1990 and 2010 censuses. The initial aim of the analysis was to see how the newspaper framed Northeast Portland during this transition. I begin the 20-year time frame in 1989 because the late 1980s has been depicted by researchers as the time when Northeast Portland “hit rock bottom” in terms of disinvestment (Gibson 2007). With the help of undergraduate and graduate research assistants, I collected 418 articles, which were written by more than 100 different journalists. Ten journalists each wrote 10 or more of the articles in the sample, while more than 60 journalists and commentators wrote just one article. For the most part, my analysis focuses on broad themes instead of the contributions of specific journalists.

The research team searched for articles that contained various formal and colloquial names for Portland’s predominantly Black area. Articles that include any account of the area were included. I analyzed the articles using Atlas.ti qualitative data analysis software. I first read through the articles in the sample. I then coded them using descriptive codes that allowed me to organize the data by topic and develop a list of potential frames. I identified the “framing devices” that condense information and offer a summary of issues, including metaphors and catch-phrases (Vreese 2005). At this stage, I paid particular attention to headlines, editorials, and declarative statements (presented as objective truth). After reading through quotations from the first round of coding, I re-coded the data using analytical codes and frames that I previously developed. I also re-read many articles while looking for disconfirming evidence. During this process, it became clear that systemic racism was omitted from the media frames. Thus, the analysis presented below focuses on how decisions about what to include and what to omit could engender racial ignorance.

Framing Neighborhood Change, Fostering Racial Ignorance

Framing Black Place as a Problem

In articles published between 1989 and 1993, journalists regularly used terms like “troubled,” “blighted,” or “decaying” to describe Northeast neighborhoods. By repeatedly referring to the city’s Black place with negative descriptors, often with no explanation, the newspaper frames Northeast Portland as an inherently inferior place that exists on a lower “ontological rung” than other neighborhoods (Mills 2007:26). This framing of Portland’s only Black place promotes racial ignorance by obscuring the racialized disinvestment that produces spatial inequality and neighborhood disadvantage.

The reporting advances broader stereotypes about Black place by depicting Northeast as a place at risk of becoming even more “blighted.” For instance, one article contrasts “Eastern cities, such as New York and Baltimore, where slums are measured in miles” with Northeast Portland, where “blight erupts like early-stage acne, one pimple here, another there” (Lane 1991b). This quote locates Northeast on a continuum that ends with the stereotypical “Black ghetto,” the personification of Black place as a problem. In another example, then-mayor Bud Clark explained that his goal for neighborhood revitalization was “. . . to stop Portland from developing a ‘permanent underclass’, which he has seen in East Coast inner cities. ‘It looks impossible to turn that around. I don’t want that to happen in my city’” (Ames 1990). Northeast Portland is portrayed as a place that threatens to become even more of a problem for the city.

By the mid-1990s, The Oregonian portrayed Northeast as improving or coming “back to life” (Irving 1997; Levine 1997). Still, the interpretation of Northeast as a problem did not disappear; instead, it was reclassified as something that occurred in the past. Northeast was described as “formally” or “once troubled” (Franzen 2000; Mayer 1996). A noteworthy exception to this pattern was Martin Luther King Boulevard, which maintained its stigmatized status. While other commercial streets in Northeast neighborhoods were increasingly populated by White-owned cafes, restaurants, and boutiques, many MLK storefronts were occupied by older businesses, many of which were Black-owned. In articles published in the 2000s, the ongoing problem that needed to be fixed was redefined as MLK Boulevard. For example, one article describes MLK Boulevard as “eternally troubled” (Griffin 2008). In addition to concealing the mechanisms of racial/spatial inequality, framing Black place as a problem also reinforces the default status of whiteness and White space (Anderson 2015; Embrick and Moore 2020).

Ignoring the Racial Mechanisms of Lending Inequality

In 1990, The Oregonian published an award-winning series called “Blueprint for a Slum,” which attributed low rates of home ownership in Northeast neighborhoods to banks’ refusal to provide conventional mortgage loans:

The Oregonian found that major lenders discourage home ownership. That meant would-be buyers must move, keep renting, or turn to risky lenders. That’s a blueprint for a slum (Lane and Mayes 1990).

The series focused on lending policies that disqualified lower priced houses and property in “low-income neighborhoods.” It also depicts the illegal practices of exploitative lenders. However, it did not link these harmful lending practices with systemic racism in the housing market. According to these articles, loans were not available in Northeast because property values were low and mortgages did not meet banks’ minimum loan requirements.

Bank policies and practices vary - some impose loan amounts, others simply discourage small loans. But the effect is the same. Portland lenders exclude houses in large segments of North and Northeast Portland from loan eligibility based solely [emphasis added] on the price of the house (Lane 1990a)

By claiming that the lack of conventional loans is based “solely” on the low price of housing, this reporting obscures the fact that racism shapes lending practices and property values. Some articles do state that the lack of lending in Northeast in the 1980s and 1990s was akin to “redlining.” For example, a realtor stated “it is redlining when you won’t go under $30,000, because we have lots of homes for sale that are under 20 or 25” (Lane 1990a). However, most of the references to redlining do not mention race or racism. In one example, it is defined as “an old banking practice of drawing red lines on maps around areas where the bankers wouldn’t lend money” (Lane 1991a). Moreover, when race is mentioned, as in the quote below, the proposed solution is nonetheless colorblind.

The Oregonian found that the banks and thrifts could address these problems with more aggressive loan marketing, which is what the federal Community Investment Act requires. The law was passed to prevent redlining, the old practice where bankers simply hung a map on a wall and drew lines around black or low-income areas where they wouldn’t make loans (Lane 1991a).

Some local banks changed their lending practices after the Blueprint for a Slum series was published. These changes allowed more people to acquire conventional mortgages and purchase homes in Northeast. A 1996 news article explained that the increase in mortgage lending would likely facilitate the racial transformation of one Northeast neighborhood:

Blacks are benefiting from the economic energy in [Northeast]. More than 260 African Americans applied for home loans in 1994, an increase of 50 percent over 1992; approvals rose 73 percent. But applications from whites rose 53 percent, to 2,645, in the same period, and were approved at a slightly higher rate. The net result: more than 80 percent of the increased lending activity from 1992—both in dollars and number of loans—involved white buyers . . . if the trend continues, King will be majority white within 15 years (Barnett and Suo 1996).

This article correctly predicted that Northeast Portland’s King neighborhood would be majority White by 2010. It is noteworthy that the quote above begins with the summary “Blacks are benefiting from the economic energy.” This statement creates a particular reality in which Black people are the primary beneficiaries of lending reforms. An assertion which, again, is decoupled from the long history of racial discrimination in the mortgage-lending market. It also belies the content of the paragraph, which shows that White applicants were receiving 80 percent of the loans. This quote, which seemingly celebrates Black economic inclusion, conceals the fact that Whites were reaping the most benefit from banking reforms.

In later articles, journalists continue to provide exclusively economic explanations for racial disparities in home ownership:

. . . rising property values and property taxes have made home buying more difficult for low-income residents and many racial minorities . . . The economic pressures could get worse in North and Northeast Portland with major revitalization projects under way (Leeson 2020).

In this example, the journalist refers to “economic pressures” but does not explain how Black people’s opportunities to acquire economic resources were constrained. Similarly, in “Albina: Up or Out,” the article quoted above, a White real estate agent and developer described his experience of buying and selling properties in Northeast Neighborhoods, noting:

Not all of us have the same opportunities for whatever reason, [emphasis added] says Leigh, 38, who says he bought his first home with a $3,000 loan from his parents (Barnett and Suo 1996).

In this example, the reporter provides no additional information to help the reader understand the “whatever reason[s]” that provide White newcomers with more opportunities to buy property.

The Blueprint for a Slum series highlights exclusionary lending practices in Northeast Portland. However, these structural processes were presented as primarily economic and were disassociated from systemic racism. The solutions that reporters suggested were likewise nonracial. Consequently, their implementation (i.e., making more loans available without regard to race) contributed to the rapid racial transformation of the neighborhood. The reporting about lending disparities provides an example of symbolic perversity (Jung 2015). Although the reporters drew on dominant discourse and research to examine lending disparities, they did so in a way that ignored the dynamics of racial oppression.

Ignoring Racial Foundations of Property and Profit

Long before Northeast Portland gentrified and became majority White, the newspaper took note of changes in the real estate market that could lead to displacement, as in the following example from 1990:

. . . cash and private sales account for about half the sales in North and inner Northeast neighborhoods. Very often, that means the buyers are either investors who want cheap rentals or yuppies who want to renovate . . .Gentrification, they call it. People with money move in and fix up the neighborhood. Property values go up, but in the process low-income people are pushed out of the community (Lane 1990b).

Reporters also documented Black residents’ concerns about real estate speculation. For example, a 1989 article includes a warning from Black community leader Ron Herndon:

“The word is out . . . You have hustlers out there now with every kind of scheme to get houses in Northeast Portland.” “There are cats out there now talking about 100–200 houses, and it’s not for philanthropic reasons,” he added (Oliver 1989a).

As this example shows, the “voices” of Black Northeast Portland residents were present in some of the articles. However, the reporting promotes ignorance about the racial processes that determine who wins and who loses in the real estate market.

One article commends a White investor who flipped properties and brought them back into the market of (White) home buyers and renters:

Salvaging abandoned houses in the bleakest neighborhoods of inner- North and Northeast Portland is [investor’s] business. In the past 4 ½ years he has acquired and fixed up 170 houses—houses that nobody else wanted, houses that otherwise would have remained boarded up, or might have been converted to drug houses or even demolished (Oliver 1989a).

In this article, the journalist does not explain the processes, such as racialized property valuation, that create conditions in which homes fall into disrepair. Moreover, by asserting that “nobody” wanted the houses in Northeast neighborhoods, the author takes for granted the racial dynamics that devalue housing in Black neighborhoods.

Reporters tended to celebrate neighborhood change as a positive development that turned “slums” into profitable and amenity-filled neighborhoods:

Espresso bars grace corners that once steamed with illicit sex. Fresh pastels dress homes that, not long ago, harbored crack dens. Business investments and home loans are up. Crime and unwed births are down.” In five years, a booming real estate market has done for Albina what 50 years of government and social programs alone could not (Barnett and Suo 1996).

Reporters simultaneously acknowledged that these changes could have harmful consequences for “Albina’s poorest residents”:

But the progress is costly: As home values rise, Albina’s poorest residents are finding it harder to rent, much less buy . . . To owners—especially the elderly on fixed incomes—even a low-ball offer might seem attractive after decades of market stagnation and rising taxes (Barnett and Suo 1996).

Neighborhood change is framed as a contradictory process that is good for the city but potentially harmful for poor and elderly residents on fixed incomes. However, the journalists do not explain why [Black] elderly residents might be willing to accept a “low-ball offer.” The aforementioned excerpt references city-wide patterns of market stagnation and rising taxes. The deep devaluation of property in Black neighborhoods, the history of forced residential segregation, or the decades-long pattern of excluding Black people from prime mortgages are never mentioned.

Attributing Racial/Spatial Inequality to Black People’s Behavior

Rather than highlighting structural mechanisms of racial/spatial inequality, problems facing Northeast Portland were frequently attributed to patterns in Black behavior. One repeated assertion was that Black adults in Northeast needed to take more responsibility for the actions of Black youth. One article about gang violence suggests that if Black people are eventually displaced from Northeast Portland, it will be because of their own irresponsibility:

Countless efforts are under way to combat the sense of hopelessness and despair . . . They will amount to little until the community that produces these youngsters steps up to embrace responsibility for its own children. Portland’s black community finds itself at a historical crossroads. It needs soon to stand up and grasp its own destiny. If it doesn’t, it will be displaced (Nicholas 1993).

This framing draws on the culture of poverty, or the notion that poor people develop norms and behaviors that reinforce and reproduce poverty over time and across generations (Bourgois 2015). It also reflects controlling images and stereotypes about Black people’s inferior values (Hill Collins 2009). ¹

Another theme is that middle-class Black people should show low-income Black people how to successfully assimilate into mainstream society. Black middle-class people were represented as role models for culturally deficient poor people. These stories include quotes from Black Portland residents, which lends legitimacy to the journalists’ framing:

. . . the movement of the many black middle-class residents from the inner city and the lack of role models for young people. If homeowners stayed in the area, if young people grew up seeing homeowners and expecting to become homeowners, [community leader] speculated, maybe then there wouldn’t have been so much trouble” (Lane 1990a).

Several articles profiled Black middle-class residents and community leaders who were forming civic organizations, businesses, and nonprofits to help “save” Northeast neighborhoods:

[Two black community leaders] have watched some streets in their Northeast Portland neighborhood go to hell. Blame it on any number of factors—black middle-class flight, gangs, unemployment, crack cocaine, deteriorating family values . . . (Rollins 1993).

Here, the reporter weaves together a multilayered story of cultural pathology to suggest that poor Black people need middle-class people to show them how to behave. Systemic racism and structural inequality are missing in this list of factors that the community leaders need to address, while cultural values and individual behavior are highlighted. The newspaper promotes an individualistic understanding of racial inequality rooted in the cultural inferiority of non-White and poor people.

“Racism” was occasionally named as one of the problems faced by Northeast residents, along with individual flaws, as in the following example:

[The mayor] uses an adage to explain his vision of how the revitalization program should work. “We won’t be giving them fish. We’ll be helping to organize and teaching them how to fish,” he said. While the program’s direction is unclear, the problems facing the area are not: Crime fueled by drugs, unemployment, educational failures, racism, low self-esteem among many of the young, large numbers of single-parent families living in poverty, shoddy housing and indifferent landlords (Oliver 1989b).

In this excerpt, the journalist mentions racism as well as several structural conditions: poverty, shoddy housing, and indifferent landlords. However, the mayor’s claim that people need to be taught “how to fish” indicates that individual shortcomings—including drug use and low self-esteem—are most responsible for the “problems facing the area.” Given dominant definitions, the reader might understand “racism” to refer to individual hatred, rather than systematic, racially patterned oppression. It is noteworthy that unemployment, educational failures, and indifferent landlords are framed as issues that are separate from racism.

Between 1989 and 1993, much of the reporting about Northeast neighborhoods was about gangs and drugs. One article proclaims, “This is the city’s combat zone, the center of Portland’s gangland drug trade, where the effects of crack cocaine can be measured at least indirectly in almost every life” (Bella and Lane 1991). During the 1980s and 1990s, White gangs were very active, particularly in Southeast Portland (Langer 2004). Racist White gangs tormented pedestrians and regularly initiated violence during this period (Rosenthal 2019). In November 1988, three members of a White supremacist gang murdered Ethiopian college student Mulugeta Seraw on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building. One article offers the following summary of the city’s gang problem:

By recent estimates, Portland may be home to 1,200 black, Southeast Asian and Skinhead youth gang members who are committing crimes, failing at work or at school and generally causing trouble in their communities (Austin 1989; Dillon 1989).

This phrasing, which represents White gang members not as White, but only as “skinhead” originates in a quote from a city official. It was then repeated in an article’s headline and again in one other article. By not identifying White gangs by race, gang involvement is decoupled from, and characterized as incompatible with, whiteness. In contrast, “Black” and “Southeast Asian” are framed as well-matched to an account of young people “committing crimes, failing at work or school, and generally causing trouble in their communities.” This association of Black youth with crime, failure, and “troubles in their community” is another example of attributing racial/spatial inequality to individual behavior while ignoring systemic racism (Cate 2010).

Ignoring Power and Privilege in Racialized Space

As Northeast neighborhoods transitioned in the 2000s, news stories minimized systemic racism by representing racialized displacement as a conflict between two equally positioned racial groups. In the following example, the difficulties faced by the leader of a Black church whose parishioners were leaving Northeast neighborhoods in the 2000s were equated with those faced by White clergy who occupied the same church in the 1950s:

Seeing the demographic shift reminded [the Black church leader] of the church’s history—when the neighborhood’s European immigrants were displaced by African Americans [emphasis added] drawn by World War II-era jobs (Chuang 2006).

By characterizing the demographic transition that occurred in the 1940s and 1950s as displacement “by African Americans,” the journalist ignores a multifaceted history of White racial dominance and Black exclusion. This framing creates a false reality in which Black people had the power to decide where White people could live. In the same article, the Black church leader reads from church minutes from the 1950s, “The blacks have made it up to 7th Avenue and are going to be at 15th real soon.” The reporter explains:

As the shift occurred in the 1940s and ‘50s, the church was conflicted about whether to allow African Americans into its congregation. [The Black church leader] says he used to think that line in the minutes reflected racism. Now he sees irony. “We should really be calling this re-gentrification”.

Here, the reporter legitimizes the suggestion that the White parishioners who were “conflicted” about whether or not to exclude Black parishioners in the 1950s were facing the same worries as Black church leaders whose congregants were leaving, or being displaced from, Northeast Portland in the 2000s. These two processes cannot be equated. In the 1950s, Black people were systematically excluded from other regions of the city. And many of the White people who left the Albina area moved to suburbs where Black people were not welcome and used loans that Black people could not access (Abbott 2011). The journalist’s decision to use this quote while offering no alternative interpretation upholds an erroneous interpretation of the past, which is only made possible by ignoring racism.

A similar likening between the status of Black and White social actors occurs in an article about a club that was at risk of closure. The Black man who owned the club indicated that White newcomers wanted to determine how Black residents behaved in public, specifically that they should not speak or play music loudly: “What’s going on here is that White people are moving in, and they don’t want us around. It’s almost like this White entitlement thing, ‘We’re here now, so you have to get out or change’” (Griffin 2006). This article also includes a quote from a White newcomer who states:

I hate to say this . . . but I think the problem here is a cultural clash. The culture I grew up in wasn’t as vocal. We didn’t blare our music out of the car. We didn’t have conversations with people a block away. There’s this entitled attitude that some people over at the club have, this, ‘We were here first, so you just have to adjust’ thing.”

By including these two quotes one after the other, this reporter suggests that conflict occurred because two equally positioned but culturally different groups felt entitled to public space. This framing minimizes the power that White people have to summon the police, to criminalize the everyday behavior of Black people in public, and to consolidate privilege and profit by setting the norms of behavior in their neighborhoods (Combs 2022; Evans 2025; Korver-Glenn 2022; Ramírez 2020; Summers 2021; White 2015).

As these examples show, conflict over neighborhood change was framed in a way that ignores both the racialization of property and wealth and unequal power dynamics between differently racialized groups in space. It turned racialized displacement into an issue of race “relations,” thereby suggesting the appropriate solution is racial tolerance. Indeed, several articles in the 2000s celebrate efforts by Northeast residents to resolve neighborhood conflict by “getting along” and participating in intentionally integrated public events (Barnett 2008; Mitchell 2002).

Quieting Black Testimony

When systemic racism was referenced in an article, it was typically in a quote from a Black resident, scholar, or activist. These quotes were usually presented as the speaker’s opinion rather than fact. For instance, in 1997 and 1999, The Oregonian reported on lectures given by “nationally recognized race and urban poverty analyst” john a. powell. In 1997, powell noted that the rate of Black homeownership in Portland was shrinking, stressing “The metro region should start planning now to stem the drain of African American homeowners and other drifts toward concentrations of poverty” (Spicer 1997). Two years later, powell raised concerns about historical processes that harmed Black people and communities.

Powell said urban renewal programs tore through African American communities in many large cities. As future protection against the damage caused by urban renewal in many minority communities, he said a racial impact study should be required as part of development permits (Nkrumah 1999).

In these examples, the issues raised by powell were not substantiated with evidence, affirmed as truth, or further examined by journalists. Rather, they were presented as powell’s opinion. This is an example of “testimonial quieting,” where the dominated group is “denied the status of ‘knower’” (Dotson 2011; Mueller 2020:154).

Another example of Black testimony appears in a June 1996 article. Avel Gordly, Oregon’s first Black women state senator, is paraphrased:

. . . before Oregonians can stop racism, they will have to recognize a past filled with hate crimes and bigotry, Rep. Avel Gordley [sic] of Northeast Portland said. She said children and newcomers should study Oregon’s history of racism (Turnquist, Eure, and Taylor 1996).

This quote appears in an article about two acts of racial violence that had recently occurred: a cross was burned on a Black man’s lawn, and a Black church was firebombed. This article does describe past racism in Oregon, including Black exclusion laws, Jim Crow laws, and hiring discrimination during World War II. “Oregon’s history of racism” is presented as something that Gordly thought was important. The article’s main argument was that White politicians reformed and made Portland “a more tolerant place today.”

Gordly is quoted again 10 years later in an article about Black leaders’ critiques of the Portland Development Commission (a publicly funded urban renewal and economic development agency):

More than 90 people, most of them African American, watched Sen. Avel Gordly [as she] push[ed] the agency’s board to do more for African Americans who’ve been neglected through what Gordly called “institutional racism” (Frank 2006).

In this example, the journalist does not offer additional details or context about the racism that Gordly describes. Rather, “institutional racism” is presented as Gordly’s idea and not verifiable.

Concerns about racism were linked to the perceptions of Black leaders, scholars, and activists. This pattern contrasts with reporting about “troubled neighborhoods” and unequivocal proclamations about the “gang problem” and is an example of symbolic coercion (Jung 2015). Although Black leaders’ and scholars’ concerns about racism are noted, systemic racism remains unrecognized in the journalists’ interpretation of reality.

It is also noteworthy that the perspectives and concerns of Black residents and community leaders that appeared were interpreted through an explicitly racial lens. Black actors were identified as representatives of the Black racial group. By contrast, White people are not represented in the articles as a racially defined group whose behaviors may reflect racial motivations. Reporters described the work of the various White actors, including developers, business owners, lenders, investors, landlords, and representatives of city government, without mentioning race. Their whiteness is unmarked and unnamed (Lewis 2004; Seamster 2015). Consequently, their perspectives are framed as more broadly valid.

Unambiguous depictions of systemic racism do appear in two articles written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, then a reporter at The Oregonian, in 2008. One article summarizes the research of two Oregon-based professors who argued that housing discrimination in the United States warrants reparations for Black Americans (Hannah-Jones 2008b; Kaplan and Valls 2007). The second article was about restrictive covenants and the history of housing discrimination in Portland. It includes a quote from a Fair Housing Council Oregon employee, who said, “We were never a very welcoming state . . . We had exclusion laws, sundown laws and real estate covenants. . . . A lot of people have no idea.” Instead of portraying this quote as one person’s perspective, Hannah-Jones affirms its palpable truth:

The houses know. Such as the ones on North Lombard Street with covenants that no black or Chinese person could ever live within their walls. Or the ones outside of the designated black zone of Lower Albina, where real estate officials could lose their license if they sold to someone black. Or the ones in Boise-Eliot where years of federal mortgage discrimination left them dilapidated and discarded (Hannah-Jones 2008a).

The two articles by Hannah-Jones, with their detailed examination of the long-term consequences of racism in the real estate market, differ markedly in the dominant framing of reality in the 418 articles.

In a 2016 interview, Nikole Hannah-Jones said that she considered leaving journalism after five years at The Oregonian because editors would not allow her to write about the issues that mattered to her: “I wanted to write about racial inequality . . . what called me to journalism is to write those stories . . . that’s not what they wanted me to do. Over and over, I would find myself pitching stories and being marginalized for those stories” (Columbia Journalism Review 2016). Sharing Hannah-Jones’ example is not intended to suggest that The Oregonian was uniquely opposed to documenting racial injustice. Rather, her experience provides a case of both symbolic coercion and testimonial quieting, whereby her reporting was “discredited in advance as being epistemically suspect” (Mills 2007:31).

Conclusion

This article considers how a mainstream newspaper framed a historically Black urban area over a 20-year period during which it gentrified and became majority White. I find that the newspaper framed a reality that minimized systemic racism. The findings point to the role of mainstream media in maintaining and reinforcing racial ignorance, the stance of not knowing about racism that allows White people to benefit from the racial order while maintaining a positive sense of self (Du Bois [1920]2014; Jung 2015; Mills 2007).

The newspaper contributed to racial ignorance by depicting Portland’s Black place as a problem that needed to be fixed while not explaining the mechanisms of racialized spatial disadvantage. This framing denigrates Black neighborhoods while legitimizing racialized property valuations and profitmaking. The news articles also contributed to racial ignorance by presenting White people as neutral and nonraced rather than a group that worked collectively for most of the city’s history to secure racialized privileges while politically, socially, and economically marginalizing Black people and other non-Whites.

Some news articles attributed spatial disadvantages in Northeast Portland to the behaviors of Albina’s Black residents. Focusing on the behaviors of Black residents promotes individual explanations of inequality and implies non-White cultural inferiority. By contrast, accounts of systemic racism—including urban renewal, redlining, racial steering, and restrictive covenants—were largely absent. The news articles revealed a “collective forgetting” of systemic racism.

Moon-Kie Jung’s (2015) concepts of symbolic perversity and symbolic coercion and Jennifer C. Mueller’s (2020) use of testimonial quieting are particularly helpful for understanding how White racial ignorance persists even when evidence of racial domination is produced by both dominated and dominant groups. Symbolic perversity describes the dominant group’s “tacit nonrecognition of explicit discourse concerning inequality and domination” (Jung 2015:143). For example, while some news articles noted that “low-income people are pushed out of the community,” the reporting ignored how racism shapes power and privilege in changing neighborhoods and in the real estate market (Lane 1990b). Similarly, reporting about lending disparities showed that Northeast Portland residents had unequal access to economic resources; however, it largely ignored racial mechanisms of economic inequality. Concerns about racist social processes that did appear were usually presented as the unsubstantiated opinions of Black community leaders, academics, or politicians. This is an example of symbolic coercion and testimonial quieting (Dotson 2011; Jung 2015; Mueller 2020). Black Portland residents called attention to systemic racism, but by framing their perspectives as mere opinion, their accounts were “unconsciously unrecognized.”

The analysis is limited to a 20-year time period. The boundaries of this period were determined by my initial objective: to understand how the newspaper framed a historically Black neighborhood in transition. The fact that racial ignorance was fostered during this time period is important because policy and planning decisions that influenced the trajectory of Northeast Portland neighborhoods were being made at that time. Moreover, people who read The Oregonian between 1989 and 2009 were being socialized by the newspaper to understand racial/spatial inequality through frames that minimized systemic racism. The readers take those understandings with them as they participate in the social world. The fact that this analysis ends in 2009 means that I can make no claims about how the media framing may have changed in subsequent years (2010–present).

Analyses of racism and the news media typically focus on whether marginalized perspectives are included, the preponderance of racial stereotypes, and racial representation among reporters (Campbell 1998; Coleman and Yochim 2008). I find that articles about Northeast Portland included quotes from longtime Black residents, as well as developers, politicians, and White newcomers (Brown-Saracino and Rumpf 2011). Similar to previous research, the reporting reinforced racial stereotypes about Black people as culturally deficient, and Black places as less valuable (Dreier 2005; Rucks-Ahidiana et al. 2025).

This article suggests an additional dimension of racism in the news media: the degree to which reporters present empirical and historical evidence to explain how racial inequality and domination has been produced and maintained over time. While this analysis focuses on media framing of racialized urban space, future research should consider how the news media contributes to racial ignorance about other forms of racial inequality, including the racial wealth gap, educational inequality, and health disparities.