Emotions and Ambient Racism in America’s Whitest Big City

Abstract This article explores the ways communities of color experience racism in Portland, Oregon—the whitest big city in the Unites States. Drawing from 40 in-depth interviews with an ethnically diverse sample of Portlanders of color, the study’s findings demonstrate how emotions are constitutive of racialized lived experiences. Participants’ emotions were deeply intertwined with Portland’s demographics and historical legacies of white supremacy in the city, highlighting the importance of place in structuring racialized emotions. Participants also describe emotional and impression management strategies they used to navigate predominantly white spaces. As a conceptual link between racial structures and racialized emotions, I introduce the concept of ambient racism, which describes how legacies of racism are “baked into” the social environment that racialized people navigate and emotionally contend with daily. Ambient racism bridges structural and emotional dimensions of racism by illustrating how racial structures are felt by racially subordinated groups.