Salvage Heart

A weekend trip to OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science & Industry) is best attempted at the opening bell. By 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, the building is teeming with parents and children, some drawn today to the dinosaurs exhibit. Lots of dads (or men with cameras at least) snapping pictures of their kids. It's an occurrence that generates some tension in our household...why am I not at OMSI with the kids while Mother does whatever she does when the kids aren't around (give birth, I think, or sleep?).

Wandering around the second floor today in the preschool room, I watched my 2.5-year-old daughter run from station to station while the 10-month-old crawled his way around the toddler pen. And I checked out the other parents staggered between all these children, perhaps a hundred or more in this room.

All white. Or, all White. Holy Anglos!

Really? I took another look. Okay, not all white. There were a few people of Asian heritage (and that includes the India sub-continent). One giant of a man we might call American Indian, or Native American, or by his first name if we'd asked.

But no black people. No Hispanics either, for that matter, but for the purposes of this discussion, we'll limit ourselves to black and white. Black and White.

We went downstairs, toured the main dinosaur hall, ate lunch (skipped the Turbine Hall...is that where all the black people were? Or in the gift shop? The planetarium?)...white people.

But why? Granted, the pasty demographics of Portland are such that you can go through the day in most parts of town, and black is the minority (less than 7% in 2000, and I'll bet much lower by the time the 2010 U.S. Census rolls around).

Could be, that in this unchurched region, a disproportionately large number of Sunday parishioners are black. So, at church? Or do the demographics of Portland-area African Americans tend to poorer, larger families than whites? Is this a sociographic issue? Or does OMSI just fall into that very Portland category of Stuff White People Like? Do dinosaurs?

I have no doubt (or no inclination to doubt) that OMSI manages significant outreach to a diverse range of communities. And I don't know how being in a group of whiteys impacted my museum-going experience. If anything, I'd like to have seen fewer people, regardless of color....

I've been thinking what it would mean to heed Sen. Barack Obama's call to engage in a discussion on race, although parsing a Sunday morning museum headcount (I estimated 500 or so present by noon) hardly serves as substantive discussion. And in fairness, I did eventually see a few black people: One man down by the Willamette River, waiting for a chance to see the museum's submarine. One girl, with a white man, running, but also outside.

And a well-dressed older couple (post-church?) who we greeted as we exited the building through a sidedoor that put us out on the Eastbank Esplanade (thank you Vera Katz).

We exchanged hellos, and they asked how OMSI had been. Great, I told them.

We should go sometime, they said to one another. "I didn't even know that this building was here," said the woman, with a smile, and walked on.

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Post-script reads: "Anglosaurus" is a joke. In the event that an actual Anglosaurus exists (at least in fossil format), I'd like to apologize. Also, if readers found this post to be offensive, I'd like them to think I might apologize. I'd like to think there might be readers, rather than Blogger users stumbling across Salvage Heart while hitting the "Next Blog" button.

Oh, and if an OMSI representative should decide to contact me, the membership expires tomorrow. I know. I KNOW.

Labels: demographics, OMSI, Portland