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All the Parts We Push Below
Why America can’t seem to survive without an underclass
Whenever I drive through Portland, see the endless tents climbing the grassy banks like roses beside the freeway, the tarps stretched out like arms to make shelter in alleyways and underpasses, I find myself thinking of Omelas. Omelas is not a real place, of course, but a fictional city in a famous story by Ursula K. Leguin. Funnily enough, the name came from a highway sign LeGuin saw in her rearview mirror, not for Portland, but for Salem, Oregon. Salem, O. Omelas.
Omelas is a veritable Utopia: egalitarian, peaceful, and abundant with cultural delights — at least, it appears to be so above-ground. But in a cellar beneath the city, a single child lives in perpetual misery and deprivation, caged in his own filth, neglected, abused and isolated. It is on this one child’s suffering that the Utopia of Omelas is built. Without his torment, the whole thing would collapse.
How fitting that LeGuin’s town drew its name from the capital of Oregon, a state where Black people were not allowed to live until 1926, where homelessness is a topic of constant political vitriol, where tribal communities face entrenched poverty and generational trauma, and the state’s ever-expanding wildfire season depends on the labor of incarcerated firefighters working for less than $10…
