I love living in Port Washington. One of the things that attracted my husband and me here in 1990 was the community’s economic, religious, social, ethnic and racial diversity.
Boy, you sure wouldn’t know about any of that from the ad that the Greater Port Washington Business Improvement District ran in the Port Washington Times’ May 7 Guide to Port Washington.
The blurbs on the ad make it sound like every resident is an “urban sophisticate,” a media person or an artist. Those terms happen to describe our family, but Port has a solid core of working-class people as well as professionals.
Worse, everyone in the photos the BID chose (with one possible exception) is white. That doesn’t reflect our community at all. Per the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 population estimates, 1 in 4 Port residents claims some nonwhite ancestry.
Whether these choices were conscious or unconscious, the BID should be ashamed of promoting such a skewed – one might say racist – view of Port Washington. There’s really no excuse in this day and age.
Barbara Selvin
Port Washington
