From the Classroom to City Hall

Race, Class, Identity, and Political Speech on the Portland City Council

For twenty-three years, I have taught a graduate sociology of education course at Portland State University. The course is built on a deceptively simple premise: that education does not occur in a vacuum. Schools and postsecondary institutions are embedded in social structures shaped by race, class, gender, and power, and the sociology of education gives us tools to see how those structures operate, often invisibly, to sort people into winners and losers.

Each term, my students, most of them working professionals returning to graduate study while holding down demanding jobs, arrive with personal narratives about how education has shaped their lives. They bring stories of first-generation struggle, of moving through institutions that were not designed for them, of watching cultural capital operate as an invisible sorting mechanism in their workplaces and communities. Over eleven weeks, they learn to examine those experiences through analytical frameworks. They read Bourdieu on cultural capital and habitus. They study how social capital accumulates unevenly along racial and class lines. They encounter intersectionality not as a buzzword but as a rigorous analytical tool for understanding how overlapping systems of domination produce distinct forms of disadvantage. They grapple with social reproduction, the way institutions reproduce existing hierarchies even as they claim to offer equal opportunity.

What I consistently ask of my students is that they move beyond personal testimony toward structural analysis. Lived experience is the starting point, not the endpoint. The task is to examine how individual narratives connect to larger patterns of inequality, and to do so with intellectual honesty, which means being willing to challenge assumptions that feel true and to examine whether the categories we use to describe our experience map onto the structures we claim to be analyzing. In my feedback to students, I push them to ask whether they are applying these theories with rigor or using them to confirm their existing beliefs. Are they distinguishing between the different mechanisms through which race, class, and immigration status produce disadvantage, or collapsing them into a single undifferentiated story of oppression?

I find myself asking these same questions as I read the transcript of Councilor Angelita Morillo’s speech on January 7, 2026, during the Portland City Council’s debate over electing its next president. Morillo’s remarks in support of Councilor Sameer Kanal are a striking piece of political rhetoric, emotionally forceful, personally vulnerable, and strategically sophisticated. They are also, in ways that bear directly on democratic governance, analytically incomplete. The speech deserves the same careful attention I would give a strong but imperfect student paper in my course: recognition of its strengths, followed by honest engagement with its unexamined assumptions.

What follows is not a dismissal of Morillo’s concerns. Many of them are grounded in patterns documented by the sociological literature. It is, rather, an attempt to hold her claims to the standard of analytical rigor that the sociology of education requires, the same standard I hold my own students to when they apply structural theory to lived experience.

Race as the whole story

The most fundamental assumption running through Morillo’s speech is that race operates as the primary and organizing axis of disadvantage within the council. She builds her case by linking the self-described progressive¹ caucus’s racial composition to its members’ lack of generational access to government, to the institutional hostility they face, to the scrutiny Kanal will endure, and to the need for mutual support spaces. Each of these connections is presented as following almost inevitably from race.

But her own biography complicates this. When she describes her mother never entering City Hall because she was a “single immigrant mother trying to raise us,” she is describing the intersection of immigration status, class, gender, and family structure as much as race. The barrier was not that her mother was a person of color turned away at the door. The barrier was that a working single immigrant parent lacked the time, language access, or social capital to engage with the municipal government. These are related to race in the American context, but they are not reducible to it.

In my course, we spend considerable time distinguishing between correlation and mechanism. Students read about how social capital and cultural capital accumulate along racial, class, educational, professional background, and family structure lines. The point is not to deny that race is consequential, because it obviously is, but to identify how it is consequential in a given context. A white first-generation councilor from a working-class background with no family connection to politics might share many of the same institutional disadvantages Morillo describes. A councilor of color from a political family might not. By collapsing these distinct mechanisms into a single racial narrative, Morillo gains rhetorical force but sacrifices the analytical specificity her argument needs.

When I evaluate student papers, I frequently note this pattern: strong personal narratives that identify a genuine phenomenon but then attribute it exclusively to a single variable, without adequately considering how multiple systems of stratification interact. In my feedback on one student’s final paper, I wrote that the work would benefit from exploring how multiple identities interact to create both privileges and constraints, rather than treating race as the sole explanatory lens. Morillo’s speech, for all its emotional power, would benefit from the same counsel.

Support group or power bloc

Morillo frames the progressive caucus as a support structure born of necessity, a space where “young emerging leaders” who lack inherited political knowledge can learn together how to govern. She is explicit about this: “these spaces were not created to protect or uplift people like us,” and so the caucus does what the institution itself refuses to do.

This framing asks the public to see the caucus as fundamentally defensive rather than strategic, as existing because its members need protection rather than because they are consolidating political power. But these two functions are not mutually exclusive, and in practice, most political caucuses serve both simultaneously. Labor, women’s, and ideological caucuses throughout American political history have provided community while also operating as power blocs. There is nothing wrong with this. Morillo herself says, “That is the role of a politician.” But her framing asks the public to see only the vulnerability dimension while the power dimension goes unacknowledged.

This is relevant to how we teach about institutional power in my class. Students study how dominant groups often present their power as natural and invisible, while marginalized groups’ organizing is treated as factional or disruptive. But it can also become a shield against legitimate political disagreement. A conservative caucus of white members organizing to elect their preferred candidate to the presidency would likely face identical procedural objections from the opposing side, and those objections would not be racial in nature. Morillo’s framing makes it difficult to distinguish between criticism rooted in racial animus and criticism rooted in ordinary political competition. That conflation, whether intentional or not, serves the caucus’s strategic interests.

By asserting that the caucus’s “ability to be values aligned and effectively organized should not be punished,” Morillo implies that criticism of the caucus is punishment, and, given her earlier establishment of the caucus’s racial composition, that such punishment carries racial undertones. This is a powerful rhetorical move, but it forecloses the possibility that some criticism might be about the politics rather than the people. In a democratic body, that foreclosure is costly.

A Claim that Can’t be Wrong

Morillo’s assertion that Kanal “will not be able to have any moments of missteps in the way that our white colleagues can” is perhaps the most emotionally resonant passage in the speech. She grounds it in her experience working for “the first black city Councilwoman” and in her observation that media treatment is “very desperate[ly]” unequal.

The claim is broadly supported by research on media coverage of politicians of color, who do tend to face more identity-framed coverage and harsher consequences for equivalent missteps. This is a documented tendency, not an invention. But Morillo applies a general finding as a specific prediction about a specific councilor in a specific city, without examining whether the local dynamics support it. Are there examples from this council’s first year of white members receiving more lenient treatment for comparable errors? She does not cite any. Has the local media demonstrated a track record of disparate coverage? She references it but provides no specifics. The claim operates entirely on the authority of lived experience and the public’s willingness to accept the general as locally applicable.

The significance of this gap is that the claim does considerable political work. By preemptively framing any future criticism of a Kanal presidency as potentially racially motivated, Morillo constructs a defensive perimeter around her candidate before he takes office. If he is criticized, the criticism can be attributed to the double standard she has identified. If he is not criticized, the warning was prudent. There is no outcome in which the claim can be shown to have been unnecessary. This is not dishonest; she may genuinely fear for him. But it is a rhetorical structure that insulates itself from falsification.

In my classroom, I teach students to be alert to exactly this type of unfalsifiable claim. Not because the underlying concern is wrong, but because claims that cannot be tested tend to harden into orthodoxies. If every criticism of a leader of color is potentially attributable to racial bias, then the leader becomes functionally immune to accountability, and that is not equity. It is a different exceptionalism.

Who runs an institution that excludes them?

When Morillo says, “these spaces were not created to protect or uplift people like us,” she is making a historical claim about institutional design that is broadly defensible. American municipal government was built during periods of explicit racial exclusion, and its norms, procedures, and cultures carry those marks. Sociological research documents this dynamic exhaustively: institutions embed the cultural capital of dominant groups into their structures, treating particular forms of knowledge, behavior, and self-presentation as neutral when, in fact, they are deeply partisan.

But Morillo extends this historical observation into a present-tense claim about how the institution currently operates, and that extension deserves scrutiny. The council she sits on, by her own description, is a new body in its first year. Several of its members are people of color. It has a large left-leaning caucus capable of contending for the presidency. Whatever the historical origins of the city council as an institution, this particular council is in the early stages of remaking itself. The question Morillo does not engage is whether and to what extent the inherited institutional hostility has already been mitigated by the very representation she and her colleagues provide.

This is a common tension in progressive institutional critique, and one we encounter regularly in my course. The language of structural exclusion can persist unchanged even as the conditions shift. Students who work in organizations that look very different from those they worked in a decade ago sometimes continue to describe those organizations in the language of total exclusion, not because they are dishonest, but because the analytical lens they have adopted does not easily accommodate institutions that have changed in some respects. Morillo’s framing of the council as hostile to people like her sits uneasily alongside the fact that people like her are running it. That tension deserves honest examination rather than rhetorical elision.

When Politics becomes identity

There is one additional assumption worth isolating because of its implications for democratic norms. Morillo establishes early that the progressive caucus with which she identifies is “primarily made of people of color,” and she returned to this fact repeatedly as both explanation and justification. The effect is to fuse the caucus’s political identity with its racial identity, so that criticism of the former becomes indistinguishable from criticism of the latter.

This fusion is strategically powerful but analytically dangerous. The caucus is organized around a set of political commitments: leftist policy positions, DSA affiliation, and immutable stances on public safety, housing, and labor. These are contestable political commitments, and in a functioning democracy, they should be contested. By wrapping these commitments in a racial identity narrative, Morillo makes it harder to oppose the caucus’s political agenda without appearing to oppose the racial progress it represents. This is a form of what sociologists might call symbolic boundary work, the construction of a boundary between “us” (the racialized caucus fighting for inclusion) and “them” (those who oppose the caucus, and therefore, implicitly, oppose inclusion).

But the boundary between political disagreement and racial exclusion is not as clear as this framing suggests. A more moderate councilor of color who disagrees with the leftist caucus’s policy positions would fall outside Morillo’s “us” despite sharing the racial identity she foregrounds. A white progressive who fully endorses the caucus’s agenda would fall inside it. This reveals that the caucus’s organizing principle is ultimately ideological, not racial, even though Morillo presents it as the reverse. The racial composition is a fact about the caucus; it is not what makes the caucus a caucus.

What I would write in the margins

None of this means Morillo is wrong in her underlying concerns. Racial dynamics almost certainly shape how the Portland City Council operates and how its members are perceived. The leftist caucus probably does serve a support function for members who lack inherited political capital. These are reasonable concerns, grounded in patterns extensively documented in the sociological literature.

But the sociology of education, the discipline I have taught for over two decades, requires more than reasonable concerns and patterns. They require specificity. They require that we distinguish between the different mechanisms through which disadvantage operates rather than attributing everything to a single variable. They require that we examine whether our analytical categories accommodate the complexity of the situations we are describing, or whether they reduce that complexity into a narrative that serves our political purposes. They require that we hold our own assumptions to the same scrutiny we apply to those we oppose.

Morillo’s speech would have earned high marks in my course for its integration of personal narrative with systemic analysis, for its courage in naming uncomfortable dynamics, and for its genuine care for colleagues on difficult terrain. I would have also written in the margins what I write to many of my strongest students: the analysis is compelling but incomplete. The racial framework does important work, but does not do all the work you are asking it to do. The lived experience is powerful, but it is not a substitute for the harder task of demonstrating, rather than asserting, the claims you are making.

The strongest version of Morillo’s case would have acknowledged the complexity she elides: that race intersects with class and immigration status in ways that do not always map neatly, that the caucus serves both community and strategic functions, that not all criticism of organized left is racial in nature, and that the institution they inhabit is being transformed partly by their own presence. Making those acknowledgments would not have weakened her support for Kanal. It would have made that support harder to dismiss.

In a new council still establishing its norms and precedents, that incompleteness is consequential, not because Morillo’s concerns are unfounded, but because the precedents set now will determine whether racial analysis is used as a tool for understanding or as a shield against all forms of disagreement.

1. The caucus referred to throughout this paper is known as “the progressive caucus,” abbreviated “p-cauc” or “peacock.” The progressivism movement, however, refers to a liberal democratic reform ideology, not democratic socialism, and has therefore been misapplied to the group of six Portland city councilors who broadly identify with democratic socialism.