CNN Comes to Portland and Wants to Know If Hipster is a Dirty Word

"Portland, how can you be so hop and yet so uncool?" asks comedian W. Kamau Bell, host of CNN's "United Shades of America."

The weekly show focuses on the Rose City when it airs Sunday night at 10 p.m.

Bell says on a piece for CNN.com "it's a great city. The people who live there love it openly and loudly, and it regularly appears on the lists of best American cities. But something has always felt weird to me about Portland And not in the way Portlanders mean weird in their slogan, "Keep Portland Weird."

He compares it M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense."

"Everything looks right, but something is definitely wrong."

Bell points out that Portland is 76% white compared to the United States, which is only 72% white.

"Portland is considered a major city," he says. "And we don't associate major cities with whiteness."

So, he came here to try and figure out what's going on and discovers that the city feels even whiter than the 76 percent because "much like lima beans on a child's plate, the black people of Portland are pushed from the center out to the edges, where there seems to be a childlike attempt to forget them."

He talks to hipsters who are not too crazy about the characterization (it comes across as a case of they doth protest too much) and black people pushed out to the edges of the city by gentrification.