This essay was written collaboratively by two Portland protest community members, Susan Anglada Bartley and Lexy Kahn, and is the result of conversations after participating in protests, both as frontline protestors and as writers and journalists. Throughout the article, we switch italicized and non-italicized fonts (Lexy in italics, Susan not) when we swap voices, offering two perspectives. We hope the processing we offer can be a catalyst for our comrades in Portland and worldwide who do the work of sorting out how to heal and walk forward. Throughout the writing of this article, we were both working forty hours-per-week, parenting, and doing our own healing, while also continuing our organizing work.
Context
Out of that storm of apocalyptic uncertainty in 2020, and a slew of deep individual and collective traumas, back-to-back-to-back with no time to process any of it, and amidst a tense and highly turbulent climate–with death and disease all around us– somehow a sliver of light broke through. And with it came a small shred of hope that we could finally tackle the issues of systemic racism and police brutality that have been so deadly and devastating to Black America, and all other marginalized groups, in this country for so long.
That tiny shred of hope shining through the cracks of this outdated, inequitable system, was enough to send upwards of twenty-five million racial justice activists, abolitionists, and lost souls, sprinting hard for those cracks to try and break through the obstacles that kept them trapped all their lives. They could now sense the defenses that their oppressors had laid out for them were in a weakened state, not as formidable as they once had been. That possibility was enough to make many of us All Go, All In.
And now, two years later, with a long list of accomplishments juxtaposed to a long list of mistakes and setbacks, this movement stands at a crossroads. Flustered and fragmented, but still standing . . . and still all in. Yet, all that trauma changes a person, and this group in particular has been hit hard with intensive trauma in a very short period of time. And in this climate, where just existing within the current state of the world is traumatic itself, we have to look back and resolve some of the traumas of these last two years in order to be able to move forward and build a more equitable world for our children and future generations.
It was that tiny shred of hope that drove us out of our homes, but for many a mass reckoning around white privilege was also a motivating factor. The geographic, social, and economic demographics of Portland, a city deemed ‘The Whitest City in America,’ a city located in a state that was originally founded as a white supremacist utopia, a city also known for both anarchist underpinnings and quirky white liberal Portlandia funkiness, was the only place where this could have happened exactly as it did. Portland was already known for massive protests. The history of protest in Portland in the past twenty years must be acknowledged as part of understanding how we got here. This historical recounting will not be perfect. It is non-academic. It is written in the cracks between work and mothering and street-level protest. It is missing pieces that I hope others will fill in. Even so, it is written by people who were right there, involved in it and who saw it happen, and also took part in that happening. So take from it what is helpful and add to it what is missing.
Many of the Portland protests of the early 2000s were active rejections of US imperialism and furious responses to Bush agenda colonialism in the Middle East. Climate justice and its relationship to all of the above also drove people to the streets in those early years at the start of the century. And in 2011, Portland joined the global movement of the squares with the Occupy Portland movement straddling two adjacent city parks in front of the Justice Center, which by no coincidence would become the heart center of the Black Lives Matter and antifascist movement of 2020-21.
Human rights organization Don’t Shoot Portland[1] must also be credited with doing the work to shift the gaze inward toward white racism within the city of Portland through their ongoing activism and support of artistic production around police violence and murder of Black people, hyper-policing of Black youth, and the history of racism in the state of Oregon and the city of Portland. Of course, dozens of Human Rights activists from many organizations spoke and protested prior to the rise of Don’t Shoot as a trusted and reliable source of information, but we acknowledge the work of Don’t Shoot due to their clear focus on exposing racism within Portland in the decades prior to the uprising of 2020 and 2021. This does not mean they were the organizer. As we say on the streets, Britney Spears is the organizer.[2] We acknowledge the work of Don’t Shoot PDX in order to highlight the consciousness and political energy-raising factors that [3]preceded the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing public response.
Likewise, the Occupy ICE Movement, supported by multiple antifascist groups, Direct Action Alliance, several mutual aid groups, and Portland DSA, in 2018, helped to focus the gaze of Portland protest community lenses around the intersection between colonialism, institutional oppression, race, and class. Occupy ICE was an immigrant rights movement, but also an Indigenous rights movement, an anti-colonial movement, an anti-federal power movement, and an anarchist movement. One could enter from any of those invisible doors. Once inside, the rhetoric sparked discussions and even deep divides around race, class, gender, sexuality, protest, and organizing that bled right into the protests of 2020-21 through the veins of those of us who were involved in both.
Occupy ICE is also particularly relevant because it was the largest, most recent anti-colonial and anti-racist movement in Portland prior to 2020-21. Like the uprising in 2020, Occupy ICE was decentralized in leadership and some of the same expectations (not naming organizers, protecting Black and Indigenous voices) were the norm (or attempted norm) in 2020/21. Though the Occupy ICE Movement was successful in several of its goals (including the shut-down of the ICE facility on SW Macadam in Portland), the protest community faced a tangle of painful and oppressive internal dynamics, which were only to be expected given that snipers literally pointed guns and surveillance cameras down from the rooftops for the duration of the occupation. Explaining the oppressive dynamics that arose during the Occupy Ice movement would require an essay or book chapter of its own, but what I’d like to document here is that the Portland Protest community, with little actual time to process, came to the next movement with slightly more understanding of how toxic hyper-masculinity in movement spaces could combine with police and military toxicity to attack women, non-binary Black and Indigenous people, children, and people of differing abilities to undermine movement goals.
In the 2020-21 movement, however, voices of Black women who wanted a movement that was truly intersectional (meaning centering Black women including trans women if you are really using Dr. Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality) were sometimes drowned out by the decentralized approach, and often they were still arrested, harassed, and targeted anyway. There were internal power struggles and ideological divisions among members of decentralized leadership that caused splintering. Within this context, there was also the reality of thousands of high school students, most but not all who were white, with a lot of spare time on their hands and who were ready to roar. In identifying the youth protestors as majority white, it must be acknowledged that Black, Indigenous, Asian, and youth of multiple backgrounds, sometimes in leadership roles did, in fact, hit the streets. Bands of young people began to bloc up for Black Lives Matter informed by Instagram handles that told which park to meet at, how to bloc up, how to make a shield, and what to do if you were arrested.
Portland has a history of anarchist organizing. Reed College is sometimes said to be an anarchist institution, though as a non-Reed student who spent time with anarchist Reedies at the turn of the twenty-first century, I can tell you that this looked like a whole lot of dumpster diving, food sharing, zine-making, reading anarchist literature, and punk rock music played in damp Portland basements.
But anarchism also lived outside of the academic nest that is Reed college. On Southeast Division street in the early 2000s, the Red & Black Cafe was a worker-owned coffee shop that was a center of anarchist thinking and activity. Pockets of anarchism and antiauthoritarianism dwelled in little puddles around the city, often in the shape of young artists collectively renting buildings or houses to create underground galleries, hold metal shows in basements, and hide before big developer gentrification hit this town; when housing was still cheap and working-class artists could afford to hold paint brushes rather than shields.
That the throngs of protestors who showed up in 2020 were dubbed white anarchist youth, however, is absurd. As I’ve already established, the people who came out for the Portland antifascist and BLM protests were not all white youth. People who identify in many and multiple racial and ethnic identities took part in all actions. And there were and are many Black, Indigenous, and Asian people who are anarchists or interested in anarchist and Marxist philosophy living in Portland. Throughout the movement, local media created a divisive narrative in which they juxtaposed “White Anarchists” with “Black Lives Matter Protestors.” In doing so, they both erased the presence of Black, Indigenous, and Asian anarchists, and inflated the lie that white or white appearing people on the streets were fighting for anarchism, but not for Black lives.
That said, a hell of a lot of white youth who had not previously been politically engaged did, in fact, come out for the first time in 2020 and many came out under the banner, or shall we say umbrella, of anarchism. Some had knowledge of the political philosophy due to the availability of antifascist and even anarchist literature and ideologies in their own Portland homes (no doubted some of their parents were once the anarchist twenty-somethings of the 90s and early 2000s). That knowledge also likely grew through communication and pamphlets available at movement activities, but there were still plenty of white kids who had no knowledge of anarchism other than how to tag the A and just wanted the chance to fuck shit up. And did.
Since decentralized leadership also meant that no single group or individual held the power, the rhetoric coming from megaphones and mics (which people just grabbed on a fairly regular basis) also ranged the full gamut of political underpinnings, from tacitly pledging allegiance to state power to anarchistic direct action. City Council candidates who received donations from the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) spoke at BLM children’s marches on the same weekend that Black voices holding the megaphone at street-level protests shouted “Every city, every town, burn the precinct to the ground,” while marching through the night. But I cannot speak on this as if I were an outsider listening in. Like many fellow protesters of a great variety of backgrounds, I was right there chanting too, motivated by the sincere belief that the police, criminal “justice” system, and the system of mass incarceration are indeed corrupt institutions that perpetuate racism, genocide, and harm to humanity.
Within the movement, there were common threads and hashtags. #wearenotamonolith became a commonly repeated explanation for serious ideological discrepancies in the movement used to normalize Black people not all having to share the same perspective because they are Black.
Another common thread was a constantly combusting discussion about the deeper meaning of Black Lives Matter and the need for whites to repair historic and ongoing wrongs. Fellow activists often questioned whether the very urgent and immediate daily focus on hitting individual Venmos or Cash Apps of Black and Indigenous activists, organizers, or protestors was in fact distracting the movement from the needed focus on demanding reparations for all Black and Indigenous Oregonians, through money and land that they deserve. To clarify, the demand to send cash directly and immediately was a common refrain through microphones, megaphones, and online platforms. There was often little to no expectation that recipients would prove their need or the use of funds to those who gave. In fact, shouting those kinds of questions back toward the person on the microphone was not possible or acceptable in the context of street protest.
As the practice of demanding funds from fellow protestors became a norm, some fellow street-level protestors began to question whether it was really helping us toward our common movement goals. These critiques did not intend to suggest that the aspects of the Revolution that operated through Venmo and Cash App were all the way wrong; the needs in the movement were and are real and these and other apps and mutual aid actions helped to address immediate needs and keep people housed and supported. The economic and personal needs that emerged in movement circles were also byproducts of apocalyptic capitalism and racism, and many needed urgent support so that organizers and protesters could keep doing the work or simply keep living, but this can be true while it could also be true that the movement can and will win more for those who are most impacted by demanding reparations from the city of Portland, the state of Oregon, and the federal government.
A third common thread was respect for both decentralized leadership and diversity of tactics. Protest policing was widely eschewed, meaning it was not cool to tell anyone else how to protest, whether they were lighting a fire or silently meditating. Above all, it was essential to keep showing up. White people had the responsibility to listen, to front line if able, and to continue to disrupt white supremacy, especially in spaces where they (we) had privileged access due to race.
Not far from the start, three demands were also made by multiple members of decentralized leadership:
Defund and Abolish the Police
Fund the Community
Make Reparations for Historic and Ongoing Racism in Oregon.
Organization Unite Oregon followed up these demands with a detailed set of budget suggestions and actions for City Council and the Mayor (Fuck Ted Wheeler) to adopt.
Some people marched with knowledge of what was on the table. Others marched for other reasons. Communication was imperfect. But in that chaotic context, the movement continued to multiply and subdivide. It continued to attract both sincere protestors and grifters. Its messages were both reproduced, surveilled, and tainted by fear or polluted by ego. We experienced infiltration by those with corporate protest agendas (groups who came down with the intention of soliciting votes or supporting particular agendas), politicians hoping to gain capital in every way they could through the opportunity to speak to large numbers, the FBI, and the Portland and Oregon State police.
Trusted voices emerged in the depths of street protest. Trusted voices emerged far away from stages, in parks, on street corners, behind umbrellas, faces hidden. Brief but historic conversations happened outside of precincts. There were moments where no microphone was present, but the truth was told. Trusted political actors also emerged–people who were intentionally silent, unseen, acting on behalf of the movement. Firecrackers, yes, but also actions never to be heard, seen, or mentioned again. The movement felt scattered like gas canisters on the street after a Portland protest, yet furious, chaotic, unpredictable, and still on fire.
After decades of dancing in denial over racist policies within the US justice system, it only ended up taking those three fateful words to expose nearly every closet racist that existed in this entire Ill-fated empire. Outside of the system and within, all the way up to the potus. All it took was simply saying that we believed Black Lives Matter, and they all crawled out of every racist nook, cranny, crevice and closet, to show how woven in they were to the institutions of this country. And after gaslighting Black America and our most marginalized communities for decades with false narratives that wealth inequality and poverty is based only on their own lack of merit, rather than lack of available resources or systemic racism, the racial justice protests of 2020-21 and the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement forced many white Americans to see and acknowledge the thinly veiled layers of white supremacy that permeate every aspect of this nation’s power structure, to finally face their own complacence and privilege within those frameworks.
It did not take long though for the bigots to come crawling out from the ideological muck and sludge like slugs after a fresh rain to tell Black America that they weren’t allowed to say that their lives mattered. And when that same racist version of white America realized they could not control or suffocate this civil rights movement with their hate speech alone, it led to visible collective rage and a volatile response that reverberated through the far right and manifested itself in many episodes of right wing, neo-Nazi hate groups from out of state, invading the city, leading to frequent clashes with homegrown antifascists, who were forced into defending themselves and their homes. As writer Mark Bray reminds us, “Militant anti-fascism is inherently self-defense because of the historically documented violence that fascists pose, especially to marginalized people.”
Those of us on the ground in Portland that year were probably much less surprised and shocked than the rest of the nation when the events of the January 6th Capitol riot transpired. For far too long, the white American, cis male bigot has been enabled and placated by the powers that be and they panicked and flailed and clung to their prejudiced ideologies in a perverted carnival freakshow-like display of childish tantrum combined with the very real and extreme dangers of mob mentality. So it’s not a wonder that they literally trampled some of each other to death in the process.
Meanwhile, by contrast, the organizers of mass protests on the far-left were diligent in creating measures for de-escalation, and touting chants like ‘we keep us safe’ or ‘we take care of us’ as a way of instilling safety measures into the minds and routines of the participants. Always keeping intersections blocked and barricaded from motorists who would use their cars as weapons against us during marches or demonstrations. Helping to ensure medics were in attendance at large rallies as well as ASL translators for accessibility. Always making food and water accessible and provided for free, fueled by donations of supporters of the movement and dispersed by the efforts and labor of the community, shouts go out to Riot Ribs in those early days (a local Portland food cart that kept anyone in the protest community fed for free in the earliest months of the uprising, and were constantly targeted and assaulted by police and right wingers for their work). So much emphasis was placed on keeping our marches as safe as possible because we knew if we were going up against a violent system of injustice that imposes what’s seen as ‘law and order’ it was going to be dangerous.
Given that police brutality was the very reason for this uprising in the first place, we inherently know how violent US policing is as an institution and if we stood firm against it, necessarily violence was going to follow. Some of our people were going to take wounds from the punches delivered by the violent right arm of the system we sought to abolish or at the very least, bring a much stronger measure of accountability to. Nothing else would do and we could settle for nothing less, and so some windows would have to break, some precincts would have to burn, and worst of all, some of our people would have to bleed before the needle would even start to move. But credit where credit is due, this community worked extremely hard to keep each other alive or from being seriously injured even in the most lawless, chaotic of circumstances. In the aftermath of clashes with neo-Nazis, feds or local police, you’d always see comrades tend to each other’s wounds, carry each other to the closest available medic or wash the bear mace from each other’s eyes with saline. Assigned groups walked injured comrades to safe houses or to took them to the hospital when it was necessary which, thankfully, wasn’t often due to all the community support within the movement and from our heroic street level protest medics tending to us all as needed.
Work
And yet we were workers.
We were workers who held children on our hips. We were workers who did what we had to for tips. We were workers who loaded boxes at the supermarket in the middle of the night. We were Grub Hub, Burgerville, and food cart workers. We were librarians, social workers, and public school teachers. We were childcare workers, EMTs, artists, cannabis clerks. We were bus drivers, nurses, herbalists, students, and professors. We were retail workers, sex workers, and we were also great masses of unemployed workers.
We were exhausted by day, fighting by night. We were willing to meet anytime, anywhere to stand for what we knew was right. We changed out of uniforms, shook off the eight-hour shift. We arranged for childcare, some taking turns with partners, so we could Bloc up and fight.
We met in the park at the place where race, class, gender, and human power flexed into a muscle that was the revolution. For some of us, it was the revolution we had seen up ahead and organized toward for years. For others, it would be the first time tasting it.
We were both leaderless and guided by each other’s voices. We were both marching in the impeccable solidarity of the heart and each needing to express that sacred rage that kept our feet marching when our souls were tired.
It was always all for George Floyd (fly in power) and also for those shattered parts of each of us, dominated our whole lives by racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic authoritarianism that decided upon his death to scream our truths. It was always about Black Lives Matter and it was also our biggest mistake to fail to admit that we were also doing it for ourselves.
Here enters our trauma. Here our lies. Here our unspeakable truths. Here our addictions. Here our imprisonment. Here our egos. Here our fear. Here our fury. Here our failures. Here our demise.
The Battle of 1312 and the Attempted Federal Occupation of an ‘Anarchist Jurisdiction’
And as we were clashing with each other’s egos in a constant battle of ideological motives that sometimes devolved into power struggles based on popularity contests or scene politics, what was most enlightening in all of that was the way all of that drama and toxicity and venom we were directing at each other would suddenly melt away and evaporate into the void the second the police came pushing down on us in their riot gear. And, once again, for the brief clash against the foot soldiers of our real oppressor, we would all be united as one against a common enemy. An enemy we collectively agreed was one of the most glaring problems in our community; there in front of us looking right back, with eyes hungry for violence from behind those shielded helmets. Dressed in body armor, boots and state issued gas masks, the so called ‘peacekeepers’ were back to restore law and order from the ‘unruly mob’ who kept insisting that Black Lives did in fact, matter and had to be beaten, gassed, tazed, shot at, and maced for saying so.
But even if the police were itching to bash some heads, there was not a single night that the police truly wanted to be out there. On the flip side of that you better believe that those of us within the group they came to try and disperse wanted to be out there . . . Even needed to be out there, if only to challenge the brutality of a State that desperately needed to be challenged, with the lives of our own community members hanging in the balance, especially BIPOC and those from marginalized communities, endangered by the same police thug element we were fighting and those state issued .45 caliber handguns that they were always so quick to draw from out of the holster that hung on their hip. And in those moments, even with one of our leading mantras being ‘no gods, no masters’ we were almost always as close to one unified faction as we ever were. You would’ve had no idea that just five minutes earlier multiple people in that same group were at each other’s throats about to come to blows over differences of opinion or petty squabbles. Such is the anger and hatred for the police and their masters that so many of us in the working class majority feel.
The Battle of the Portland Police Association, June 30th, 2020
Could there be a love that was strong enough to win?
We met at Peninsula Park just before dusk. The rule “no whites on the microphone” was in full effect, and I remember cleaning the mic for each speaker, one of whom was my partner, whose words illustrated the relationship between colonialism, racism, and police violence as the sky turned from grey to a shade of indigo above us.
“…Mass Incarceration is Colonialism. Racism is Colonialism! Police Brutality is Colonialism! This is an ancient fight! We are fighting against colonialism. All of these things that we are going through right now…this is an ancient battle! This is an ancient battle based on a violence that we sometimes cannot even see. These are based on laws that are set there to protect settler colonialism and to put pain on those who do not look like them. These are laws that are there to inflict pain on Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, so when we are moving forward sometimes we see the department of justice burning…we see all over the country, every time we are about to move forward, we feel that there is something else we need to tear down. That is because we are fighting a very old fight, which is colonialism. Racism, police brutality, mass incarceration are colonialism. We need to connect the dots. All of this racism…all of this colorism that puts us against each other, we need to end this!
By the time the first settlers came to the Caribbean and enslaved and inflicted pain on my people, and inflicted pain on African people all around this land, they had already set hierarchies based on the color of the skin. Right? This is one of the things we are fighting right now because now we can see it. We can feel it!
When we see George Floyd die on the street, we can see on a camera, through a video, that this is what we are witnessing. When we learn about the death of Breonna Taylor…when we learn about the death of Elijah McClain, we see these things at play. When we see Rayshard Brooks who was killed in Atlanta, and who was awakened by the police, sleeping in his car, taken down in his sleep…the best case scenario was that he was going to be arrested. Arrested for what? Can we just open the car and say hey man, here is a bowl of food? What do you need? Can I give you some water? Can I give you some coffee so you can continue your journey? But instead he needed to be arrested. For what? And then he gets killed. And then we look into his assassination and we see all of these things that come down to colonization and racial hierarchies. So we need to end this!
Moving forward, one of the things that we can do is to look into each other. We need to look into the mirror and acknowledge the pain that we are inflicting to each other and to our brothers and sisters by going along with these laws, these laws that are persisting for so many years through racism–the way that we try to distance ourselves because of the color of the skin…this is about colonialism. Moving forward, it’s about true liberation. Whenever politicians say we are going to give you another million dollars for this or that, we must say NO because we still have people who are incarcerated! People who are incarcerated for bullshit! They say we are going to stop and liberate some people. We must say NO! Because right now there are migrant children being detained in this country all over the place! And we think it is not happening because we cannot see it! But it is happening! Politicians say, well we are going to set free a few people. We say NO! This is about colonialism. Set immigrants free! When politicians say we are going to give a few more dollars so we can invest in schools, we must say No! We are going to say NO to continuing settler colonialism history and we are going to have to acknowledge the pain that has been perpetrated against our community for decades and decades! So as we continue to move forward, we need to remove the barrier that has been set inside of our minds, inside of our hearts, inside of our soul. And that is one step that we can take forward.”
– Pedro Anglada Cordero, Peninsula Park Speech, June 30, 2020
Numerous speakers took the mic before it was time to march–moving as a collective to the precinct where we would stand outside and demonstrate our unified rejection of police violence against Black and Indigenous people in this society. As we arrived at the precinct, we knew to expect that police photographers would snap pictures of all of the speakers from the park. At this point, we understood they were always trying to surveil us, especially targeting Black and Indigenous people who had the courage to speak their minds at the microphone. For this reason, we had to be increasingly careful to avoid any actions other than expressing our right to Free Speech.
There was no violence that night, other than the violence of the police themselves. Just minutes after our march arrived (no fires, no broken windows, just people marching into the night speaking their minds and hearts) a blockade of heavily armed and shielded police marched toward us, their automated, authoritarian white male voice declaring our mobilization a riot and demanding we disperse. I heard only the voice of a Black woman–one of the women who was the first to the Justice Center upon the death of George Floyd, shouting, “Hold the Line!” into her megaphone right behind my head.
My partner and I were that line right in front of her. Due to my racial privilege and ability, as a white, able-bodied person, I knew I better not turn the fuck back now. In front of me was one thin line that included a bike activist who was holding their bike as a shield. Next to him was a deeply-committed but frail man I knew had a significant leg injury. To my left was my partner, a Puerto Rican man who I knew was also not turning back.
“Hold the Fucking Line! We’ve got us!” she screamed, again.
As the riot-gear clad police charged with their clubs out, I saw the bike get grabbed away as the frail man was lifted up and pushed back into us like a doll. I kept pushing forward until I felt myself choking on the gas. I felt my partner disappear into the front line battle with the police.