Protesters in the predominantly white, liberal city of Portland, Oregon, have taken to the streets peacefully every day for more than five weeks to denounce police brutality.
PORTLAND, Oregon. Protesters in this predominantly white liberal city have taken to the streets peacefully every day for more than five weeks to denounce police brutality, but violence from smaller groups is dividing the movement and raising complaints that some white protesters are co-opting the moment.
As the Portland protests enter a second month, they have moved several nights from downtown to a historically black neighborhood in North Portland that is already giving way to the effects of white gentrification and has more to gain , or lose, by outrage. on the streets.
Late last week, protesters closed the doors of a police compound half a block from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and set fire to the building, which also houses black-owned businesses, including an Ethiopian restaurant and a barber shop. Two nights later, a meal in a park in the heart of the black community turned into another violent confrontation with the police, which unleashed tear gas to suffocate the crowd of several hundred people.
The change has angered and frustrated some in the black community, who say a “white fringe element” is distracting their message with meaningless destruction in a city where nearly three-quarters of residents are white and less than 6% they are black.
“This is NOT the Black Lives Matter movement. This is chaos, ”wrote Kali Ladd, CEO of KairosPDX, in a Facebook post. “These white actors are exercising dominance in a different way under the guise of fairness … White supremacy has many forms.”
Demonstrations elsewhere in the city have also become increasingly violent. Early Friday morning, someone broke the windows of a federal court and threw fireworks that started a fire inside the building.
A prominent black leader wrote to Mayor Ted Wheeler and said that some fighting had taken place three blocks from his home. He said the problem was with the “elements” that were “99% white” and did not represent the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It has nothing to do with helping blacks. These bullies are unnecessarily scaring neighbors and their children, ”said Ron Herndon, who has fought for racial justice in Portland for four decades and led a school boycott in 1979 after the city predominantly closed black schools. “At some point, enough is enough.”
Newly appointed Police Chief Chuck Lovell, who is black, said the violence in North Portland was “offensive and hurtful” and has cost the city at least $ 6.2 million in overtime for its officers.
“People in that neighborhood were upset. That’s not something they’re going to tolerate … and they came out and they were very vocal, “Lovell said.” I think people sometimes see the protest movement as a homogenous group, and there is definitely a segment here that is very violent. ” .
The tension over the protests comes amid growing conflict within the movement itself. Rose City Justice, a coalition that for weeks propelled thousands of people to peaceful marches and protests every night, announced last week that it will no longer do so after it was criticized, among other things, for sitting with the police commissioner and the mayor to discuss police reform
The Rose City Justice marches and demonstrations drew a diverse crowd of 10,000 people a night at one point. High school students marched arm in arm with Damian Lillard of the Portland Trail Blazers across the Burnside Bridge, and people gathered along the Willamette River to listen to hours of music and speeches. The aerial photos of the crowds, which filled the huge bridge from end to end, were national headlines.
“The purpose of making noise is to have a seat at the table, to be heard,” the coalition said in a statement announcing its decision to stop marching every night. “As with every movement, we realize that there are people who are actively working to discredit momentum and change.”
Now, as clashes with police have grown more violent in the business district and have moved into North Portland’s residential neighborhoods, black residents watch with dismay. Many are concerned that those who watch police precincts catch fire and that businesses are smashed will mistakenly assume that black people are causing the damage.
Jerome Polk has operated his business, JP’s Custom Framing, for 26 years from a building he shares with the burned North Precinct police offices. While carrying supplies to his business on a recent day, charcoal marks, graffiti, and police tape were still visible outside the building, and half of Polk’s windows had been boarded up as a precaution.
“I don’t know the motivation for why people do what they do,” he said. “I know that when the damage is done, they blame what movement is supposed to be. And that is unfortunate and unfair. “
A few blocks away, Carl Baskin sat next to his car wash station and was concerned that the message of racial justice would be taken from the black community by the “white children.”
“This is where they are losing the narrative. In the midst of all these other things, they don’t really show anybody sitting with the police, actually talking and making some of these things become laws, ”Baskin said. “That’s what we should be talking about.”
The sting is made even deeper by the fact that the North Portland neighborhood, over the years, has seen an exodus of black families and businesses as whites moved out. On a recent day, just a few blocks from bricked-up buildings and anti-police graffiti, white families with strollers passed food carts selling sushi burritos as they flew microgreens ads fluttering in the wind.
“Get to know us and learn about the pain we experience with gentrification in this neighborhood,” said Elaine Loving, who has lived in her family’s home in North Portland for 59 years. “Now they’re mostly white, and they don’t even talk to us half the time, and that hurts.”
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Follow Gillian Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gflaccus.
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