The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America

[::: :::]

i'm sure you can understand their feelings considering how the black community has been relegated to certain areas in portland historically on a purely racist basis, some of which have been gentrified over time. they are largely absent from city government and city employment at higher levels and will be affected by this disporportionately.

Yes, I do

[wyeaster]

Last month, Josuee Hernandez, a US Marine Corps veteran, was honored at a halftime ceremony sponsored by Leupold during a home game for the Blazers.

When Hernandez appeared on a big screen at the game – flanked by the team’s mascot – he unzipped his jacket to reveal a t-shirt reading: “End this sponsorship, #NoLeupold.” Refusing to accept a gift bag from the mascot, Hernandez went down on one knee – a tactic employed by American football players protesting against police violence.

Hernandez is a Democratic Socialists of America member. In a statement issued following the protest, he wrote: “We should not allow our experience as veterans to be reduced to moralistic spectacle, to cover the fact that the Trail Blazers are in business with a corporation that profits from killing people.”



When the Portland Trail Blazers play at home, the basketball team regularly holds a halftime ceremony to honor local military veterans. The ceremony has proven controversial in recent months as its sponsor – the weapons firm Leupold & Stevens – is accused of supplying equipment used to kill civilians in Gaza.During 2017, the Israeli military bought a consignment of telescopes from Leupold for sniper rifles. The deal was worth more than $2 million, Israel Defense, a publication specializing in the weapons industry, reported.

Under it, a Leupold product line known as Mark 6 would become “the telescopic sight of choice” for Israel’s ground force snipers, according to the publication.

It is almost certain, then, that the firm’s equipment has helped Israel’s snipers to kill and maim unarmed protesters taking part in Gaza’s Great March of Return this year.

The Times of Israel has, for example, published a photograph of an Israeli sniper preparing for the first of those weekly demonstrations, which began in late March. Leupold’s logo is visible on the sniper’s gun.
About 180 Palestinians have been shot dead by the Israeli military during the Great March of Return.
During the summer, the Portland chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace contacted Leupold about its sales to Israel.

The letter to Leupold – based in Beaverton, Oregon – elicited no response.

Further appeals were made to the Blazers and Leupold. Among the arguments cited was that Leupold has an obligation under UN guidelines to ensure that its products are not used for abusing human rights.
...


https://electronicintifada.net/conte...-snipers/26236

[Bobcat Sig]

I used to like Portland, until this thread.

I'll still spend my hard earned sales tax free dollars there though.

It’s not all bad. Spook just has crippling self-loathing about the city in which he (or she?) resides.

[wyeaster]

i don't care enough about portland to have a "crippling self-loathing" for it, whatever that is. i do think it's full of a lot of shit, tho.

[wyeaster]

PRICED OUT AT THE TIGARD LIBRARY

• Thursday, January 17, 2019
  
• 6:00 PM 8:30 PM

Screening with panel discussion about housing, displacement and the impact of upcoming light rail project planned for Portland’s Westside. Event is free and food and childcare will be provided.

Tigard Public Library
13500 SW Hall Blvd,

Along with interviews of former and current residents, neighborhood leaders and county commissioners, Priced Out features images from the thriving Vanport community before it was destroyed by a flood and the heyday of African-American graffiti along MLK in the ’50s and ’60s.

The documentary later compares shots of intersections in the late '90s and present day. One clip shows a black woman tapping her reflection in a cracked window, while the following image shows white women in yoga gear walking past renovated storefronts.

Swart himself bought a house on North Williams as a young, white newcomer in the late '90s. It was there that he met his neighbor, Nikki Williams, who was the primary subject in NorthEast Passage, Swart's 2002 documentary on gentrification and urban renewal. Williams became a symbol for NoPo residents who looked forward to change if it meant cleaning up the neighborhood. In NorthEast Passage, she lamented sidewalk violence and cleaning needles out of the yard before her young daughter, Anna, could play outside.

But a lot has changed in the 15 years since NorthEast Passage. "I mostly did this follow-up film because Nikki asked me," said Swart. "She left NorthEast Passage on a note that she was pro-gentrification, and I felt that she was owed an opportunity to update the record, so to speak."

This time around, Williams contacted Swart to tell him she was leaving. It wasn't because of the rising cost of living, but because of how unfamiliar her neighborhood has become. In Priced Out, her daughter Anna, now 26 and with a child of her own, talks about no longer feeling at home on the streets she grew up on, and the heartbreak of seeing new neighbors refuse to play with her son.

"It's not just that it's all white," says Williams in the film. "It's a different kind of white. Back in the day, at least people would look you in the eye. Now it's this 'I'm afraid to look at you, talk at you' kind of white. I joke that I feel like Moses when I walk down Mississippi, because the waters seem to part."

Priced Out isn't just about gentrification. It tracks North Portland's evolution into a heart of 'New Portland.' Through its interviews, the film puts words to the ambient tension between new and old residents.

It also illustrates that Portland's racial issues aren't just about 100-year-old exclusion laws. In one scene, a former North Portland resident named Michelle Lewis mentions finding KKK flyers in the deep southeast 100 blocks, where she can now afford to live. In another, Williams describes why she wants to leave Portland, even though she managed to stay in her house over the years of change. "I wanted to see people give a damn about that community, not to push us out and make things nice for the new, white community," says Williams. "I want to ask these new people, 'Where were you when we were cleaning up this neighborhood?'"

Swart emphasizes that the easiest step in helping the problem is being aware of yourself when you move into a new neighborhood. "A majority of what people say about what bothers them about gentrification, aside from displacement, is how badly they're treated by the people who move here," he says. "That's something newcomers have complete power over."

https://www.wweek.com/arts/movies/20...entrification/

[wyeaster]

[old goat]

Gentrification is a problem in all thriving cities and has been since there have been cities, although the problem has accelerated in recent years as commute times have increased to the point that people are no longer willing to move farther out and instead seek more affordable housing close to work. The people who move into gentrifying neighborhoods are people who have been priced out of more established neighborhoods. The underlying problem is income inequality and the fact that "desirable" parts of cities are built out. Until the problem of income inequality is solved the problem will persist, in other words, forever.

[neufox47]

i'm sure you can understand their feelings considering how the black community has been relegated to certain areas in portland historically on a purely racist basis, some of which have been gentrified over time. they are largely absent from city government and city employment at higher levels and will be affected by this disporportionately.

Yea and ultimately there should be some sort of grants for seismic reinforcements. This is an area that human nature fails at, preparing for a low annual probability occurrence event that is all but certain to occur within the next 100-200 years. Therefore it is something government needs to drive, and the cost of it happening pre-reinforcement will greatly exceed the reinforcement costs. Therefore, it is in the communities interest to pay for at least part of that cost or provide financing options.

My brother was connected tangentially to the fire in Oakland at the abandoned warehouse that became, well whatever it was before the fire; artists studios, party scene, squatters homes, etc. The city tried for years to regulate that place and were met with fierce resistance by protesters, those who lived there etc. Then it burns down and everyone asks, well where was the city?

[wyeaster]

According to the Oregonian, on Feb. 12, three days after Hayes was killed, Sergeant Gregg Lewis was instructing Portland Police Department’s Central Command on how to place civil holds on intoxicated suspects and take them to a detox center. Lewis explained that they should determine their actions based on the kind of person they encountered. As he explained what they should do when they encountered a drunk person in a suit and tie versus when they encounter a homeless person, someone noted that people were still mad about the extrajudicial killing of Quanice Hayes, so they should be careful, to which Lewis apparently responded:

“If they are black, just shoot them.”

...


And Jo Ann Hardesty is a black woman.

In November 2018, Hardesty became the first black woman to ever be elected to the Portland City Council. When Hardesty took her seat in January, she didn’t know about any of this because no one knew. The racist remark, the complaints, the firing, the six-figure settlement, the pension—it was all a secret. The city council, the police department, and city officials had covered it up for nearly two years.

Now that they had a black woman on the council, they were still going to pay off the racist police comedian. The city council was going to OK the settlement at the Jan. 30 city council meeting. The people didn’t know the details, so the vote would seem like a simple matter of financial housekeeping. Hardesty didn’t want to go along, but she only had one vote, and she would surely be outnumbered. What could she do?


So at Wednesday’s city council meeting, Hardesty waited until it was her turn to speak, and then, like a motherfucking G, Hardesty simply read every officer’s account of Lewis’ racist joke, meaning it would forever be officially on the record. No one could deny it.

Flustered, Mayor Ted Wheeler delayed the vote on the settlement. Citizens demanded the city release all of the related documents. The city did. The vote is now on hold and people are upset about the secrecy, the lies, and the racism.

“It’s clear we have a broken system,” Hardesty said at the meeting. “If it was up to me, I’d say, ‘Let’s go to arbitration. Let’s fight the good fight because even if we lose it, we send a very strong message that this is just not acceptable. That you don’t get to sit in roll call and make racist comments and you don’t get a payday on top of your city-paid retirement.’”

https://www.theroot.com/portland-pol...s-a-1832233738

[wyeaster]

Lawsuit claiming Portland nightclubs turned away black customers ends in settlement

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019...ettlement.html

[wyeaster]

and now for something a little different...

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/...-boulders.html

[ill-advised strategy]

and now for something a little different...

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/...-boulders.html

I spent part of a summer getting chased from campsites by forest service LEOs. It sucked. I've known of a few rounds of the FS evicting ski bums from makeshift camps near skiing....Telluride, my situation in Crested Butte, there was a whole thing going on in the Wasatch when I worked there and I dreaded having to get pulled into to doing that work (never did).
Now I have a house near an area that, prior to decades of soft creeping gentrification, was known as "bum's jungle" because it was a somewhat hospitable place to be homeless....and I'm so annoyed with the debris and the prospect of encountering volatile scuzzers when I walk the dog. There's a pile of camping trash from a few years ago in the woods behind my house, I keep procrastinating going back there and cleaning it up. I also am not a fan of being The Gentrifier. That also sucks. I think I could peaceably stand a tent city right near my house if people were civil, but that's the whole catch....people aren't really doing tent city life because they're upstanding reasonable people (I say this knowing there are plenty of notable exceptions)

I definitely see both sides. That boulderizing landscaping tactic is creative, that's for sure. It would be nice if there were a carrot somewhere to compliment the stick of eviction.

[wyeaster]

RIOTLANDIA: WHY PORTLAND HAS BECOME THE EPICENTER OF FAR-RIGHT VIOLENCE

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/16/portland-far-right-rally/


...

Why Portland? The city presents a unique mix of past and present white nationalism; policing that enables the far right; weak political leaders; and a legacy of antifascist organizing. Combined, these elements allow the far right to stage violent spectacles with few legal consequences against their ideological enemies — antifa, liberals, so-called PC culture, cities — while using social media to glorify the violence as a recruiting tool and proof of their racial and masculine virility.
IT STARTS WITH Oregon’s history. The state was envisioned as a white utopia and barred black people from residency until 1926. To this day, Portland is the whitest big city in America, with a population that is 77 percent white and less then 6 percent black, and that racial homogeneity has proved for decades to be fertile recruiting ground for racist hate groups.
Joseph Lowndes, associate professor of political science at University of Oregon and co-author of “Producers, Parasites, Producers: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity,” said that “in the 1980s, for groups like Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, Portland was a choice spot for their ‘10 percent strategy.’ That meant if the city was 10 percent or less people of color, the far right could organize working-class whites there as they believed they wouldn’t meet much resistance.”
...

Speaking of the massive brawls in Portland, Lowndes said, “There is another legacy of the anti-authoritarian left, anarchists, and anti-fascists who also since the 1980s have been a militant street-oriented left.”

That’s where the police come in. As the far right has turned Portland into a battleground nearly a dozen times since 2017, local journalists have revealed how police affinity for the far right has enabled its violence.

Internal documents obtained by the Willamette Week, Portland Mercury, and The Guardian reveal that Portland police see the far right as “much more mainstream” than the left. Text messages between a police lieutenant and Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson, who’s been hit with felony riot charges, show that the police fed him real-time informationabout the movements of antifa during street skirmishes, and gave him advice on how his most notorious brawler, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, could avoid being arrested on two separate occasions. In June 2017, when The Intercept asked the police about Toese, a spokesperson claimed that they didn’t know who he was and said their real concern was about the actions of antifascist counterprotesters.

There’s more. Portland police launched a criminal investigation against an activist based on material provided by Gibson. And during an extremist rally on August 4, 2018, police discovered Patriot Prayer members with loaded guns on a garage rooftop directly overlooking the protest. The police let them go and didn’t inform anyone for two months, including Mayor Ted Wheeler, who serves as police commissioner. In the Portland metro area, there are cops who are Islamophobes, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement private prison that employed a Proud Boy, and a sheriff’s deputy affiliated with the Proud Boys as well. All of which fits a national pattern of white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement.

WHEN IT COMES to left-wing protests, the bias comes into sharp focus. On June 4, 2017, police unleashed less lethal weapons on leftists, illegally kettled nearly 400 people, recorded their IDs, and retained the information despite assurances that they wouldn’t. The American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon said of the incident, “No other police force in America uses crowd control weapons with the regularity of the Portland Police Bureau.”
Just over a year later, on August 4, 2018, the police launched an unprovoked assault against peaceful protesters, nearly killing one when a flashbang grenade punctured his helmet, resulting in a brain hemorrhage. And on May 1 this year, 20 Patriot Prayer members led by Gibson and accompanied by Ngo attacked antifascists at a bar, fracturing the vertebrae of one woman (whose name was released by Ngo, leading to threats of violence against her, according to her friends). The bar owner claimed that it took police an hour to respond despite numerous emergency calls. The police released a lengthy statement seeking to justify why they didn’t respond until after the fight had ended despite knowledge of the attack as it was happening.

After Ngo was attacked in June, the Portland police tweeted out disinformation that coconut milkshakes being handed out by antifascists were laced with concrete. Conspiracists like Jack Posobiec helped the tweet go viral; it was turned into fact by right-wing media, treated as credible by mainstream media, and incited angry right-wingers to deluge antifascists with death threats. Days later, Portland City Hall was evacuated after a bomb threat, possibly related to the incident.

Police bias against the left is nothing unusual in America. The difference is that Portland lacks a counterbalance. Following the June 4, 2017, rally, someone who worked closely with Wheeler told me, “The mayor’s office is scared of the police.” The source explained that inside the police control center that day, police said not to interfere with tactics even when members of the mayor’s staff said “that looks like excessive use of force.”
...

[waxman]

tl;dr the whole thread but just spent a couple days/nights in Portland and was thinking of this thread after being downtown

what a shithole

if you live there i pity you

[The SnowShow]

I thought Portland was like the most desirable city in America?

[::: :::]

this thread is an exaggerated image of the city

i want to defend the city with all the relentless posts here, but, at some point, it's worthless trying to respond to what amounts to a kind of trolling

[glademaster]

tl;dr the whole thread but just spent a couple days/nights in Portland and was thinking of this thread after being downtown

what a shithole

if you live there i pity you

You haven't spent much time in Seattle, have you?

[waxman]

You haven't spent much time in Seattle, have you?

not in 20 years and even then i only saw sporting fields and sushi restaurants

[wooley12]

Please name any major city in the world that does not have a shithole section. You can't. Cities = shitholes is like skiing = cold feet.

[waxman]

Please name any major city in the world that does not have a shithole section. You can't. Cities = shitholes is like skiing = cold feet.

true that, is Portland a "major" city?

[wooley12]

I set the standard. Let your busy brain deal with it.

[waxman]

tl;dr the whole thread but just spent a couple days/nights in Portland and was thinking of this thread after being downtown

what a shithole

if you live there i pity you

oh, and Oregon/PNW drivers may be the worst passing lane squatters I have ever seen, holy crap, and I'm from Alberta

[billyk]

oh, and Oregon/PNW drivers may be the worst passing lane squatters I have ever seen, holy crap, and I'm from Alberta

Ha, ha, how true. I was driving from Portland to Corvallis one evening, and kind of in a hurry. I was going maybe 65 or so, back in the 55 era. Some guy in the right lane didn’t like my speed so he pulls over right in front of me and slows down to 50. I pull over into the right lane and he does too. I finally get around him, but I remember him shaking his fist at me as I went past.

[wyeaster]

this thread is not remotely trolling or exaggerated. it's not crackerchat about how progressive and enlightened the people's republic of keep portland weird is either.

[4matic]

Please name any major city in the world that does not have a shithole section. You can't. Cities = shitholes is like skiing = cold feet.

Singapore. Vienna.