A Year Later – A Pastor in the Portland Uprising by Aric Clark
This essay is a follow-up to “A Pastor In The Portland Uprising”
I look at the book, Baptized in Tear Gas by Elle Dowd, resting on the pillow beside me with confusion. How did it get there? I remember throwing it down just a second ago and suddenly switching to scrolling through apps on my phone, but I don’t remember having chosen to do so. One moment I was reading a passage about a line of riot cops closing in on a group of protesters shouting “Move!” in that affected authoritarian voice they use and the next I was doing anything else with no conscious intention. I put that book on the bottom of my current to-be-read pile and it takes me two weeks to get back to it. Weird. Don’t think about it, Aric. Just answer some more email.
Later, I am on some errands in downtown Portland. The beautiful prismatic graffiti of last summer is almost all gone, the plywood having been taken down or painted over in an offensive variety of beiges. The spicy smell is also gone, but plenty of reminders of the uprising are still around and their depressing grimness conveys the endurance of state power over anarchist resistance. The parks are locked behind fences. The public restrooms are closed. Anywhere that might give shelter to houseless people has been made as inhospitable as possible by placing concrete barriers or removing benches and disabling water fountains. The venn diagram of squashing an uprising and punishing poverty is almost a circle. Behind all that chain link was where Riot Ribs stood for a few bizarre and revelatory weeks a year ago, doling out free food between bouts of tear gas.
My church needs a new computer so I’ve reluctantly come to the Apple store. I find it behind a 40’ high steel curtain and a security checkpoint. The harmony between the luxurious futurism inside and the brutal pragmatism outside is exquisite. These barriers have remained up all year, and they’re unlikely to go away because the hubris and decadence of all that transparent glass and those glowing white LEDs is too obvious to ignore. It would be a guilt-free pleasure for many of Portland’s anarchists to put a brick through the middle of it. A college student in a polo-shirt talks to me cheerily about the banality of working inside a fortress selling consumer electronics. The steel wall is there because it makes the customers feel safer, he says. Behind him, the security guard is inspecting the backpack of an employee heading out for lunch, probably to prevent shrinkage. If downtown is going to be hostile to the houseless, it feels like marginal justice that it is also hostile to businesses like this one.
The question of whether Portland is a city in decline as viewed from the perspective of financial investors is one that has gotten ample media attention in the past year. Obituaries for the city, written by people who do not live here, have been published in a few outlets, and of course Portland has retained her spot as a favorite punching bag slash morality tale of conservative pundits. We’re still earning that “Little Beirut” nickname the elder Bush once gave us. These hot takes conveniently overlook the fact that we’re in a pandemic, and ask us not to notice the housing crisis spiraling to new levels, urged on by a corporate property accumulation spree which has driven the average home price in the city to $550k while camps of the houseless proliferate. Someone is indeed making this place unlivable and goodness wouldn’t the editorials like us to believe it is kids in black bloc with cans of spray paint.
Until Biden’s Justice Department revoked the distinction in February, Portland was briefly considered an “anarchist jurisdiction” which is a delightful oxymoron, but if lawlessness reigns here, it is only in service to establishment interests. Our pro-business mayor, Ted Wheeler, was reelected despite being wildly unpopular and it probably had something to do with him generously loaning himself $150,000 to keep his struggling campaign afloat against local campaign finance regulations. Meanwhile, the police force Wheeler is in charge of has repeatedly been out of compliance with a federal oversight agreement on their use of force and officer accountability. A County judge ruled that police violated the law by filming protesters, and the president of the police union resigned over a “serious” mistake related to false reports that city-commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty was involved in a hit-and-run accident. His resignation is shrouded in an internal-affairs investigation that hasn’t yielded any answers months later. Most egregiously, a citizen review committee report accurately assigned blame to police for the vast majority of the violence at last year’s protests; violence which the police themselves said amounted to 6000 instances of use-of-force validated by supervisors with no critical assessment, no discussion of reasonableness, and no de-escalation attempts; violence which will go almost entirely unpunished despite Portland having elected a reform-oriented District Attorney who has often been criticized in the news for refusing to prosecute protesters. At this point it almost feels like performance art when we hear that the city might rescind its vaccine mandate for municipal employees because police, whose impunity is one of the principal safety hazards to our citizens, are refusing to get vaccinated even though COVID-19 is the leading cause of death among law enforcement right now.
None of the above gets Portland compared to the Wild West, but oh when the fascists come to town…
On Sunday, August 22nd the Proud Boys planned a rally on the anniversary of the rally they held last year in which they assaulted countless people with bear mace, airsoft guns, and batons. At last year’s rally the police refused to intervene except to escort a few of the right-wingers safely out of the area and, after they had left, Federal Police declared the remaining small crowd of anti-fascists and black lives matter protesters an unlawful assembly and drove them away. This year, in anticipation of more violence at the anniversary event Mayor Wheeler and Police Chief Chuck Lovell delivered a press conference over Zoom in which they urged both sides to “choose love” and declared preemptively that the police would not intervene. In fact, the police never even showed up.
I was with the anti-fascists downtown, by the river. The mood was a familiar mix of laid-back and vigilant – like a frayed nerve which has been jolted repeatedly into alertness to the point where, even in an excited state, it doesn’t show very much. There were a few hundred of us there, maybe a third or so in black bloc, with no particular plan or agenda except to hold the space, hopefully in large enough numbers that the fascists would stay away. We were mostly successful. The Proud Boys moved their rally last minute to an abandoned Kmart parking lot in the Parkrose neighborhood, far from downtown. A few times they drove a truck through downtown to gauge our attendance and each time they decided we were too numerous to risk a confrontation.
This is an historic pattern with fascists who seek to gather in left-wing places like Portland or the Bay Area. Ideally they try to rally with either police protection or when they aren’t opposed in large numbers. When they outnumber their opposition they engage in indiscriminate violence as an intimidation tactic. If they remain unopposed then they declare success, claiming that their abhorrent ideology is acceptable and mainstream and knowing that their opponents will be traumatized by their violence. If they face opposition by anti-fascists then they rely on the media to describe the chaos as “clashes” without naming the fascists as instigators, while the fascists craft narratives of victimhood for their base. If the fascists are driven out of public space by overwhelming numbers then they go underground and attempt to recruit through covert messaging and constantly shifting talking points like “replacement theory”.
Some of the whimsy and humor I’ve come to associate with the Portland protest scene was on display at the anti-fascist gathering. A pair of unicorns danced beside the fountain which periodically had food coloring poured into it so that it sprayed rainbow hues. Garfield appeared on a banner repurposed as an anti-fascist mascot holding a baseball bat beside the slogan “Good Night White Pride”. A couple young women sat in the grass with signs reading “Antifa is for Lovers” and “Free Compliments for Anti-Fascists”. For over an hour we all sat and listened to a pair of rappers freestyle back and forth offering insults for Proud Boys, the police, and the city government, and encouragement for those of us out there doing community defense.
A few times people tried to make trouble around the edges of the crowd: an evangelist started screaming through a bullhorn something about Jesus hating queer people and socialists; a cyclist quickly spray-painted a swastika on the nearby underpass before riding away; a signature-gatherer came around with a few petitions they wanted signed; a live-streamer failed to respect people’s requests not to show faces on camera. In each case, I watched people spontaneously spring into action and nonviolently, but assertively, escort the offender away from the assembly and clean up the mess.
No one was in charge and no one was giving orders, because anti-fascism is an ideology and a set of practices not an organization. We were all there either as individuals or clumped into our autonomously organized affinity groups. I organize with a group of interfaith clergy called Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance. Seven or eight of us were there in clergy garb, with purple reflective vests, bike helmets, masks, and assorted protective gear we’ve grown used to donning at protests. We were pulling a wagon filled with drinks and snacks labeled “Mutual Aid Vibes Only”. We talked to people and distributed our supplies and staved off boredom, while anxiously checking our social media feeds to see if at any moment this spontaneous street-fair atmosphere might be disrupted by the confusion of fascist violence.
In my home, after that trip to the Apple store, I’m sitting down to dinner and game night when I receive a text message from a neighbor, “Trumpers down by the stoplight again waving their flags.” This happens every few weeks and usually I go down there in my clergy garb with a sign that says “Black Lives Matter to God”. I do this because the first time it happened there were a pair of black teenagers with a pride flag counter-protesting and they got surrounded by the people with the MAGA flags and had obscenities screamed in their face. I want to make sure those kids are never alone to endure that hatred and I don’t want the MAGA crowd getting the idea they’re welcome in this neighborhood. Unfortunately, this means that I’m the one that gets surrounded, ridiculed, demeaned, and physically intimidated. Last time my sign was ripped from my hands and torn apart and I was shoved to the ground. Tonight the text messages let me know that there’s a woman down there alone opposing them, Karin Power, our state legislator, someone I greatly admire. I should go join her. I look over at that book I can’t read for some reason and my eyes get inexplicably hot. I can’t do it. I stay home and play games instead.
Almost everyone I know who took part in the 100+ days of uprising here in Portland is traumatized at some level. Night after night the state deployed incredible amounts of brutality against us, long after the cameras of the major news networks stopped watching. And when the state wasn’t doing the violence itself it was actively colluding with or at least passively permitting white supremacists to get their licks. This year I learned that some of my neighbors count my life as less valuable than a broken window, and some of those neighbors are cops who wield lethal force with total impunity. Nearly as destructive as the physical violence is the spiritual violence done by a public that briefly pretended nominal support for the movement for Black liberation, probably due to anti-Trump sentiment more than anything, only to utterly abandon us when it took more than a few weeks and seemed like it was going to require a little more than a lawn sign or a supportive bumper sticker. After the protests ended, and with Biden’s election, support for Black Lives Matter among white people faded to where it now polls lower than it did before the George Floyd Uprising. It’s difficult to say how I feel about this without resorting to expletives.
The reasons we organize in these autonomous little cells here in Portland are both ideological (as anarchists we’re not trying to build any new hierarchies) and strategic (by doing it this way we avoid centralizing authority in identifiable leaders who can be eliminated by the tactics of COINTELPRO), but there’s no denying that it also has the downside of making it awfully hard to get everyone on the same page. The day of the Proud Boys rally, owing to the anti-fascists having superior numbers, the groups mostly stayed apart and it was therefore a mostly quiet day. Of course, there were a few exceptions, and these exceptions were enough to lead to a flurry of opinion pieces in local media chastising the police for keeping their distance because the media narrative has so completely lost the plot that they’ve forgotten that police brutality is the reason we’re in the streets in the first place. The police don’t prevent white supremacist violence, they uphold it.
Which brings us to the key unmet demand of the uprising: defund the police. Here in Portland we were asking for a 50% reduction in the police budget with that money going to other public health and safety initiatives. In June of 2020, right at the beginning of the uprising, overwhelming public pressure managed to get the city council to reduce the budget by $15million out of $244million, or about 6%, though the entire city budget was expected to undergo cuts related to the pandemic so not all of this was due to the demands of protesters. Along with these cuts the city disbanded the Gun Violence Reduction Team which had a history of racist methods and results. Later that year, during the fall budget monitoring process, organizers with the support of Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty proposed cutting an additional $18million, but despite so many people showing up to testify in favor of the cuts that public testimony lasted nearly 4 hours, the council ultimately voted it down. During that same time period, negotiations between the city and the police union began over their contract. Meanwhile a new program called Portland Street Response, which was supposed to take away some of the burden from police by sending EMTs or therapists or social workers in place of armed officers to many situations, was starting in the neighborhood of Lents.
I’m willing to wager that you didn’t find the previous paragraph about municipal politics exactly gripping reading, but I’m also aware that a lot of people have somehow heard the story that “Portland defunded their police and now crime is out of control”. The truth is that we really didn’t cut the budget by a meaningful amount, the alternatives to policing we were supposed to be attempting have never been funded, while being systematically undermined by bureaucracy, and now the unfounded narrative that this has led to a rise in crime is being used to argue for increasing the police budget and restoring the problematic Gun Violence Prevention team. What few policy gains we’ve made are in danger of being completely reversed.
Elle Dowd’s book still rests on my side table unfinished. I’ve made progress, but my nerves are still raw, so I read it in increments. As I sit to write you this report I can’t offer you closure. The only worthwhile thing I can give you is honesty and honestly: it’s messy. Our collective liberty seems in some ways even more fragile than it did when me and my friends were being assaulted by the police every night last summer. Some in my congregation and even in my family have distanced themselves from me for being divisive. It has adversely impacted my career and my mental health. I share this not to ask for sympathy, but merely to acknowledge the truth that this work exacts a toll.
Because this essay is something of a synthesis of my experiences of the past year it might sound, incorrectly, like I’m using the past tense to talk about the Portland uprising (itself just a small part of the George Floyd Uprising, which is a part of the Black Lives Matter movement which began with the Ferguson Uprising, a part of the movement for Black Liberation, which is part of the greater struggle for the liberation of all people, everywhere). I assure you this is not the end. The uprising here in Portland wasn’t defeated by the violent tactics of the Feds or the police. The nightly protests only stopped when wildfires started displacing people and the small cohorts like ours that had been organizing for protests instead turned our efforts to mutual aid. We showed up with respirators and food and tents. Our networks that had been used to mobilize people in the streets started being used to mobilize volunteers to run shelters and provide transportation. When the fires were extinguished many of these mutual aid groups turned their attention to houseless communities around Portland. We showed up to block sweeps. We showed up to protect a black family from being evicted… And yes, we’re still showing up to drive fascists out of town using black bloc and shield walls if necessary, but don’t overlook that little wagon of snacks. Mutual aid is doing most of the work.
The Rev. Aric Clark is a pastor, father, writer and activist living in Portland Oregon. When he isn’t protesting, he’s probably playing a board game.