The Oregonian’s Sunday cover story asserts that the downtown Portland protests since the arrival of the federal presence a few weeks ago have substantially diverged from their original Black Lives Matter focus. The paper interviews several activists and community leaders who argue that the protests have been co-opted by white protestors with varying agendas, yet ultimately provides unconvincing evidence that civil rights are no longer at the center of the protests.
Most tellingly, the paper notes that the protests had almost dwindled away until two weeks ago, when federal agents shot a Portlander in the head with a non-lethal munition. The paper writes, “Now rage over the federal government’s response to the after-hours strife in Portland is fueling the protests and threatens to overshadow the message of racial equality that spurred thousands of Oregonians to flood the streets at the start.” Yet even passing familiarity with the protests of the past two weeks shows that this is not an accurate statement of the facts. It is certainly true that the entrance of the feds into the mix has energized the protests, and that the protests now include a focus on ejecting the federal agents from Portland. But as most anyone who has attended the protests can tell you, the peaceful demonstrators — who constitute the overwhelming majority — remain overwhelmingly focused on voicing support for the BLM movement.
It’s also important to realize that opposition to the federal presence is also an act of support for the civil rights movement in which BLM plays a central role. While the president and his allies claim that the federal troops are here to put down a non-existent existential threat to the city posed by “violent anarchists” and antifa, it’s clear that the federal deployments here and elsewhere are as much intended to suppress civil rights demonstrations as to gin up a sense of impending anarchist doom. That the federal agents are acting in support of the re-election campaign of a white supremacist president is a fact I would wager is not lost on most demonstrators. To argue that opposition to the federal presence is unrelated to opposing police brutality against African Americans, and the broader agenda of true equal rights for African-Americans, is simply to embrace Donald Trump’s lies and propaganda about the purpose of the deployments.
As I read The Oregonian article, before the resurgence of the protests in the face of the federal presence, the demonstrations were increasingly dominated by more hard-core, predominantly white activists who sought physical confrontation with the Portland police and federal paramilitary. In the last few weeks, though, thousands upon thousands of peaceful demonstrators have arrived downtown to engage in pro-BLM chants and listen to pro-BLM speakers. In the face of this, to say that the federal presence has distracted from the BLM message is sheer distortion, when in fact it has helped revive the actual BLM protests. That the protests have also broadened to include opposition to a federal presence intended to suppress a civil rights movement is hardly an argument that opposing the federal agents is somehow a distraction from the civil rights focus. Oregonians are not out there protesting the federal government as a matter of general principle — they are protesting a grotesque abuse of power in support of white supremacy and authoritarianism.
There is inevitably some truth to the idea that the federal presence has distracted from the fight against local police abuses. The deployment of what amount to Republican paramilitaries serving the president and his party’s political purposes is a scandal and an attack on democracy in and of itself, and requires a response by the city and its residents. But this is the result of a president and his advisors deciding to make Portland the focus of a disinformation campaign about a nation under siege by dangerous antifa types. Like it or not, the focus of the nation and the world is on us, and a repudiation of the president’s abuse of power is now unavoidably in the mix.
And as I noted above, this abuse of power is deeply connected to the president’s white supremacist agenda, and media outlets like The Oregonian are not doing their job when they fail to relate the local issues to the national context. The story could as well have been about the federal agents re-invigorating the peaceful protests because the president has seen fit to place the power of the federal government against civil rights demonstrations; instead, The Oregonian made an editorial choice to tell a story about the federal presence somehow leading to protests increasingly unconnected to civil rights concerns, and to focus on the late-night confrontations often instigated by more extreme protestors — protests that in fact lead the police and federal agents to engage in violence against all demonstrators present, peaceful or not. This was a poor choice by The Oregonian.
For The Oregonian to essentially argue that the escalated late-night confrontations between more hard-core protestors and the feds is the entire story of the last two weeks, while dismissing the massive infusion of peaceful protestors in support of BLM and civil rights during that time — a story that has been reported by major outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post — does a disservice to the remarkable show of racial solidarity that Portland has witnessed. Shame on them for promoting a false narrative that misleads the paper’s readers, denigrates the commitment of thousands of Oregonians who have showed up to fight the good fight, and repeats unquestioningly the president’s lies that the federal paramilitaries are all about antifa and not also about suppressing civil rights protests. This is also an offense against the many Oregonian reporters who have been reporting the actual facts of the situation, at risk to life and limb due to the illegal targeting of journalists by both federal agents and local police.