The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Battle Over Portland

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

During the Presidential debate in September, Donald Trump was asked to denounce the white supremacists who were battling anti-racism protesters in Portland; instead, he blamed leftists for the violence and told the Proud Boys to “stand by.” The Pacific Northwest has a long history of white-supremacist violence, going back to the days of the Oregon Territory. Today, white nationalists have chosen to make liberal Portland a battleground. As clashes between anti-racism protesters and extremists intensify, one man remembers the basic injustices that brought him to the streets in the first place.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. During the first presidential debate, and possibly the last, Chris Wallace asked Donald Trump if he would denounce white supremacist violence at protests in Kenosha and Portland. I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing. So what are you saying? I'm willing to do anything. I want to see peace. sir. Say it. Do you want to call them? What do you want to call them? Give me a name.

Give me a name. White supremacists and white sermons. White supremacists and right. Proud boys, stand back and stand by, but I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what, somebody's got to do something about Antifa and the left, because this is not a right wing problem. This is a left. He did not rise to the occasion. Rather than repudiate the proud boys, the president seemed to recognize them as his own, and that shouldn't have been a surprise. Trump has ignored or downplayed right-wing extremism from the start, whether it was longtime Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, or the very fine people on both sides at Charlottesville,

or Kyle Rittenhouse, the gunman in the Kenosha shooting. Our producer Kalalia has been looking at how this encouragement of white supremacy is playing out on the ground in Portland, where right-wing violence is rising fast. He is Kalalia. Max Smith is in his late 30s. He's a father-in-lawful. four and he lives in Portland, Oregon.

I wasn't initially planning on going out to protest. He's been to dozens of protest in the past, but when the protest erupted over the killing of George Floyd, he could barely function. Causing me to wake up with headaches, it was causing me to stress, it was causing me to have depressive feelings and feelings of futility.

It interrupted my ability to get things done during the day. During the first intense week of protest in Portland, at the very beginning of June. One story finally got Mack up and moving. Police shot their own anti-biased trainer in the groin with a rubber-coated steel ball bullet bursting his testicle. Derek Sanderlin is 27 years old, African-American. He was out protesting.

And it turned out that he was actually a person that trains the police on a de-escalation, you know, works in a very white world. does all the things that they ask you to do. Well, if you have questions and you should go in help, or if you have suggestions, you should go and help. And they still shot him. And that hit me pretty hard.

And I realized that, like, you're not going to fix this system from the inside. This needs to be completely rebuilt. Lumpur Street and North Interstate Avenue must disperse to the east immediately. Lombard Street and North Interstate Avenue... So Mac went out to protest. And like many protesters, Mack wants Mayor Ted Wheeler to resign, plus he wants the police budget cut by half.

When the protests began, I mean, I was really just out wearing jeans and a T-shirt, a face mask for, you know, COVID protection. And that was pretty much it. It's a beautiful day to protest. The weather's definitely on our side. Then one night, a friend of Max was hit by a gas canister, which exploded and damaged his friend's skull. That's when I realized I needed a helmet. And then two days later after getting a helmet in the face shield, I got shot in the face.

And what does it feel like to be shot in the face? Oh, it's like getting hit with a baseball bat. Mack was hit in the forehead by what he believed to be an adeleable paintball gun, like the ones they use in the military. And it actually gave me a lump, like a daffy duck lump, like bloop, you know, it was huge. Mack moved to Portland when he was 11. His family had come from Queens, New York. And being black in Portland was really difficult. You know, I moved out initially to an area that's now called Happy Valley back then it was just called Clackamas.

And I remember kids used to ask me like if I washed more, if the black would come off or kids would say, you know, don't mind my brother. He's never seen a black person before. And so it was definitely kind of a pioneering experience for us being out here. Even today, the state of Oregon is about three percent. Black and Portland a mere 6%. It's always been a bit of a struggle being black here. It's incredibly important to recognize that Oregon as a state and the entire Northwest was founded as a racist white utopia.

Walita E. Mauritia is a local historian who teaches at Portland State University. She gives a presentation titled, Why Aren't There More Black People in Oregon? So at 1844, the entire Northwest through the Oregon Territory, passed the first black exclusion law that said that black people were not allowed to be in the Oregon territory. It criminalized their presence and their existence. One of the black exclusion laws was known as the Peter Burnett Lash Law, named after a former slave owner from Missouri. The law stated that black people would be publicly whipped up to 39 lashes every six months until they left the territory. 39 lashes.

every six months. What's really important to know is that Oregon was the only state admitted to the union with the racial exclusionary clause in its constitution. The idea was that white people could come to the northwest

and build the sort of white society they had dreamed of away from people of color. The exclusion laws were repealed in 1926, but Oregon's constitution still had language, that racially classified citizens, such as free Negroes, mulattoes, and whites. This was up until 2002. For anyone who was here in 2002 in Oregon, we remember it was a fight to get that language removed.

There was immense pushback. It went to the ballot measure. And 30% of Oregonians voted to leave the black exclusion language in our Constitution. Max Smith was in his 20s when the ballot was voted. He remembers thinking, Why was this even here? You know, and why would it have stayed for so long? But when you look at a lot of things in Oregon history,

that's just the way that things were. Now, all this may seem surprising to you because of the reputation of Portland. It's being a liberal lefty fantasy land, Portlandia and all that. And in some ways, it is that too. I reached out to my friend Dwyan. I had no idea what Oregon was about.

I don't even think I knew Portland was in Oregon. So, yeah, why in the world are you a black man? You've traveled all over the world. Please refresh my memory. Like, why are you there? Kalalia, man, it's really beautiful here in Portland. A lot of water, a lot of rain and trees. It is known for its trees, and I love trees.

You know, just having so... many options in terms of food. Did I mention Dwynd's a vegan? It was like I landed in a place that I was really looking for, you know? Yeah. Whether you are gay, whether you are black, whether you are all the other minorities, you're welcome here and everybody's into recycling. I've seen white mothers and daughters on the street corner by themselves. This is not in a big protest rally. both are wearing black lives matter t-shirts and waving a black lives matter flag. I was like, is this genuine or is this a hoax? I mean, what a way to waste your time?

In a predominantly white, you know, I don't know. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. Yeah. As Portland became the socially liberal, like more cosmopolitan city, The same did not happen in the suburbs. The city is a blue island and a pretty red state, and that's caused tensions to rise, particularly with the police. In the first two weeks of June,

Mack was working during the day and protesting well into the night. At the same time, Portland City Council was gearing up to vote on its new budget, which included millions of dollars of cuts to the police budget. Yeah, how were you feeling during the week of the city council vote? There was definitely a lot of, just a lot of anxiety. Call them the 2 p.m. City Council meeting to order. Today we will begin taking the final series of states. Hundreds of residents made public comments.

Can you hear me? Yes again. The city of Portland has done everything possible throughout its history to violently exclude, remove, and destroy black people. Split that $246 million budget in half. The city should set measurable multi-year goals. require the footage to be collected properly, we can essentially stop the police from alleging malice.

I've seen far more violence from the Portland police in the last two weeks than I have in six months in a combat zone. On June 17th, the city council voted. The outcome, they cut the budget by $15 million. It's not what we asked for, but the winds have changed. This will eliminate more than 80 positions. So we got something. If you watch videos of the protest,

You can see some of the officers shoving protesters like really hard or spraying them with tear gas, even some at close range. It's really tough to watch. The police became more and more aggressive in their response. Joanne Hardesty is a commissioner on Portland City Council. One of her priorities is advocating for police reform. And honestly, I think the reason the police became more aggressive was because people were demanding we cut the police budget.

And so I think their response was less about whether they felt under attack and more about their anger that people weren't just saying the police are the best thing that ever happened to our community. What that's done now is that's exposed that the police are just fighting us over their money. Most of our police don't live in Portland. So most of this money is not even coming back into our communities, it's going into their other communities. By the end of July, protests were actually winding down

until President Trump decided to send federal agents to Portland. He was enraged by protesters fighting police and vandalizing government buildings. The protest intensified. Moms, dads, vets, yogis, teachers, students, healthcare workers all joined Portland's grassroots activists in support of Black Lives Matter. Every day was different. Sometimes there was tear gas being shot.

over and behind you to trap you in and then to your gas shot in front of you so you had to kind of you know find a way through the smokes some days they're just coming through the smoke and beating you up it's literally just it's an adrenaline pump there's no way to calm down and relax most of the federal agents left by early august and then a couple of weeks later just as the protest began to die down again, white nationalists and far-right groups from all over the Pacific Northwest descend on Portland. And some of them, like the police, were also armed. We call them the weekend shift. They come like every weekend and try and just, you know, a ride through town. They do like car rallies. And it's messed up because if we don't show up to

counter-protest them, they'll just like attack a homeless people and like a trans kids in the street. A friend of mine was like, you know, he was worried about me. And so he got me a Kevlar vest. Actually, I have two bulletproof vests. It's just like we're just tanking up. During the last weekend in August, dozens of cars and trucks full of white nationalists and Trump supporters drove it to Portland for a pro-Trump rally.

Mack was there. So won a fire shots into the crowd. I had my vest. I wasn't aimed at or shot at, but, you know, it made me, I feel like I'd made the right choice. It's legal in Portland to openly carry a weapon if the weapon is not loaded. But I'm not sure that anyone is checking for bullets. Mack and other protesters have mentioned that when the white nationalists show up, the police often disappear or retreat from any conflict, that they seem to be cooperating.

Now the police borough denies that there's been any cooperation with the right-wing protesters or any favoritism shown to them. But Commissioner Hardesty has also heard from community members that this is happening. Most recently, white nationalists showed up in force, and the police were nowhere to be seen. And the moment they left, the police came out and declared a riot in an unlawful gathering and started tear gassing people once again. That same weekend, there was a fatal shooting. And using the most basic identifiers,

a person on the left, a self-identifying anti-fascist, was suspected of killing a right-wing counter-protester. This is probably the first killing ever committed by someone in Antifa, whereas more than 300 people have died in right-wing attacks in the last 25 years. So why is it that the city of Portland doesn't do something to prevent the white nationalist from entering the city limits? Like, you know, shutting down bridges or blocking roads? I think that there's a fear about saying that one type of protester is okay as compared to another type of protester.

That's Joanne Hardesty, a city commissioner in Portland. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. So there may be other reasons why the police seem to be more sympathetic to the white nationalist. I spoke to two experts. My name is Eric Ward, and I am executive director of Western State Center. Ward is an expert on white nationalism in the Pacific Northwest. White nationalists have been targeting law enforcement.

Why do we know this? Because the Department of Justice itself released a memo that it sent to law. enforcement agencies around the country, warning them that white nationalist indeed had infiltrated law enforcement and were attempting to use law enforcement to further divide Americans in order to create their pseudo-race war. And I heard the same from my German. In the early 1990s, German was in the FBI and he went undercover as a neo-Nazi. One of the warnings I was given by my superiors at the FBI was that I would have to be very careful in protecting my identity because it was known that there were people in law enforcement who had sympathies

for these white supremacist groups. When it comes to Portland, it's hard to know how many far-right sympathizers are on the police force. But there have been connections between officers and Patriot Prayer, a far-right group based in Washington State. They're not necessarily white supremacists. supremacist, but they do engage protesters in violent confrontations. During one protests, an officer texted the group's leader, tactical information about protesters. And two years ago, at a different protest, police found Patriot Prayer members on a rooftop with loaded guns. The police seized the guns, but let the members go without reporting anything. We're talking about a very small number of officers

within law enforcement. But what we have seen is that often the law enforcement agencies know about this involvement sometimes for years, but don't take any action. And that's really the problem, is that it's allowed to persist. There's a particular history to this in the Northwest. Eric Ward tells me that in the 1980s, white supremacist groups were encouraged to relocate to the Pacific Northwest to form a supposedly airy, ethno state. This neo-Nazi idea was called the Northwest imperative. The desire for a white

utopia that was formed in the Oregon Territory never went away. It's essentially being rebranded. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we often refer to it as the invisible war. It no longer sought to take us back to the days of Gone with the Wind, if I could be so crass, that it really sought the overthrow of the U.S. government. Ward's talking about the 80s, but anti-government extremists are still very active. Their belief is that the government is scheming to take away the rights of U.S. citizens,

and it must be resisted. It's boogaloo time. If we all stood together just one day, we could take this country back. Often sporting Hawaiian shirts and military-style weapons, the boogaloon movement is a, strange mix of far right and left, working to instigate a revolution against what they see as a corrupt and dangerous government. Not all far-right groups are looking to overthrow the government

or gunning for a race war. Some simply believe in a kind of might-makes-right mentality, where white men stay fully in control. White nationalists have targeted Portland because they see it as a progressive bastion, right, in their white nationalist homeland. They are trying to provoke a response where they feel they are then legally able to retaliate. The goal is to create violence. Mike German, the former FBI agent, says that the government hasn't made much of an effort to combat white supremacist violence or even to understand the problem. Right now, only about 12.5% of law enforcement agencies report that hate crimes occur within their jurisdictions. Even today, the FBI can't tell you how many people white supremacists killed last year.

They can tell you how many bank robberies happen. They can tell you where they happened, how much money was lost, whether a gun was used or not used, because they collect that data. But they don't collect data on white supremacist violence. And even when there is data, some in government, want to keep it from the public. ...from a whistleblower at the Department of Homeland Security who says he was demoted for refusing to change intelligence reports.

Now, in what he calls an abuse of power, the official claims he was ordered to suppress information that the president would not like. Now, that includes details about Russian election interference and the threat posed by white supremacists. A month ago, Brian Murphy, a conservative Republican and the former chief of intelligence division at the Department of Homeland Security. revealed that his superiors had instructed him to downplay national security threats of white supremacy. And Murphy's not alone.

He's actually the third high-ranking official to make those charges at the agency. The Department of Homeland Security denies Murphy's allegations. So while hate crimes by white nationalists are rising, there has been an effort to cover it up at the highest levels of government. We have to finally acknowledge this is, something that needs to change, and it's only going to change if we force it to. And that's why I give so much credit to the people that are out in the street demanding action, often in the face of violent police response.

Because of the wildfires, Mack Smith took a short break from protesting. But at the end of September, he was back on the streets. The notion of a race war, extremists with guns and hopes to divide and kill, is absolutely terrifying. But that isn't the thing that motivates Mack. I don't know that the race war is going to pop off in Portland, Oregon. So I think it's kind of a test. There aren't actually that many black people in Portland, right?

I've been dealing with skinheads and stuff since I was a kid. Honestly, that's not the fight that I'm here for. For Mack, the bigger issue is the white supremacy that remains when the violent extremists go home. I'm not here to fight the all right. I'm not here to fight the Fed, so we're just here to find the police. And so, you know, it's really important for me

to cut through all of that and get right back to the point. It's not something that's just like, oh, yeah, they painted a street and said BLM. You know, it's not, you know, Nancy Pelosi wearing a kente cloth in the capital or something. You know, that stuff doesn't help us,

you know, giving us a TV show where, you know, the black woman becomes God in the end. That's great. You know, it's a TV show, though. We need something real. We need a real change we can feel, like, that we can be like, yeah, we did this. We just took a whole summer of our lives and dedicated it to a cause, and they gave us an actual change. They decided to stop acting like we were terrorists and give us what it is we're asking for.

Max Smith in Portland, Oregon. The protests are in their fifth month. Kalalia is a producer for the New Yorker Radio. Hour. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Our is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of two nerds, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avey Carrillo, Riannon-Corbi, Callalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putuguello, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from

Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. We had assistance this week from Emery Moore in Portland. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.