By David Rovics
David Rovics Blog
December 10th, 2020
Portland, Oregon has been in the headlines
again over the last few days, and this trend will continue. The reasons
for the headlines will vary depending on who you ask. If you ask the
far right they will say something about Antifa terrorists having violent
confrontations with the police because they hate law and order. The
mainstream media’s headlines will also tend to lead with the so-called
violent clashes, but then they may inform us that the reasons for the
confrontation have to do with folks trying to prevent the eviction of a
Black and indigenous family that has lived in the Red House at 4406
North Mississippi for multiple generations.Either way, the
stories you’ll hear will focus on violence. If you look into it a
little, you’ll realize that what the stories are really focusing on are
destruction of property — particularly the windows of police cars
smashed by well-aimed rocks — and the number of times over the past few
months of the eviction defense encampment on the front yard of the Red
House that the police have been called because of “disturbances.” 81
times, according to police records, the police emphasize in the report
they issued after they entered the house and arrested occupants in a
pre-dawn raid on December 8th.
I can only
imagine what some of those disturbances might have been caused by. The
house is just at the end of the commercial section of Mississippi
Avenue, where what remains of one of Portland’s two historically Black
neighborhoods stands, with its uncomfortable mix of wine-sipping
gentrifiers living alongside a perennially struggling and shrinking
Black working class, along with increasing numbers of people living in
tents that line the highway which cuts through the neighborhood — the
highway that was originally routed through that neighborhood in order to
destroy it, as was done to so many other Black neighborhoods across the
US when the highways were being built.
Last
time I visited the Red House a few weeks ago, I was only hanging around
for a matter of minutes before a man I recognized as a fascist drove
slowly past, staring at us from behind his bushy beard, a bizarre new
fashion among the fash here in the northwest lately, and in other parts
of the world as well. Indeed, if you follow people on Twitter who are
involved with the struggle at the Red House, you will see frequent
mentionings of the latest spotting of a known fascist, whether Proud Boy
or Patriot Prayer, along with the latest prediction of when the riot
cops will next come to create chaos.
While the
broken squad car windows, the conflicted neighborhood, the poverty, the
homelessness, and the frequently-visiting fascist trolls are all very
real, there is so much more going on at the Red House at this moment
than these alarming reports would seem to imply. Primarily, what’s
going on there is pure beauty, in the form of the most profound
expression of human solidarity you’re likely to see anywhere.
Reading
the descriptions from the police and in certain corners of the media,
one would expect an unwelcome reception, if you were to visit the
neighborhood they’re describing. In fact, as of last night, the police
were officially warning people to avoid the neighborhood altogether,
implying that it was, in fact, an anarchist jurisdiction, and therefore a
terrifying thing. Mayor-select Tear Gas Ted Wheeler says Portland
shall not have an “autonomous zone” like Seattle did for a while.
Mayor
Ted really can’t stand it when the rightwingers in Washington, DC and
the corporate landlords who own downtown call him a wimp for not
cracking enough heads, even though his cops have been cracking more
heads over the past few months than possibly any other police force in
the United States. So his instinct, naturally, is to crack some more
heads, in the service of his friends, the corporate overlords, the
business lobby, the Owners of the City. (The real “stakeholders,” as
the governor likes to call them — not the ones who hold the stakes that
they drive into the ground to keep their tents from blowing away.)
I’m
reminded, as I hear of these official pronouncements and
fear-mongering, of my visit to the biggest city in the West Bank,
Nablus, years ago. An Israeli soldier took me aside, separating me from
my Palestinian friends, to privately make sure I was traveling of my
own free will, and had not been kidnapped. Once determining that I was
not a captive, the soldier’s next tack was to try to reason with me.
There are very dangerous people in there, he informed me. They have
bombs, he said. I politely thanked him for the information, not wanting
to create problems for anyone, in our collective efforts to cross this
checkpoint. But I wanted to ask him if he had ever tried leaving the
machine gun at home and traveling in civilian clothes. His reception in
Palestinian towns would be very different.
As I
entered what has arguably now become a sort of gated community in
reverse, I was welcomed everywhere I went, whether with words of
greeting or just the sorts of eye contact that says more than enough.
Not to extend the previous analogy with Palestine too much here, but the
feeling is a bit similar, in the sense that when you’re an American in
Nablus, people there tend to assume you probably are the kind of
American who does not support Israeli atrocities against Palestinians.
Going anywhere near the Red House as of yesterday, you are suddenly
transformed from a “visitor” to a “participant” as soon as you pass
through the makeshift gates, into the liberated space that is now the
neighborhood surrounding 4406 North Mississippi Avenue in Portland,
Oregon. Because you know once you pass these checkpoints and enter the
anarchist jurisdiction, you are now as much of a potential target for a
police attack as anyone else who is willfully disregarding orders to
avoid the neighborhood.
From
the time people began to maintain a constant presence in front of the
house as part of an effort to prevent the forced eviction of the Kinney
family within it, until a few days ago, it was the house and its yard
that was being protected. Then, at 5 am on December 8th — the favorite
time of day for these sorts of police attacks — the riot cops moved
in, arresting a number of people, including a member of the Kinney
family. Much was made in the police report about multiple firearms
being seized in the course of these arrests, of course with no context
provided — that armed fascists are regularly coming by to threaten
people, and that the police make sure never to be present when that
happens. For example. Or that the ownership of firearms is very
commonplace in this country, especially lately, across the political
spectrum, and is about as surprising as finding a baseball bat or a
guitar.
The raid on the Red House on the
morning of December 8th will, I believe, go down as an historic
miscalculation on the part of Ted Wheeler’s corporate-friendly
Democratic Party administration — with its recently-approved, massive
police budget — that runs this city in the service of the
landlord-stakeholders. What they have done with this raid is they have
massively escalated the conflict, and I sincerely hope, and suspect,
that they will soon regret this move. What they have done now, I
believe, is they have taken two movements that were already intimately
related, and fused them. If it was not already completely obvious, now
it’s impossible not to see it, the police have made sure of this — if
you are in favor of Black lives, you are also against evicting families
onto the streets. And the converse is true as well.
Since
the police raid, what was limited to one house is now a
neighborhood-wide conflict. The neighborhood is already very
gentrified, and the displeasure among some of the yuppies around
Mississippi Avenue that black-clad youth had set up checkpoints on
multiple intersections was occasionally being made clear, but only
through the aggressive use of car horns, never by people actually
getting out of their cars to engage with anyone on a human level,
whether out of fear or embarrassment on the part of the horn-happy wine
bar set.
After the raid, the police employed a
fencing company to erect a tall fence to surround the Red House with.
They apparently were operating under the premise that a tall fence would
take care of the problem. In actuality, the fence they erected turned
out to be very useful, but not for the reasons the authorities
apparently believed it would be. What transpired in the hours after
they erected the fence, as is easy to observe directly, is the fence was
dismantled and reengaged, deployed as part of some suddenly very solid
barricade constructions at every intersection surrounding the Red
House. The barricades were set up in such a way that people who lived
in other houses in the neighborhood could still access their houses, and
mostly also their parking spaces, but they now had to take a much more
circuitous route to get onto a main road. Each barricade has a little
entryway that a human — but not a vehicle — can pass through, once the
nice, thoroughly masked young person in black who greets you ascertains
that you’re probably not a cop or a fascist.
During
my time hanging around the neighborhood there last night, many people
were engaged in many forms of industrious activity. If you haven’t
spent much time among autonomously-organized youth — whether current
youth or the same crowd that existed when I was young, in the 1980’s in
New York City — you might not realize that when you enter such patches
of liberated territory, whether it’s a mostly outdoor phenomenon like
this, or a building takeover, you are entering a hive of activity,
reminiscent of a beehive, with everyone engaged in doing their thing,
whether they are responsible for cooking, collecting trash, building
barricades, constructing tire spikes, collecting wood for the campfires,
collecting rocks, or whatever other useful endeavors. Last night was
full of that beehive vibe, with most people fulfilling one role or
another, whether self-appointed, or appointed through an affinity group
or larger network involved with specific aspects of organizing the
things that need to happen when large numbers of people are being
somewhere for a while. Folks need to eat, sleep, and shit, while also
seeking to defend the Red House.
While many
people were engaged in meetings or carrying out various tasks, the
scouts looking for the next inevitable visit from the riot cops, and
others involved with guarding the perimeter always have time to talk.
Now, nothing that I’m about to say should come as a surprise to anyone
who has spent much time on the ground at protests in Portland over the
past eight months or so, but the crowd last night consisted of a very
interracial, multigendered and otherwise very intersectional group of
mostly young people. Mostly wearing black — which, incidentally, is
not just a political statement, if it even is one, but is a matter of
practicality for a variety of reasons.
Are
there, as I’m sure some readers will be quick to point out, armed
sentries? Yes, there are armed sentries. Very nice, armed sentries.
The kind we need more of, unfortunately.
And
what are people talking about in there among the campfires? I pass by
one meeting, noting that most of the participants are people of color. I
recognize the man who is speaking to the group of a dozen or so
people. He spoke at the last rally I sang at, in fact. As I walk past
the discussion, he’s talking about how to be inclusive of people who
want to be involved, while still finding effective ways to exclude truly
disruptive elements. I then came upon another couple of folks, who
greeted me for the sole reason that I had stopped walking momentarily
while in their general area, and we then spontaneously began having a
conversation about the history of eviction defense actions across the US
in the 1930’s, during the Great Depression.
Back
in the 1930’s, all of us radical history buffs hanging around the Red
House collectively noted, when the cops came to evict people, they often
succeeded, but only temporarily. After evicting a household, the
people would gather together — often in their thousands — to move the
family back in, and un-evict them. That, we all noted, was exactly what
was going on at 4406 North Mississippi Avenue.
I
believe this struggle, around this particular house, will be won. I
believe it will also set the stage for the much broader struggle to
come, in the months after Oregon’s eviction moratorium expires. But the
future is very much unwritten, and there are many more players involved
with this deadly game, aside from the barricade-building youth,
unfortunately.
So don’t just scroll on to the next article. Put your phone down, and come meet me at the Red House.
David Rovics is a songwriter, podcaster, and part of Portland Emergency Eviction Response. Go to artistsforrentcontrol.org to sign up to receive text notifications, so you can be part of this effort. Another Portland is possible.
David Rovics has been called the musical voice of the progressive movement in the US. Since the mid-90’s, Rovics has spent most of his time on the road, playing hundreds of shows every year throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Japan. He has shared the stage regularly with leading intellectuals, activists, politicians, musicians and celebrities. In recent years he’s added children’s music and essay-writing to his repertoire. More importantly, he’s really good. He will make you laugh, he will make you cry, and he will make the revolution irresistible. Check out his pamphlet: Sing for Your Supper: A DIY Guide to Playing Music, Writing Songs, and Booking Your Own Gigs
