Fascism in PDX
No. 5 | 2021
Jean-Michel Basquiat – Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart), 1983. Photograph: Allison Chipak/Collection of Nina Clemente, New York
Fascism as Diversion
I live in Portland. I moved here because I wanted to live among people committed to progressive values, thoughtful activism, environmental justice, and healthy communities. So, there’s that…
And. racism is rampant here. Our histories of gentrification and re-zoning are beyound. Oregon itself was built on the back of black exclusion laws and white supremacy. There are countless articles on the police department’s organized and recurring acts of unwarranted violence against Black people.
By now, you know that white and Black Portlanders have come together—in characteristic Portland style—in the spirit of (mostly) peaceful protest and free speech, to acknowledge and right these wrongs. You also know that we’re being tear-gassed, kidnapped, beaten, shot, and terrorized. By our own Federal government.
And that’s the news. Internationally. Folks are reading, watching, and hearing about Trump, Fascism, violence, and the state of our democracy. We’re hearing less about Black lives.
So, pause. Breathe. Remember.
And know that Portlanders are protesting BECAUSE Black Lives Matter. Downtown booms with emphatic and thunderous chants for Black Lives, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. Black activists, like E.D. Mondaine, the President of Portland’s NAACP, and community members like Michael Richardson, Kinsey Smyth, and Devin Boss speak on systemic racism; they tell stories about what it’s like to be a POW in your own country.
I don’t know what white folks will do. I hope we don’t lose our sense of purpose in the face of the attack on our civil rights. I hope we don’t forget about why we started protesting in the first place.
Instead of wallowing in that “need to know,” I choose uncertainty. A tough, but good choice. It leads me to Angela Davis’ and James Baldwin’s beautiful 1970-71 public correspondence. He wrote to her in jail (where she was held, as a political prisoner and illegally, for over a year). She signified the correspondence in her own public letter. They wrote with passion, intimacy, and fierce insight into the interdependence of fascism and racism.
Words
An open letter to my sister, Ms. Angela Davis. From James Baldwin
Dear Sister:
You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our ancestors, chained together in the name of Jesus, headed for a Christian land.
Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago. I was asked to speak on the case of Miss Angela Davis, and did so. Very probably an exercise in futility, but one must let no opportunity slide.
The enormous revolution in Black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
Therefore: peace.
Brother James
November 19, 1970
An Open Letter from the Marin County Jail in May 1971, by Angela Y. Davis
In resisting, we have sometimes been compelled to openly violate those laws which directly or indirectly buttress our oppression. But even when containing our resistance within the orbit of legality, we have been labeled criminals and have been methodically persecuted by a racist legal apparatus.
Official assertions that meaningful dissent is always welcome provided it falls within the boundaries of legality are frequently a smokescreen obscuring the invitation to acquiesce in oppression.
The government is not hesitating to utilize an entire network of fascist tactics. The sharp edge of political repression, cutting through the heightened militancy of the masses, and bringing growing numbers of activists behind prison walls,
One of the fundamental historical lessons to be learned from past failures to prevent the rise of fascism is the decisive and indispensable character of the fight against fascism in its incipient phases…Although the most unbridled expressions of the fascist menace are still tied to the racist domination, it lurks under the surface wherever there is potential resistance...The masses of people in this country have a real, direct and material stake in the struggle against all dimensions of racism.
No potential victim of the fascist terror should be without the knowledge that the greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity!
Marin County Jail, May, 1971
The letters are beautiful. They’re chilling, though, in their evocation of today’s Portland. See for yourself.
More soon.
So. Much. Love.
Cara
