Whiteness and Trump’s Attack on Portland, Oregon
By: Kyle D. Serrott
Tags: BlackLivesMatter, Trump, Portland, Whiteness

Image from New York Post

When the moment of the dual contagions of the Coronavirus and anti-Black state violence that we are all currently living through one day make it into history books, part of that history will include when the American President attacked the city of Portland and its residents in the summer of 2020. Demarcating protesters in the “liberal city” of Portland as domestic terrorist, Donald Trump sent secret police to wreak havoc on its citizens and act violently towards people demonstrating democracy. Secret police are not secret in the sense that no one is aware of their existence. Rather, secret police are secret in the sense that they are accountable to no one. Trump’s agents can be factually categorized as secret police because they have been whisking protesters away in unmarked vehicles and detaining them for hours on end, failing to create arrest records documenting their actions, and disregarding basic legal standards of probable cause for detention. Further, it is not at all clear which federal agency these agents are working for. The agents appear to be a plethora from Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the U.S Marshall Service, Transportation and Security Administration (TSA), the Coast Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The federal police agents are said to be following hushed, sketchy orders from acting government officials, such as Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, who have not been confirmed by Congress. Congressional conformation of high level government officials is one of the strongest checks on executive government that our system of federalism provides.

While other American Presidents have sent federal police agencies into cities for much nobler causes relating to democracy, such as integrating public schools, this President will be noted as sending federal police forces to cities governed by his political opponents as a means of firing up his racist political base in the midst of the 2020 Election, an election that Trump is as of now poised to lose. Trump has declared that he is “solving” an emergency of violence in “liberal cities” that was in fact an emergency of his very own creation. It is a classic case of shock politics; create an “emergency” and then usher in anti-democratic policies under the guise of emergency action. Finally, not only are the President’s actions in Portland and other “liberal cities” anti-democratic, they severely breech state sovereignty, states’ rights and principles of federalism that republicans have been unsurprisingly quiet about.

However, it cannot go without noting that other presidents have used federal police agents and the military for nefarious purposes. FDR used federal police agencies to round up Japanese Americans during WWII and hold them in concentration camps, a racist reaction to the mythological dis-loyalty of that group. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Executive Branch’s operation of these concentration camps in United States v. Korematsu (1944), a stark hypocrisy to the notion that WWII was in part fought to liberate concentration camps in Axis held Europe. President Obama used federal agencies to deport tens of thousands of people to unsafe conditions in their home country. Andrew Jackson used the military (largely because his time in office was before the executive presidency created the administrative state we currently have) to genocidally displace Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw and other indigenous peoples in the 1830's and 1840's. The FBI has been used to terrorize Black communities since its creation during Jim Crow. The Department of Homeland security was created after 9/11 and is used to largely surveil Muslim Americans, in many cases illegally detaining them under racist pretexts of “national security.” The entire institution of the Bureau of Indian Affairs has been used to visit violence onto Native Americans, and as recently as the 1960's had the express policy of “terminating” tribal culture, sovereignty and language. If you are concerned about what federal police agencies and the military are doing in Portland, I cannot wait to tell you about what happens at Guantánamo Bay.

The point I wish to make is that federal agencies of the US government have always been used to terrorize people. But as a collective we tend to be silent or fail to recognize the violence that these agencies visit on people that are not white. It appears that much of the widespread outcry and denouncing of the federal agencies in Portland over the last two weeks have been centered in whiteness. Far fewer white liberals denounce or become outraged when federal agencies such as ICE and CBP are used to terrorize nonwhite people living in this country by deporting them and displacing families. State attorneys’ generals and the ACLU are not so quick to file emergency injunctions when the bodies on the other end of state violence are primarily black or brown ones. In fact, the ACLU filed an emergency injunction on behalf of white supremacists to secure a permit to hold a Neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017. The same Neo-Nazi rally that resulted in the murder of community activist Heather Heyer at the hand of an unashamed white supremacist. The same rally that President Trump declared the white supremacists to be “very fine people.” Portland (and Oregon, really) has its own troubling legacy of white supremacy and the current situation demonstrates the deep roots of white supremacy in Portland and other cities typically deemed “liberal” or “progressive.”

Heather Heyer

Unite The Right Rally For White Nationalism, Charlottesville, Virginia. August 2017. Photo from BBC News.

The national reaction to what has been going on in Portland has largely been centered around white people from the suburbs that have been the victims of the secret police violence. The Portland Moms, as they have come to be known, are projected by the media as innocent victims of state violence who have been peacefully singing lullabies near the federal courthouse that has become the epicenter of violence in the city. Similarly, the Portland Dads have received widespread accolades for their use of leaf blowers to force tear gas back onto the federal agents. The perceived whiteness of the nude “yoga woman” (who is actually not a white woman at all) has been used to exemplify the quirky, white “keep Portland weird” culture that, for all its weirdness, surely does not warrant state violence. The named defendant in one of the emergency injunctions for a restraining order against the federal agents is a white man. The media outrage about a white navy veteran who was beaten with clubs and suffered broken bones from the secret police was particularly strong. The white people who have hijacked leadership of the now sixty days of protest in Portland are actively blocking the participation of Black women who have been organizing in the city for far longer than the fifteen seconds of fame that the white people have been afforded.

“Naked Athena” photo from The New York Times.

“Portland Moms” photo from Forbes.

“Portland Dad” photo from Huffington Post

While we are at a revolutionary moment of national reckoning in our country, the old, tired tropes of white innocence that white supremacy keeps alive are roaring their ugly heads. So, yes, let us be outraged by Trump’s use of secret police to attack an American city. But let us also keep that outrage and public reaction when it inevitably happens to Black and Brown people as well. Because for as cliché as it may be to say that history repeats itself, it has been especially true when it comes to state violence of marginalized people in this country.