Do Justice, Make Peace: Portland BLM Protests 4 Years On

On the 4th anniversary of the first day of my protest coverage, I’ve initiated a look back and my experiences in Portland with the BLM protests in July and August 2020. The coverage will be on my Substack (always free, though donations accepted!) but I’ll try to post reminders and excerpts here. From the first post:

Despite being a homebody, I did have a long history of participating in progressive protest. I had thought to support the protests from home, as best I could, and avoid the consequences of exacerbating my anxiety. But when the first stories came out in mid-July 2020 of police snatching individuals off the street without the niceties like Miranda warnings that are normally mandatory for a lawful arrest, I knew I had to act. Supporting from home no longer felt sufficient. It no longer even felt ethical for me.

Post contains pictures! Come look!

 

 

Eliminationism Starts With Language

25 years ago at the annual meeting of Portland’s Lesbian Community Project, there was a motion on the floor to adopt a statement recognizing trans people as partners in liberation and trans women who joined LCP as full members with rights indistinguishable from other members.

During the discussion from the floor the people who objected to the proposal also rejected all the language necessary to talk about the proposal. They insisted that they were not cis, not “not trans”, and not “non-trans”. There was no language acceptable to them which would even allow the debate to be had. Woman, lesbian, and normal were all terms to be used exclusively for them and those these opponents personally validated.

Cis objections to the word “cis” as well as phrases like “non-trans” are 100% about who controls “normal”, but the effort to control “normal” is not an end of it’s own. Controlling language or normality and other words and phrases central to discussing the social realities of sex and gender are also about whether or not we are even allowed to have conversations. If opponents of gender liberation sufficiently control the language, then certain ideas cannot be effectively communicated, and meaningful understandings of trans lives cannot even be articulated. Without those understandings, that information about who trans people are, what the trans experience is, and even what is meant by the word trans, there can be no such thing as trans advocacy.

And that is the world they wish to occupy: a world in which they are not merely centred as “normal”, but a world in which no one can say transness exists, and no argument could ever be articulated in favour of trans humanity. Imagine a world in which sex and gender discrimination is banned, but so is deviation from sex and gender norms. It sounds weirdly dystopian, but it’s exactly the world we’ve occupied for much of my life.

For the cis supremacists, rebutting the arguments that trans people are people and that trans rights are human rights is tiring, and places them on the defensive. It even, occasionally, causes them to appear gauche.Their response to the debilitating possibility that they might feel awkward is, obviously, that language must be constructed such that those arguments cannot exist in the first place. Likewise books that make such arguments must be banned. They aren’t resistant to a particular position on the best way to construct a just world. Like the racists with whom John Venn would be happy to show their extensive overlap, they object to any effort to create a just world.

Their answer (book banning, language control) is also, not incidentally, the answer arrived at by IngSoc, who did not defend their positions so much as obviate defense by eliminating critique: first by linguistic control, later by thought control, and in the last resort, by death.

While some people have resisted labeling the massive, coordinated attack on trans people as genocide because individual trans persons aren’t being killed in sufficient numbers, this belies the definition of genocide itself. Genocide is not about killing individuals, though that can be one tactic of those committing this greatest of crimes. Rather genocide is the effort to destroy a people as a people.

Imagine an invasion of Belgium that was followed by a ban on referring to Belgium as a separate country from its invader, let’s say Ireland because we know how evil those Irish are. Now imagine this invasion is followed by rewriting textbooks to declare great artists and writers of Belgium’s past to be Irish and teaching only English and Irish languages in schools. Imagine Ireland holding birthday celebrations the “Irish” artists they have claimed. Imagine Leopold the II portrayed as a corrupt rebel, with Belgians who reject the usurper and embrace Irish identity absolved of any need to make reparations to the large number of people who have been harmed by Belgian slavery and exploitation in the Congo region. Imagine an ongoing campaign to abolish the very idea that there is or ever was a legitimate “Belgium”. Those who, in the past, used the word to describe Ireland’s continental territory are acknowledged, but only in the sense that the newly Irish population admits that criminals in the past attempted — and failed — to create a Belgium out of evil and dreams.

There is no doubt that this would be recognized as. a campaign of genocide. The intent is not to kill individuals, true, but it is still an intent to end the Belgian people as a distinct people.

Fortunately, these depraved Irish instincts are being restrained, for now, by what I must presume are truly heroic Irish activists. The same cannot be said for the cissexist campaign to colonize gender. They wish to own all the perspectives, to control which ones are acceptable, which ones normal, which ones even speakable. They do not wish to have a discussion about the true nature of Irishness gender or historical definitions of Ireland woman or Irish feminine. They wish to eliminate such discussions entirely.

But the eliminationist response to threats to default status, the eliminationist response to questioning what is normal, is not separate from the public calls to end transness in public life. It may be that the book GenderQueer raises a challenge to hegemonic notions of gender. But when the books are gone, when the word is forbidden, how we choose to act or dress, the names on our drivers’ licenses, the brash insistence that we own our own bodies will wordlessly raise these same questions. Only then the cis supremacists will only be more frustrated: with the language of transness banned, how will they even articulate our crimes?

Ultimately the logic of language control, the imperative to colonize and control “normal” extends to the control of bodies, as we have seen with bans on health care. And what is to be done with a body that cannot be made to comply?

There is no reason to believe that those working to control language and to deny trans people the right to articulate a liberatory advocacy will be able to stop its eliminationist core from eliminating people once its disciples’ attacks on language and thought and argument prove less than 100% effective.

But even should organized, large-scale, train-car loading attacks on trans people never arrive, this is still an attempt to control more than language. It is an attempt to render invisible and inconsequential, to render irrelevant and unnoticeable, the trans individuals near them. But as both they and we are everywhere, it is also an attempt to render invisible, inconsequential, irrelevant and even non-existent trans communities as trans communities. It is an attempt to eliminate not trans persons per se, but to eliminate the trans people as a people.

Of course this is an attempted genocide. The world may choose not to recognize it for its lack of machetes or smallpox-infested blankets or poison gas or forced marches.

But just as trans rights are human rights, and trans individuals have the right to freely associate together for our common education friendship and support, the fight of cissexists to end trans people as a people is an attempted trans genocide.

We refuse to call it such at great peril.

 

Bias does not exist, bring on the sportsball!

So you’re presumably familiar with Sha’Carri Richardson who will miss the Olympics. What I did not know is that the test she “failed” is notoriously inaccurate. We can say what we want about banning marijuana and not gewurztraminer (and I’ve said plenty this week), but this thing looks a whole lot worse when we find out the test isn’t even accurate:

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Critical Race Theory Link Round-up & Summer Reading List

This ain’t Pendleton or Calgary, but a round-up you shall have anyway. This here is for all those folks who are wondering what important writing on FtB they might have missed related to CRT… plus a few links to other places like The Root & Wonkette, because I love me some The Root & Wonkette. Hell, when we’re done, you’ll have a whole summer reading list just of CRT related things. Fun!

Let’s start with TheRoot, since there are two pieces there that I consider essential reading.

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Critical Race Theory: Questions, Answers, Feelings, and more Questions

A few weeks ago Marcus Ranum asked me via a secret backchannel communication conduit (read: email) if I wanted to tag team some CRT education here on FtB. I said sure, but then quickly hit writers’ block. (And also didn’t keep up with the email. Sorry, Marcus! It’s all me, you did nothing wrong!). The biggest reason I’ll get to at the end, but it hugely contributed to the block. My second biggest problem, though, would have been enough on its own even without the biggest: There’s so much to write about! And although I might possibly be the only blogger on this network who has actually studied this stuff in the law school classrooms where it was meant to be taught, that doesn’t mean I’m an expert. Far from it.

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Dee Farmer, this Juneteenth, every Juneteenth, until we learn its lessons

Last summer during the BLM protests a lot of folk wrote in to say that they not only appreciated my work, but some of those were worried that they wouldn’t be able to head into the gas the way I had. It’s not an irrational question. Portland has well over a million people in the metro area and BLM was getting only a thousand people on monday nights, and not always much over 5000 on weekend nights. As far as I know, the crowds never hit 15k at any time when I was there. We’re talking about numbers between one third of a percent and one percent of the metro population coming downtown, with another tenth of one percent showing up for simultaneous actions at Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct (there were also some protests out at East Precinct, but they weren’t every night and probably no larger than the ones at North). More than 99% of people weren’t coming out on a nightly basis, and it’s likely that more than 95% of people never showed up for even a single night. So, yes, some people sympathetic to BLM weren’t showing up for BLM.

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From Minneapolis to Salem, from 2021 to 1992: An unsettled, unsettling journey

Now THIS is an unpleasant shock. From the Minneapolis StarTribune:

The FBI arrested three more men Friday in connection with the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, two in Minnesota and one in Iowa.

Brian Christopher Mock of Minneapolis was charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers; entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds without authority; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted place; obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, and acts of physical violence on Capitol grounds.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m more or less from Oregon. Certainly I’m more from Oregon than I could be said to be from anyplace else, even Los Angeles, where I was born. I moved away from LA when I was 10 months old (ask me about my experience driving the U Haul, it was hellish without power steering) and landed in Oregon when I was 4. From then on, I grew up in a relentlessly white section of that relentlessly white state about 20 miles from Portland. Not much farther from Portland is the state capital, Salem. I’ve been there many times, both because I’ve had friends live in the area and because of activism I’ve done. This article brings up something that happened in Salem 38 years and 8 months ago that everyone should learn or remember.

In 1992, the Oregon Citizens’ Alliance, a theocratic group originally known for misogynistic attacks on women’s reproductive rights (most obviously in an anti abortion ballot measure which was their first success in placing new state laws before voters) had become better known for hating queers.

For that year’s election they had drafted a ballot measure and collected sufficient signatures to put it on the ballot so that if passed it would be illegal for the state to spend money in any way and on any person’s salary if doing so would contribute to portraying queerness as anything other than “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse”. Conflict was ramping up like crazy around the state. Many people who hadn’t been out, came out that year. Others who had been out retreated to the closet.

This was a defining year for me as I, too, came out of the closet in 1992, and immediately began engaging in activism to fight the OCA. Anxiety was high for queers, but it was also high for the bigots. While in Colorado Amendment 1 was written to have a similar legal effect, it was written in dry prose, without the phrase “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse”. In Colorado the fight was mostly about whether or not the state should “support” queers. (which I guess just means should allow queers to use state services without discrimination?) Amendment 1 passed. In Oregon the hostile language became a reason for moderates to oppose the OCA and their Measure 9. With so much attention focussed on not the legislative effect but the apparent ill will communicated by the OCA’s language, a huge number of people were feeling reflected hostility. While in the past their bigotry would go unchallenged as simply “normal”, now anti queer hatred was (modestly) condemned.

The turn of events shocked the bigots, what with how other people were questioning the morals of the bigots as much as (sometimes more than!) people were questioning the morals of people who liked boobies or occasionally gave a blowjob to someone they loved. Anxiety and anger among the bigots rose as well.

Over the course of that summer, 39 years ago, some young skinheads (ages 19 to 22) living in Salem were engaging in a long running campaign of harassment against two queer roommates a couple doors away. The roommates were one black lesbian in her twenties with a Jewish surname and one white gay man in his early 40s. Perhaps because it was a single theme that allowed them to condemn both roommates at once, their friends made it clear that insults targeting sexual orientation were at the heart of this campaign of harassment. But racism and antisemitism were present too, as you could expect from a group of racist skinhead asshats.

One day in late September, well into the campaign season, there was a physical confrontation between houseguests of the two queers and the racists, heterosexist jackholes. We’re not sure of the details of the confrontation, but the houseguests felt that they were sticking up for their hosts when they heard the skinheads being racist, as racists will do, and the racists felt that the houseguests had invaded their apartment and attacked them (and, hell, maybe they did).

In any case, after a confrontation over racism in the context of this ongoing campaign of heterosexist harassment, the racist, heterosexist bigots decided that the right way to reclaim their power was to fill bottles with gasoline, stuff the ends with rags, light them on fire, and throw these Molotov cocktails into the apartment of the hosts & houseguests.

Because of the layout of the apartment, the houseguests made it out. The hosts burned to death.

The hosts’ names were Hattie Mae Cohen & Brian Mock. They were clear victims of a campaign of racist, heterosexist terror for months and became martyrs to hatred’s white, Oregonian avatars.

While Measure 9 consistently polled badly, the margins were never huge, and there was a great deal of concern that some people would not want to admit to supporting a measure that had become associated with bigotry, but would happily vote yes in a private voting booth. Every queer I knew was tense right up to the day after the election.

I am acutely aware that the coverage of the murders of Cohen & Mock may very well have tipped the vote decisively against Measure 9. My freedom and my employment may have been affected by their deaths. For that reason, I consider it a duty to remember them, and I have ever since. I’ve never forgotten their names, nor am I ever likely too.

That’s why it was so shocking to see the name Brian Christopher Mock in a news story as a man arrested for acting out bigotry and hatred and paranoia. To be honest, it was a relief that they included the middle name, and made me wonder if someone at the Star Tribune was familiar with the events of September 26, 1992 in Salem, Oregon.

If you were not familiar with these murders and the effect they had on queer freedom in Washington, California, and especially Oregon, you can read more, or listen to a podcast about them, here.

In the meantime, I will take this coincidence as another reminder of the capacity of fascists to befoul everything that they touch, and as more motivation to prevent the spread of fascism’s stain.

May we always remember those who came before. May we always consider those who will come after.

 

 

QAnon, self parody on steroids

So, apparently Q has gone quiet since not long after last November’s US election. As a result there is a power vacuum, or perhaps “influence” vacuum, since QAnon isn’t precisely a hierarchical movement where anyone is overtly or specifically empowered to order others to take action. Whether in practice people have sufficient influence to declare an action needs to be taken and can expect that QAnons, at least some of them, will take that action is a separate question. (And I think the answer to that question is yes.) But call it power or influence, the vacuum exists, and there are many people who covet that power/influence and will pursue it.

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Say Her Name: Ma’Khia Bryant

The details are sketchy at this point and a number of important things, including how to spell her name and even her age are being reported differently in different places, but from the best information I have right now (which could easily change later):

A foster child, 15 years old, whose name was Ma’Khia Bryant, was being bullied and attacked by other foster kids, probably other girls. She called police for protection. At some point before police arrived (possibly even before she called them?) she acquired a knife to use in self-defense. When the police arrived there was some sort of altercation between Ma’Khia and at least one other girl. At this point she may or may not have been still holding the knife. It’s even possible that someone else had taken the knife from her, but I don’t consider that likely.

Police seeing a physical altercation with a knife involved shot to kill Ma’Khia, the girl who called desperate for protection. She is dead.

I don’t give a god damn if Ma’Khia had the knife in her hand and was swinging it: she was in state custody (unless this detail is also wrong, I fucking hate how different stories are saying different things, but none seemed to say that she **wasn’t** in state custody, it’s just that some stories don’t mention foster care at all), and the state owed her better. Even if there was an immediate necessity to protect the other child because Ma’Khia was swinging the knife, that only backs up responsibility from the cops to the foster system that shouldn’t have put her in that situation to begin with.

To make matters worse, the Mayor of Columbus, Ohio where Ma’Khia was killed called her a “young woman” who “lost her life”, probably between the couch cushions.

Ma’Khia was not a young woman. She was a child, a girl. It’s bad enough that the mayor would say such a thing, but it is much worse than that in that there is a long trend of Black children being treated as adults to maximize the blame that can be placed upon them while white young adults are called “children” or “teenagers” to minimize the blame that can be placed on them. Kyle Rittenhouse is a perfect example of the latter.

I’ll keep watching things, but FUCK THIS SHIT. I’m so sick and tired police violence. I’m so sick and tired of the government killing the people it has a duty to protect.

Live Coverage of MN Protests for BLM Mon April 12: Shots fired

I’m obviously not in MN, but there’s quite a lot to see in the live coverage provided by Unicorn Riot.

Less than 5 minutes ago there was audible gunfire. The reporter was speculating that it was coming from protesters shooting bullets into the air. Obviously that’s very dangerous, since the bullets won’t reach escape velocity. I’m not entirely clear why the reporter thought it was protesters, but I’m assuming it’s because they have a general sense of distance and direction. Here’s hoping this shit doesn’t escalate further.

ETA: I thought I might add multiple updates to this as more info came in, but the protests were almost over when this happened. Everyone has gone home for the night and from where Unicorn Riot was filming there was simply no way to get any more info about the shooter, not even whether or not they were arrested. Because things ended so quickly after I wrote this post (maybe 10-15 minutes, tops) there’s simply nothing of substance to add, but I thought I had to at least write “nothing else happened” here lest the dangerous cliffhanger become needlessly alarming over the long hours of the night.

I’m not going to head to Minnesota like I went to Portland, but I’ll keep an eye on Unicorn Riot’s channel & make posts if I notice something important.