{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": ">@slatestarscratchpad said: Do you have a post where you explain why so much of this political violence is concentrated in...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/627915078699810816/", "html": "<blockquote class=\"npf_indented\"><p>&gt;<a class=\"tumblelog\" href=\"https://tmblr.co/Mr_VjRMdGrF-gPcvkpyuSDQ\" target=\"_blank\">@slatestarscratchpad</a> <b>said:</b> Do you have a post where you explain why so much of this political violence is concentrated in Portland?</p></blockquote><p>Well I guess I can make one. Imo, it comes down to &ldquo;Portland is so white the Civil Rights Movement didn&rsquo;t reorder culture and politics&rdquo;</p><ul><li>Oregon was born out of the &ldquo;free soil, free labor&rdquo; tradition that hated slavery for taking our jerbs, as a white producerist utopia and was really exclusionary</li><li>Perhaps more important, there wasn&rsquo;t much industry or any direct train lines from the Deep South circa the Great Migration \u2013 to leave sharecropping for Portland, you&rsquo;d have to pass through somewhere with better jobs</li><li>So Portland&rsquo;s biggest civil rights initiative was busing the small redlined black neighborhood&rsquo;s kids all over town until they asked for their local Black Power school back and the white establishment said &ldquo;sure&rdquo;</li><li>The city&rsquo;s official narrative is &ldquo;we ended residential segregation in the 1990s by asking realtors nicely&rdquo;, the unofficial is &ldquo;no, that&rsquo;s just when the ghetto started to gentrify&rdquo;</li><li>So future &ldquo;identity&rdquo; claims didn&rsquo;t have a confrontational model to go off of, and were welcomed in and co-opted by the establishment</li><li>So politics never repolarized away from lunchbox labor vs. progressive owners, both of which fit in the current Dem party coalition</li><li>So there wasn&rsquo;t white flight and urban decay, and there&rsquo;s still an inner-city white working class that identifies as working class, not white</li><li>That&rsquo;s sure under stress from rising prices now, and has no expectation a continuation of the existing trends would work for them</li><li>That&rsquo;s combatitive, there&rsquo;s almost a European-style labor combatitiveness that, Euro style, overlaps with street politics and soccer fandom</li><li>Portland&rsquo;s <i>been</i> radical, there&rsquo;s an anarchist axis going from Olympia to Oakland, it got called &ldquo;Little Beirut&rdquo; by <b>H.</b>W. Bush, the governor once threw a hippie festival to clear out town for a Nixon visit</li><li>The surrounding suburbs aren&rsquo;t, though, and the rural exurbs especially aren&rsquo;t, they&rsquo;re still free soil/free labor really</li><li>Because of &ldquo;Urban Growth Boundaries&rdquo; (cause no white flight!), rural areas aren&rsquo;t far out from the city</li><li>So because they were never understood as black, an existential threat, &ldquo;excesses of the 60s-70s&rdquo; were never really seen as excesses and reigned in.</li><li>Like, Oregon has the most extensive free expression protections in the country, which has been interpreted as protecting the right to give naked lapdances</li><li>And many understand as protecting anything going as &ldquo;protest&rdquo;, meaning they see the government as having COMPLETELY delegitimized itself by making ANY effort to suppress crowds menacing government buildings at night</li><li>When I arrived at the start of the 2010s, Portland was <i>very</i> inward-looking. There were around 10 local newspapers but I knew multiple people w/o computers and even TVs</li><li>The elite gatekeepers followed national stuff, but they kept The Conversation Portlandy enough that everything in Portland, even the &ldquo;opposition&rdquo; was, definitionally, compatible with Portland</li><li>And propped up a hippie-academic-gentry-downtown business-landlord power system that congealed in the 70s, even as the city&rsquo;s center of gravity moved east across the river</li><li>Let alone the immigrant, minority, and poor communities on the land east of 82nd</li><li>The smartphone revolution fucked that right up, empowered and connected the lower orders and realigned the whole city with national narratives</li><li>Welp</li></ul>"}