Street roots., June 09, 2017, Page 5, Image 5

Street Roots • June 9-15, 2017
News
Page 5
In Portland, an uptick in hate
Southern Poverty Law Center’s
Lecia Brooks explains how
racists have become emboldened
BY JARED PABEIM
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
ince the presidential election, “In Our America”
signs have proliferated in front yards and windows
across Portland, spreading messages of love and
tolerance to passers-by. But to the casual observer, the
messaging may obscure a newly energized underbelly of
intolerance in this majority-white city.
On May 26, an extremist’s heinous crimes on a M AX
train shocked the community. But the City of Roses has
actually had one of the country’s highest rates of hate- or
bias-related incidents since the Nov. 8 election. That’s
according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which
recorded 50 hate and bias incidents statewide in the three
months after Election Day. Taking into account
population, it was a disproportionately high number
compared to all our neighbors: California (154 incidents),
Washington (65 incidents), Nevada (seven incidents) and
Idaho (five incidents).
Street Roots recently spoke with Lecia Brooks,
outreach director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a
Montgomery, Ala.-based group that tracks extremists,
sues on behalf of their
victims and works to
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Jared Paben: As you
LE C IA BROO KS, know, on May 26 we had an
O U T R E A C H D IR E C T O R F O R
incident in Portland where a
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man intimidated two girls
before killing two men and
injuring a third. Pm
wondering, was Jeremy Joseph Christian on Southern Poverty
Law Center’s radar before this happened?
S
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F T H E O R E G O N J E W IS H M U S E U M A N D C E N T E R FO R
H O L O C A U S T E D U C A T IO N A N D O R E G O N H IS T O R IC A L S O C IE T Y
This image from a 1923 K u K lu x K ian parade in Albany is
featured in “Discrimination and Resistance, A n Oregon
Prim er.” Oregon claimed the largest K K K membership o f any
Western state, with branches in every part o f the state by 1925.
EXHIBIT, from page 4
love with Doris Burgess, who was white, the couple had to
marry in Washington because interracial marriage was
illegal in Oregon until 1951.
But Unthank Jr. was also the first black graduate from the
University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Allied
Arts and was a lifelong advocate for the black community.
Recently, there was a black student-initiated effort to
rename U O dorm Dunn Hall, which was named for
Frederick Dunn, a high-ranking member of the K K K .
On June 2, the Board of Trustees unanimously approved
the new name: Unthank Hall in honor of Unthank Jr.
Dilg’s exhibit also takes aim at the collective tendency of
dismissiveness toward the racist actions of white America’s
ancestry.
She hopes when visitors learn how the NAACP
introduced the first public accommodation law into Oregon
Legislature in 1919, it will make it harder to chalk the
oppression up to ignorance. Oregon didn’t adopt the Civil
Rights Bill until 1953.
“There were black people in Oregon, who were very
enlightened, who knew in 1919 - and I’m sure much earlier
- this is not O K ,” she said. “Native Americans knew, this is
our land, you are taking it from us. This is not O K .”
She said knowing this history “makes it less possible for
people to say, ‘Oh that’s just the way it was.’”
Dilg designed her exhibit not chronologically, but
thematically around the tools used for both resistance and
discrimination throughout history.
“It doesn’t matter what period, or what group,” Dilg said.
“They are often the same tools implemented in similar ways
that have the end result of excluding a group, dehumanizing
a group, scapegoating a group, and all of this is very,
effective in creating a broad result of discrimination.
She said she wants people to question how this happens
“over and over and over” so they might learn how to
recognize discrimination when they see it and how to
intervene and break the cycle.
“Both the discrimination and the Holocaust exhibits are
very emotional,” museum director Judy Margies said. “We’re
not just spewing out facts. We’re really giving context and
doing what I think my institution does very well, which is
telling stories.”
Docents and museum staff will be on hand to offer tissues
and shoulders to guests, who will also have an opportunity
to reflect on how discrimination has played a role in their
own lives as an interactive part of the exhibit.
“I am anticipating that our visitors are going to have a
wide range of emotions, and if tears are part of that
emotional outpouring, I think that we want to make sure that
our visitors know they are in a safe space,” Margies said.
L ecia Brooks: No, Jeremy Christian wasn’t on the
radar, though it was really easy to find information related
to his white supremacist and extremist-right ties. It was all
over his Facebook page, all over his social media. As you
know, April 29 he showed up at a free speech rally in
Portland and had a little incident with police, so it was real
easy to find intelligence on him.
J.P.: What can you tell us about his views? And since the
S P L C has a nationwide perspective, are they common views?
L.B.: Well, they are more common these days. As you
know, post-election, we saw an extreme uptick in the
number of hate- and bias-related incidents across the
United States. And, of course, Portland, sadly, has one of
the highest rates of hate crimes or hate incidents of a
metropolitan area since the election.
J.P.: Wow, I hadn’t realized that. Do you have any data on
just how bad it’s been in Portland?
L.B.: I don’t have the figures in front of me, but what
we did at the Southern Poverty Law Center was we had a
Web portal that we invited folks to report incidents that
they either witnessed or were victim to, and we gathered
close to 1,500 reports (nationwide). We continue to gather
reports. There have been a number of flyerings of white
nationalist flyers on college campuses across the United
States. And the Pacific Northwest has a history of racist
violence and racist hate groups, so we weren’t too terribly
surprised that this incident would happen there.
Leda Brooks is the outreach director fo r the Southern
Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.
J.P.: I get the feeling that Portland kind of thinks of itself
as a liberal, tolerant bulwark against a rising tide of hate.
That image that you just painted contrasts with that. Should
we be justified in being surprised that something like what
happened last week could happen here?
L.B.: Well, I think so. I mean, Portland has made great
strides in moving toward a more progressive side. I think
that, generationally, you do have a large majority of
progressive liberals in the area who are definitely against
hate and bias. But, as I mentioned, the history goes pretty
deep. The Southern Poverty Law Center had a case in
1988. There was an attack on an Ethiopian graduate
student, a Mr. Seraw, who was attacked by a group called
White Aryan Resistance. They were a California-based
hate group. But white supremacists beat him to death in
front of his apartment building. Portland is also home to a
group called Volksfront, which is now defunct but was a
very violent neo-Nazi group. A number of adherents of the
ideology moved from the South to the Pacific Northwest.
As you know, the Pacific Northwest is very mono-racial.
Portland is 70 percent white population. So what you find
in those instances is that, oftentimes, white supremacists
can hide in plain sight.
J.P.: Have you guys identified Christian as a member of
any organized group at all?
L.B.: No. We don’t see that he’s tied to a group. But I
will say that he seems to have picked up on the rhetoric
that began during the presidential election with Donald
Trump and his anti-immigrant, Islamophobic rhetoric. One
of his posts talks about purging the country of
immigrants. He says if Donald Trump is the next Hitler,
then he’s joining the SS to put an end to the monotheist
question. Portland police are on record as saying that they
thought he had some kind of a mental condition. What
we’re seeing at the Southern Poverty Law Center is
people just kind of parroting and echoing this message of
being anti-anyone out, anti-people of color, anti-immigrant,
anti-anything that’s not white nationalist.
J.P.: That kind of gets at one of my questions, which is
maybe a psychology question: How does someone get such a
warped lens through which to view the world?
L.B.: Well, what we’re seeing is the shifting
demographics that are taking place across the country,
and that started about a decade ago, where demographers
showed that whites would no longer hold the numeric
majority in the country by about 2040 or 2050. We began
See BROOKS, page 7