From Black lives to 'white spectacle,' Portland protests have lost focus, civil rights leaders

[jmdrake]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...civil-n1234886
By Alicia Victoria Lozano

PORTLAND, Ore. — Black community leaders are urging local protesters to shift the focus of demonstrations back to the Black Lives Matter movement and away from what has become a largely “white spectacle.”

Standing in front of a large banner bearing an image of Rep. John Lewis, the Black civil rights icon who died last week, the Rev. E.D. Mondainé, president of the Portland branch of the NAACP, told protesters, “The focus has been moved from where it is supposed to be and made to be a spectacle, a debacle.”

“This is no new thing we’re experiencing. We have seen this from the beginning of time,” Mondainé said. “Four hundred years we have struggled as Black people in this nation. … We have been made to be the last that were informed but the first that were affected.”
Image:
Mothers form a human chain during a protest in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center in Portland, Ore., on Thursday.Ankur Dholakia / AFP - Getty Images

Throughout the week, protesters have argued among themselves over tactics used to denounce the continued presence of federal officers in Portland. Some have called for nonviolent action, while others have thrown fireworks and lit fires outside the federal courthouse.
Portland protesters, local officials say federal presence is making tensions worse
July 22, 202006:05

The ongoing unrest, which started at the end of May following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, initially began as a series of demonstrations against racism and police brutality. After federal officers under the command of the Department of Homeland Security arrived to defend the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse, they became the focus of protests.

Lost in the shuffle were the millions of Black lives suffering systemic racism and injustice, said Lakayana Drury, executive director of Word is Bond, a Portland-based nonprofit.

“I want us to remember why we’re here,” Drury told protesters Thursday. “What’s happening downtown is not a Black issue. This is a battle between two white supremacy entities: the Trump administration and the local city of Portland.”

In the majority-white city, Black people comprise just 6 percent of the population, according to the latest numbers available from the U.S. census. Many of those residents live far from the downtown area, where thousands of demonstrators have descended every night for almost two months.
Image:
Demonstrators try to kick down a fence during a Black Lives Matter protest at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse on Thursday in Portland, Ore.Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP

Drury said instead of drawing national attention to what transpired outside the federal courthouse in recent weeks, protesters should be talking about communities of color, who are subjected to increased policing and a lack of economic opportunity.

“The Black issues exist very far from here,” he said. “It’s in the classrooms when we have Black students in eighth grade who are not at an eighth grade reading level. That’s what we should be marching for.”

The Portland NAACP has repeatedly denounced the actions of federal forces in Portland but has also criticized “mostly white anarchists” for inciting violence during the protests. Much of the national scrutiny in recent weeks has centered on the melee that erupts nightly after small groups of demonstrators begin a cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement.

Over the past week, protests have settled into a cycle that starts early in the evening with peaceful marchers singing and chanting, “Black lives matter," and, “Feds go home.” Recently Portland parents have led a short procession from the Justice Center to the neighboring federal courthouse. There, the Wall of Moms link arms and form a barrier between protesters and the building. Members of the PDXDadPod wear gas masks and carry large leaf blowers to help disperse the inevitable tear gas used by officers against demonstrators.
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Sometime around midnight, a small group of protesters, usually wearing all black and carrying makeshift shields and umbrellas, begins to lob fireworks toward the federal courthouse or light small fires nearby. On Wednesday and Thursday nights, after law enforcement erected a steel fence around the court’s perimeter, people targeted the barricade by shaking it or trying to climb over it.

Once the fence is breached, the federal officers come out. They throw tear gas into the crowd and use projectiles. No one standing near the scene is spared, not even Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler.

Images of the mostly white Wall of Moms, PDXDadPod and aggressive protesters have dominated much of the news coverage. Last week, a photo went viral showing a standoff between law enforcement and a naked white woman later dubbed "Naked Athena."

While these images might speak to the constitutional debate created when federal agents use force against demonstrators on American soil, they do not address the bigger issue of systemic racism against Black communities, civil rights leaders say.
Image:
Protesters walk through chemical irritants dispersed by federal agents at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse on Thursday in Portland, Ore.Noah Berger / AP

In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Mondainé denounced what he called the “white spectacle."

“Unfortunately, ‘spectacle’ is now the best way to describe Portland’s protests,” he wrote. “Vandalizing government buildings and hurling projectiles at law enforcement draw attention — but how do these actions stop police from killing black people? What are antifa and other leftist agitators achieving for the cause of black equality?”

Still, some Black leaders in Portland say any attention drawn to inequities is a step in the right direction.

Reginald Richardson Jr., pastor of Your Bible Speaks Seventh Day Adventist Church who describes himself as “nonviolent,” encourages white allies to act as shields for Black people, who have a historically fraught relationship with law enforcement.

“Black men and women will go to jail at a higher rate than our white brothers and sisters,” he said. “It is time for our white brothers and sisters to stand up and be that barrier.”

It's sad to see some of the black ministers in my church caught up in this foolishness. Others have spoken out against it.

[AngryCanadian]

Why are some of those so called BLM activists in Portland so white?

[tod evans]

Black community leaders are urging local protesters to shift the focus of demonstrations back to the Black Lives Matter movement and away from what has become a largely “white spectacle.”

Smart people would go home, lick their nuts and vow to not associate with idiots in the future...

Smarter people would vow to avoid the Tee-Vee cameras too.

[shakey1]

Smart people would go home, lick their nuts and vow to not associate with idiots in the future...

Smarter people would vow to avoid the Tee-Vee cameras too.

LOL... Damn, outta rep ammo.

[Anti Federalist]

Why are some of those so called BLM activists in Portland so white?

Because it is a majority white city and a city with a high level of university graduates and a leftist city, politically.

Universities teach their students, especially women, to become Marxists.

It is no surprise then to find them gravitating toward Marxist street gangs.

[Anti Federalist]

LOL... Damn, outta rep ammo.

So am I...no covering fire

[Anti Federalist]

Why would any self respecting black man take orders from or ally themselves with shrieking, flabby, ugly, white women?

[Champ]

Why are some of those so called BLM activists in Portland so white?

This may have been a rhetorical question, but I'll take the bait anyways.

Most of BLM and antifa are white. BLM started predominantly black, but got co-opted not too far in by the more Soros funded contingent that currently runs antifa, and therefore got overrun with guilt ridden, self-hating white communists. You have to love all of these BLM white people that tell black people how they should feel, and how they should think or act.

[Champ]

Way would any self respecting black man take orders from or ally themselves with shrieking, flabby, ugly, white women?

My thoughts exactly. Is anyone besides guilty white people taking anything coming from other white whiny BLM/antifa seriously? I get the feeling the rest of the world is laughing at how pathetic and groveling white people have become. And they are using this opportunity to take advantage.

We aren't quite as sturdy as we used to be. More like wet noodles now.

[Danke]

Why would any self respecting black man take orders from or ally themselves with shrieking, flabby, ugly, white women?

https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/...ves-matter-blm

• Established in 2013, in response to the acquittal of the man who killed black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin
• Seeks to stoke black rage over the “virulent anti-Black racism” that “permeates our society”
• Says America was originally “built on Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery” and “continues to thrive on the brutal exploitation of people of color”

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

---

Founded by Marxist revolutionaries in 2013, Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a movement that depicts the United States as a nation awash in racism, sexism, and homophobia. Demonstrators at BLM events have been known to: smear white police as trigger-happy bigots who are intent upon killing innocent, unarmed black males; taunt, and direct obscenities at, uniformed police officers who are on duty; throw rocks at police and threaten to kill them; and celebrate in the streets when a police officer is killed. Some examples of BLM’s racist and incendiary rhetoric:

• At a December 2014 BLM rally in New York City, marchers chanted in unison: “What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want it? Now.”
• At a BLM march in August 2015, protesters chanted : “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.” (“Pigs” was a reference to police officers, and “blanket” was a reference to body bags.)
• On a radio program the following month, the BLM-affiliated host laughed at the recentassassination of a white Texas deputy; boasted that blacks were like lions who could prevail in a “race war” against whites; happily predicted that “we will witness more executions and killing of white people and cops than we ever have before”; and declared that “It’s open season on killing white people and crackas.”
• In November 2015, a group of approximately 150 BLM protesters shouting “Black Lives Matter,” stormed Dartmouth University’s library, screaming, “Fu** you, you filthy white fu**s!,” “Fu** you and your comfort!,” and “Fu** you, you racist sh**!”
• In July 2016, a BLM activist speaking to a CNN reporter shouted: “The less white babies on this planet, the less of you [white adults] we got! I hope they kill all the white babies! Kill ’em all right now! Kill ’em! Kill your grandkids! Kill yourself! Coffin, bitch! Go lay in a coffin! Kill yourself!”

At all BLM events, demonstrators invoke the words that the Marxist revolutionary, former Black Panther, convicted cop-killer, and longtime fugitive Assata Shakur once wrote in a letter titled “To My People”: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” (The fourth line was drawn from the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.) In Shakur’s original letter, she described herself as a “Black revolutionary” who had “declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heart-less robots [police] who protect them and their property.”
Another figure greatly admired by BLM is Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, who in the 1960s was renowned for threatening that blacks would “burn America down,” and for urging blacks to murder “honkies.” In the spring of 2000, Al-Amin shot two black law-enforcement officers in downtown Atlanta, killing one of them.
The Roots of BLM
BLM was established as an online platform in 2013 by Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. In a July 2015 speech at the annual Netroots Nation convention in Phoenix, Cullors exhorted fellow blacks to “rise the $#@! up,” “shut this $#@! down,” and “burn everything down!” In 2015 as well, Cullors openly acknowledged BLM’s revolutionary Marxist objectives, proclaiming on video: “We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular, we’re trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories.” In the same video, Cullors revealed that for more than a decade she had been the protégé of mentor Eric Mann, a former domestic terrorist who in the 1960s and ’70s was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, whose shared objective was to launch a race war against the “white” United States on behalf of the nonwhite Third World. Mann trained Cullors in Marxist-Leninist ideology and the tactics of political organizing.
When founding BLM, the principal aim of Cullors, Garza, and Tometi was to stoke black rage and galvanize a protest movement in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the “white Hispanic” who was tried for murder and manslaughter after he had shot and killed a black Florida teenager named Trayvon Martin in a highly publicized February 2012 altercation. Before long, “Black Lives Matter” became a rallying cry for writers, public speakers, celebrities, demonstrators, and even rioters who took up the cause of demanding an end to what BLM terms the “virulent anti-Black racism” that “permeates our society.” In 2014, BLM also adopted the slogan “Hands Up–Don’t Shoot!,” which was first popularized by Dream Defenders and grew out of that year’s death of Michael Brown, a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri who was killed by a white police officer after he had tried to take the officer’s handgun during a confrontation. (In the immediate aftermath of that incident, numerous racial agitators circulated the false narrative that Brown had been shot after raising his hands in submission and pleading, “Don’t shoot.”)
By BLM’s telling, black Americans are “collectively” subjected to “inhumane conditions” in a “white supremacist system.” Demanding that Americans “abandon the lie that the deep psychological wounds of slavery, racism and structural oppression are figments of the Black imagination,” BLM seeks to force the country to become “uncomfortable about institutional racism.” And emphasizing the permanence and intransigence of American depredations, BLM maintains that: (a) the nation’s “corrupt democracy” was originally “built on Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery” and “continues to thrive on the brutal exploitation of people of color”; (b) “the ugly American traditions of patriarchy, classism, racism, and militarism” endure to this day; (c) “structural oppression” still “prevents so many from realizing their dreams”; and (d) blacks in the U.S. are routinely “de-humaniz[ed],” rendered “powerless at the hands of the state,” “deprived of [their] basic human rights and dignity,” and targeted for “extrajudicial killings … by police and vigilantes.”
The notion that blacks are targeted for “extrajudicial killings … by police and vigilantes” is a lie, as demonstrated by decades of hard empirical evidence.[1]
Though BLM professes to articulate the needs and grievances of black people as a whole, the organization deems it vital to go “beyond the narrow nationalism” that “merely” urges black people to “love Black, live Black, and buy Black.” That is, it focuses an added measure of attention on those blacks who, in the past, “have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.” These include, most notably, black “***** and trans,” who “bear a unique burden from a hetero-patriarchal society that disposes of us like garbage and simultaneously fetishizes us and profits off of us”; black “undocumented immigrants” who are “relegated to the shadows” of American society; black “disabled” people who “bear the burden of state-sponsored Darwinian experiments that attempt to squeeze us into boxes of normality defined by white supremacy”; and blacks who self-identify along non-traditional points of the “gender spectrum.”
To improve the allegedly abysmal condition of blacks in the United States, BLM has issued a series of non-negotiable demands. These include:

• “an end to all forms of discrimination and the full recognition of our [Blacks’] human rights”;
• “an immediate end to police brutality and [to] the murder of Black people and all oppressed people”;
• “full, living-wage employment for our people,” to ensure “our right to a life with dignity”;
• “decent housing” and “an end to gentrification”;
• “an end to the school-to-prison pipeline,” a term for the practice of using black students’ behavioral problems as an excuse for pushing them out of the classroom and into the juvenile- and criminal-justice systems;
• “quality education for all,” including “free or affordable public university” enrollment;
• “freedom from mass incarceration and an end to the prison industrial complex,” whose hallmarks include “the over-policing and surveillance of [black] communities,” the enactment of many “racist laws,” and “the warehousing of black people”;
• “access to affordable healthy food for our neighborhoods”;
• “an aggressive attack against all laws, policies, and entities that disenfranchise any community from expressing themselves at the ballot” (e.g., Voter ID laws);
• “a public education system that teaches the rich history of Black people”;
• “the release of all U.S. political prisoners”;
• “an end to the military industrial complex that incentivizes private corporations to profit off of the death and destruction of Black and Brown communities across the globe”;
• the cessation of racially “discriminatory discipline practices” in the schools;
• a comprehensive Justice Department review of “systematic abuses by police departments” across the United States;
• congressional hearings investigating “the criminalization of communities of color”;
• an end to “the use of profiling on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin or religion by law-enforcement agencies”;
• the implementation of a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice by the Obama Administration, addressing “persistent and ongoing forms of racial discrimination and disparities that exist in nearly every sphere of life”;
• the release, by the office of U.S. attorney general, of “the names of all [police] officers involved in killing black people within the last five years … so they can be brought to justice—if they haven’t already”; and
• “a decrease in law-enforcement spending at the local, state and federal levels and a reinvestment [through the federal government] of that budgeted money into the black communities most devastated by poverty in order to create jobs, housing and schools.”

(Cont.) https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/...ves-matter-blm

[dannno]

Why would any self respecting black man take orders from or ally themselves with shrieking, flabby, ugly, white women?

Did you see this?

"Someone told me to do it" Says MKUltra Antifa
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...MKUltra-Antifa

[oyarde]

The white spectacle could just be a devious plot by Danke to cruise for dates.

[dean.engelhardt]

Really, BLM can protest one block away from the Federal buildings and not have to worry about tear gas and rubber bullets. Let Antifa try to overrun the Federal courts by themselves. Antifa does seem to care about black people at all. BLM should not be giving them cover.

[dean.engelhardt]

Why are some of those so called BLM activists in Portland so white?

No black people are allow to join the Portland chapter of BLM. Something about property values or something.

[Valli6]

I see a distinct change this week, with local democrat governments and the media moving focus to the "whiteness" of rioters - as if ANTIFA hasn't been there all along! Numerous stories are pushing the narrative that it is "white supremacists" who've been responsible for the rioting.

I think they intend to portray all that video of obnoxious ANTIFA rioters as being "far-right" people (Trump supporters).

Over the last weekend, the internet buzz was that rioting had finally begun to reflect badly on Biden's poll numbers (or whatever you'd call that scam).

Suddenly, Biden blurted out that he wants protesters arrested and prosecuted!
(July 28, 2020) Biden calls for violent protesters to be ‘found, arrested and tried’
https://nypost.com/2020/07/28/biden-...ted-and-tried/

I think Biden misfired with this statement. He made it a little too soon - before the media got fully out in front of him to push stories like these - or perhaps these stories are just to cover for Biden's statement?:

Claims that the "umbrella guy" breaking windows in Minneapolis was a white supremacist. Recently-alleged umbrella man Mitchell Wesley Carlson, has NOT been arrested, but state and local officials there are claiming that he and white supremacists are responsible for inciting ALL the looting and rioting that occurred!
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...-rioting!-sarc
(JULY 28, 2020) http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documen...n-probe-753920

"Far right" boogaloo boys orchestrated riots in Richmond
(see post #374) http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...rotests/page13
(July 30, 2020) https://www.virginiamercury.com/2020...ts-complicated

I expect that this weekend, these stories will be further publicized to spread further.

[devil21]

I talked to someone who lives in Portland yesterday (mid 50's upper executive level white female). What's not being reported is that all of this hubbub is entirely confined to a section of 2 small blocks in the city and has essentially been cordoned off as "where this happens every night". It hasn't spread to anywhere else in the city and the protestors and police both know to keep it within that designated small area. I was also told that each evening it starts as a peaceful protest and then the police start shooting tear gas into the gathering, which then kicks off what we see on video the next day, labeled as "CHAOS IN PORTLAND". It's basically a manufactured for tv and YT event and as usual, is spun for political purposes and ratings. Otherwise, it's a nothingburger for the residents of Portland outside of the designated 2 block area.