Race
andAmerica<https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/george-floyd-protests-minneapolis-new-york-los-angeles?name=styln-george-floyd®ion=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&impression_id=8d12a7a0-edf2-11ea-9567-4f4bef4fc0c5&variant=1_Show>
* Portland Shooting
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/portland-shooting-explained.html?name=styln-george-floyd®ion=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&impression_id=8d12a7a1-edf2-11ea-9567-4f4bef4fc0c5&variant=1_Show>
* Portland Video Investigation
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/video/portland-protests-shooting-investigation.html?name=styln-george-floyd®ion=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&impression_id=8d12a7a2-edf2-11ea-9567-4f4bef4fc0c5&variant=1_Show>
* March on Washington
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/us/march-on-washington-2020.html?name=styln-george-floyd®ion=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&impression_id=8d12ceb0-edf2-11ea-9567-4f4bef4fc0c5&variant=1_Show>
* Breonna Taylor’s Life and Death
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/breonna-taylor-police-killing.html?name=styln-george-floyd®ion=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&impression_id=8d12ceb1-edf2-11ea-9567-4f4bef4fc0c5&variant=1_Show>
* Pro Athletes Respond
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/sports/basketball/kenosha-nba-protests-players-boycott.html?name=styln-george-floyd®ion=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&impression_id=8d12ceb2-edf2-11ea-9567-4f4bef4fc0c5&variant=1_Show>
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<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/portland-protester-teen.html?fbclid=IwAR3SHNrHyjVPXOodXPR4URsjv_eAe0sh1lRkaEt2f1vLSW-YviWH4RibW0Q#after-top>
What a 16-Year-Old Learned in Three Months of Portland Protests
Last summer was all about dance team and teen parties. But after she
watched George Floyd’s death in a video on her phone, Daria Allen’s
world drastically changed.
Daria Allen is one of many protesters who have rallied nightly for
racial justice in downtown Portland, Ore.
Daria Allen is one of many protesters who have rallied nightly for
racial justice in downtown Portland, Ore.Credit...Octavio Jones for The
New York Times
ByKate Conger <https://www.nytimes.com/by/kate-conger>
* NY Times, Sept. 3, 2020,5:00 a.m. ET
*
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PORTLAND, Ore. — Last summer, it seemed like everyone in Portland was
turning 15. Daria Allen’s neighborhood buzzed with a steady hum of
quinceañeras and parties. She joined a dance team, and signed up for
extra dance classes at a local studio.
As she turned 16 over the fall, she was ready to get her driver’s
license, but that brought on a nagging new worry: What if she were out
driving and got stopped by the police? This year’s deaths of George
Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, both
African-Americans who were killed by the police, turned it into a
constant loop of anxiety: What if the police came to her home and shot
her grandmother? What if she had children and then saw one die in a
traffic stop?
So Ms. Allen’s summer is different this year. She has not had time for
dance classes. She is instead one of the many protesters who have
rallied nightly in downtown Portland, mounting one of the
longest-running cries for racial justice since Mr. Floyd’s death on May 25.
Next week, she will start her junior year of high school. The main thing
she is worried about is how her class schedule will conflict with protests.
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“For me, being a young Black woman, I’m just focused on my life. That’s
really why I’m out here,” she said. “I am just a Black girl trying to live.”
Ms. Allen grew up in the Pacific Northwest and recently moved to her
grandmother’s home on the north side of Portland, where she could have
her own bedroom and the privacy from her mother and siblings that she
craved. She had been one of only a few Black students at her elementary
and middle schools, but her high school was more diverse — she no longer
felt like she stuck out.
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It was in late May that she was scrolling through Instagram and saw a
video of Mr. Floyd lying in the street, a white police officer’s knee
digging into his neck. She watched it again.
“I just remember crying,” Ms. Allen said. “Especially when he called out
for his mom, that made me so sad.”
She saw news footage of protests over Mr. Floyd’s death in Minneapolis
and Washington, D.C. Then she found a livestream online that showed a
protest in downtown Portland. She needed to go see for herself.
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In early June, Ms. Allen joined the protests for the first time, jumping
into a march that snaked downtown from Revolution Hall, a music venue on
the east side of the city. Seeing people singing and joining in the
march made her feel happy.
After her summer job at a local zoo evaporated in the financial fallout
caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Allen started attending protests
almost every night. Maybe, she thought, the demonstrations would spur
changes in policing that would keep her family and her friends safe. But
there was a deeper feeling, a sense that she belonged there.
“I don’t even feel like I have to,” Ms. Allen said. “I just/do/have to.”
Her family was worried, but on the other hand understood that something
important was happening, for all of them, on Portland’s streets.
“This is the only way she can make change at 16 and I get that,” said
Aneesah Rasheed, a relative who has sometimes accompanied Ms. Allen to
protests. “In two years, Daria’s going to be old enough to vote. She’s
learning about people, learning about politics, how to organize, how to
start a movement.”
The first night that Ms. Allen was tear-gassed, the feeling reminded her
of the sting she felt when she let shampoo wash into her eyes. The crowd
faced off against a line of police officers and she yelled at them,
furious and teary. More gas erupted and she ran. It seared into her
throat and she coughed until she thought she might vomit.
After that, she decided she needed to be better prepared, so she began
an online appeal in mid-July to raise money to buy earplugs, a
respirator mask and goggles.
When she posted a link to the fund-raiser in a neighborhood Facebook
group, a woman confronted her. Ms. Allen was destroying the city, she
said. Ms. Allen fired back, arguing that the police were polluting the
city with tear gas. The argument ended with the woman sending her a
direct message, which Ms. Allen has saved in her inbox, just to remind
herself of the mentality she is fighting against.
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“If I see you on the street, you will be the next Black person hanging
from a tree,” the woman wrote.
Other neighbors were more supportive, and Ms. Allen ended up with about
$300 to buy supplies. She got the mask and the goggles, but the helmet
she bought did not quite fit. She went without one until another
protester gave her a hard hat.
Her family eventually followed her into the movement. Sometimes, her
aunts took her to marches. Her grandmother watched livestreams of the
protests on Twitter to check on her. Even her 12-year-old brother tagged
along at a few protests.
“I’m very scared,” Laura Vanderlyn, her grandmother, said. “No matter
what, she feels she has to be out there. Daria is a very, very
passionate girl about everything.”
In the crowds that swarm nightly around downtown Portland, there are
many things to fear: projectiles, aggressive protesters, low-flying
fireworks, riot police and counterprotesters who sometimes try to
antagonize the crowd. Over the weekend, one of the counterprotesters
wasshot to death
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/portland-trump-rally-shooting.html>.
Ms. Allen tries to avoid most of the dangers. She constantly skims
through Instagram and Snapchat, watching videos of the protest to stay
informed about what is happening in other parts of the crowd. It is not
important to her to be at the front line of confrontations with the police.
One of the few chants she consistently recites is “Black lives matter.”
It annoys her that the phrase has become a subject of controversy, often
met with the diminishing response “All lives matter.”
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“When they have the breast cancer runs, you don’t see people out there
yelling, ‘What about lung cancer?’” she said. “Just because I’m talking
about what’s happening to me doesn’t mean I don’t care about what’s
happening with you. Why do I have to constantly remind these people that
I matter?”
ImageMs. Allen, who starts school next week, is mostly worried about how
her high school class schedule will conflict with protests.
Ms. Allen, who starts school next week, is mostly worried about how her
high school class schedule will conflict with protests.Credit...Octavio
Jones for The New York Times
In July, President Trump dispatched federal agents to Portland in an
effort to subdue the protests. But their presence raised tensions in the
city even further, and new groups joined the demonstrations: moms in
yellow T-shirts, nurses in scrubs and cooks in grimy chef’s whites.
One night, after the mayor called on the federal officers to leave, Ms.
Allen had to go home and admit to her grandmother that she had been hit
by one of the agents as they cleared a street.
“I told her I wasn’t going to get hurt,” Ms. Allen said.
She had noticed a woman standing in the street as the agents swept
through, and called for her to get out of their way. She hesitated,
waiting for the woman to respond, and an agent struck her hip with a
baton, leaving a purple welt.
“As soon as she came in, she told me she didn’t want me to worry but
that the police had struck her and she was really, really sorry that she
got that close,” Ms. Vanderlyn said. “Her first reaction was to apologize.”
The encounter left Ms. Allen feeling depressed. “It makes you feel kind
of empty sometimes when you see people getting beat up on the street by
police and you have to run,” she said.
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Now that guns have been drawn by protesters and those who have tried to
disrupt the demonstrations, Ms. Allen has been feeling even more uneasy.
At first, she figured it was not much different than the police carrying
guns, but then she decided it was.
“It is scary because you never know,” she said. “The police have their
weapons on them where you can see them. These people, you don’t know
what they have.”
One night she met up with one of the friends she has made at the
protests, a young woman who goes by the nickname Moon.
Together, they stood staring up at the federal courthouse in Portland,
flinching as fireworks lobbed by the protesters detonated above them.
Ms. Allen sent videos to a few friends on Snapchat. Then the inevitable
cloud of tear gas ballooned around them.
“Your eyes hurt?” Ms. Allen asked.
Moon nodded, wincing behind her goggles.
“Let’s go,” Ms. Allen replied. She kept stopping to give eyewash to
people as they retreated, instructing them to tip their heads back and
rinse their eyes.
A block away, they settled onto a sidewalk to compare notes. Ms. Allen
furiously refreshed an Instagram account that labeled the protesters as
“rioters” and “antifa.” It irritated her that her months of peaceful
protest were being dismissed based on the actions of other people. It
felt like no one was listening.
It was time to go back out. Ms. Allen saw federal agents sprinting up
the street, and she started to run. But she remembered what she had
learned — walking was safer — and she forced herself to slow down.
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The agents rushed into a crowd of people, pushing them back.
“I’m scared,” Ms. Allen said, her voice rising. Still, she turned and
went back toward the agents, phone in hand in case she needed to start
recording.
The flashes of light and smoke sometimes seemed to her more like stadium
effects for a big concert than the sound and fury of a popular revolt.
“Doesn’t this seem like a movie? Doesn’t this seem surreal?” she said.
Another evening, Ms. Allen sat on the sidewalk across the street from
the county justice center. A man led the crowd in a series of chants.
“Say his name!” the man shouted into his microphone.
“George Floyd,” the crowd responded.
The voluminous pink wig that Ms. Allen has taken to wearing during the
protests to help her friends locate her in the crowds came tumbling out
from beneath her white hard hat. She thumbed through her phone,
reviewing photos of recent protests and screenshots of the threat she
had received on Facebook so she could show some of her friends.
“Are we tired?” the man thundered.
“Hell no,” the protesters shouted back.
But Ms. Allen did feel exhausted. Months of nonstop demonstrations, with
little sleep, were taking a toll.
“I understand what they’re trying to say, that we’ll never get tired of
fighting for what’s right,” she said. “But it’s tiring. I am tired.”
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Allen and other protestersfaced off against a
caravan of supporters of President Trump
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/22/us/portland-protests.html>that had
converged in Portland. During the confrontations, Ms. Allen was sprayed
with mace by one of the counterprotesters.
“That was worse than tear gas,” she said.
Other protesters came rushing over, helping her rinse the spray off her
face and skin. “That’s why I love being out there,” she said. “Because
even though not everyone who is with the movement is always right or we
always agree, I know everybody is going to have my back.”
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