Re: [Marxism] White Oregon
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Posted to Marxmail 10 years ago: Wasn't Portland a sundown town? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 I am sure that Michael Yates will have more to say on this, but when I was in Powell's bookstore in Portland some years ago while visiting some old friends, I spent about 15 minutes browsing through an old book on Portland that documented its racist past. The KKK was very strong in the city in the 1920s and the mayor actually allowed himself to be photographed in his offices with Klan leaders. --- The Sunday Oregonian January 5, 2003 Sunday SUNRISE EDITION UNCOVERING OREGON'S TARNISHED PAST OREGONIANS HAVE FEW reasons to gloat over Mississippian Trent Lott's serial apologies and self-induced miseries. Our state practiced forms of racial segregation for years after Strom Thurmond's failed 1948 bid for president. Forget the romantic notions of a glorious pioneer past and a virtuous present. Oregon is certainly not a Mississippi or a South Carolina, but our state's history is scarred with racial prejudices, social conflict and violence: German backlash. The Ku Klux Klan. Red Squads. Japanese American relocation. Skinheads. Gangs. Most Oregonians know little about their flawed history. Typical history lessons tend to emphasize the brawny, brave pioneers, and the state's many newcomers and a younger population carry no memory of Oregon's dark side. As the new year opens to the prospect of a war with Iraq, heightened tensions with North Korea, new terror alerts, constraints on our civil liberties and a sluggish economy, could Oregon's history predict its future? WAR TYPICALLY HOLDS CIVIL liberties hostage to national security and unleashes violence against perceived enemies. The stage is set for a new wave of social conflict at home. Reports of hate crimes in Oregon against Muslims and those of Arab ancestry increased from none to 29 between Sept. 11 and December 2001, according to the FBI. If we're not careful, the Patriot Act and newly established Department of Homeland Security could create an atmosphere of tolerating hate crimes. Oregon's history offers many examples of the powerful trying to extinguish the powerless. During the 1800s, the exploration and acquisition of the Oregon Country, as it was known, by the United States renewed the national promise of democracy and economic opportunity. Oregon was viewed as a pristine place far from the corrupting influences of slavery, immigration, Catholicism and the factory. In 1843, the Scottish Edinburgh Review newspaper said Oregon was the last corner on Earth left free for the occupation of a civilized race. Just a straightforward expression of an English and American imperative: Dominate Oregon and the West with a mostly Protestant -- any very white -- culture. That year began the mass movement along the Oregon Trail. This racial unity and cultural identity between white Britons and Americans proved a cautionary tale about violence, delivered with guns, axes, rocks and hands. Anglo-Saxonism merged with the biblical idea of God's chosen people, somehow justifying the triumph of white settlers over native peoples. Perhaps this assumption of Manifest Destiny explains part of what happened in Oregon to Native Americans, Chinese and Japanese during the 19th and 20th centuries. That attitude might also partly explain why Oregon's laws and constitution initially banned not only slavery but free blacks. DURING WORLD WAR I, Oregon's pacifists, political radicals and German immigrants were the victims of stereotyping, verbal assaults and violence. Even before Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition acts, local police and social organizations enforced proper patriotism. Historian Gordon Dodds cites numerous instances of silly and serious responses to war on the homefront: In Portland, the City Council changed the name of Frankfurt Street to Lafayette, Frederick to Pershing and Bismarck to Bush. In Tillamook, locals tarred and feathered a Swiss immigrant with a German-sounding name. And during World War II, Japanese Americans were forced to live in relocation centers in inland states. There they suffered the additional indignities of racism and economic loss. In the Hood River Valley, Portland area truck farms and other places with small pockets of Japanese Americans, the war disrupted and destroyed old friendships and livelihoods. Race was the calling card. Early in the 1900s, fears of espionage, subversion and terrorism spawned movements attacking radicals, foreigners and labor organizers. These early anti-radical activities evolved into the Red Scare of 1919, with its deportations and
Re: [Marxism] White Oregon
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Wasn't Portland a sundown town? Ad nauseum Ok, this thread has become officially intolerable. Where do a bunch of White marxists get off coming down on a whole state? Oregon has a racist history? Right, because no other state nor this entire nation has no such history. What, did you think that California was blessed with enlightened White people because the Europeans who populated it spoke Spanish? Oh, and how about New England--a real bastion of Caucasian culture, where, you know, Plymouth Rock landed on all those Indians and African Slaves. And, how about multicultural New York City born in the equivalent of a @$24 sale from the native populations and now (!) is so cosmopolitan that it results in the murders Black people by the police for various and sundry crimes of, wait for it, being Black. And now we have well-heeled left academics who make a great living speaking and writing about oppression recounting their, surprise!, horror stories about how not simply White people, but a whole state, is racist.My, such erudition and enlightenment is . . .underwhelming. I lived in Oregon, Portland and the Willamette Valley, received my first college degree there and if I could find the right opportunity, I would move there in a second never mind a New York minute. I have also experienced people who were not only immensely kind for no other reason than that I was different. I experienced support for some very unpopular points of view and been questioned with respect even in the face of my admittedly tremendous ire. There aren't enough Black (or Brown) people in Oregon? Really? There aren't enough in the entire nation for my liking. Better yet, perhaps some of you White people ought return to where y'all came from?! Of course, I don't really mean that in any way, but you will understand that how many of us is not really the problem as I sure y'all know. Just like every other place I've lived including my own home town in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas where the vast majority are Chicano, not only have I enountered racism but learned of our tremendously racist history. Big deal. I've also recognized, you know, as a Marxist, that White (never mind, Latino/Chicano) working people have a historic role that is more concrete than any ephemeral (historically speaking) limitd racist thinking that they may now exhibit. I wonder if any of you bourgeois liberal-thinking pretend revoutionaries even understand the quote of Marx's about The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.? One of the biggest disappointments in this list for me is the tremendously few people of color and women who participate. I submit that one reason for that is the kind bourgeois liberal thinking that creeps in when White Marxists get all indignant about the racism out in the sticks. Yes, this was a harangue. Roll your eyes and keep on with the bourgeois liberal crap recounting stories of racism that your White sensisibilities were subected to from other White people. Or better yet, learn a little bit of tolerance if not a longer view of history. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] white Oregon
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Dennis Brasky said: from a FB friend - The International Warehouse and Longshore Union was one of the first unions to be racially integrated. Within the ILWU, the one holdout was the all white local in Portland. That local finally integrated during the early 60's as a result of pressure from the Civil Rights Movement. Ken Hiebert replies: The story is told of the 1934 strike in San Francisco that Harry Bridges, busy as he was, spent Sunday mornings going to black churches and appealing for them to not be tempted into being used as strikebreakers. Blacks had been excluded up to that point and Bridges promised them that as soon as he could, he would open the doors for them. This leads me to the view that the ILWU leadership was anxious to see a racially integrated union and would have welcomed the pressure from the civil rights movement as what they needed to overcome the resistance of the Portland local. No doubt there are others with a better knowledge of this history and I would like to hear from them. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] White Oregon
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * To Manuel's point, it's worth remembering that after the Kansas Free Staters had fought their border conflict in the 1850s to exclude slavery, they adopted a new state constitution that explicitly excluded blacks. This certainly didn't reflect the will of the more militant antislavery people, who just ignored it--and the Civil War made it a complete dead letter. However, it provides an insight into just how little that practical antislavery of most of the politicians meant in terms of race . . . not just in Oregon but on the front lines of the struggle . . . . ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] white Oregon
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Some unions had African American members long before this. Those labor organizations in almost exclusive black occupations--waiters in NYC hotels, for example--were all-black and had a history predating emancipation. On Oregon, remember the link between the slaveholders and the Manifest Destiny idea. When John C. Breckenridge and the Southern Rights faction of the Democratic party broke away in the 1860 elections, his vice presidential candidate was Joseph Lane of Oregon--a transplant from Evansville, Indiana. At the same time, the Rouge River War in Oregon gave rise to John Beeson, a white farmer from Illinois driven out by his neighbors for siding with the Indians. Beeson took some of the local Indians with him on regular tours across the U.S. from the late 1850s through the Civil War. He established interesting ties with future sections of the International and brought Indians into the White House and organized a mass rally at the height of the Civil War. I think that modern Oregonians have some sort of local history site up there to memorialize him and his Indian neighbors. ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] White Oregon
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://slavenorth.com/exclusion.htm _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] White Oregon
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * From my book, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate. We lived in Portland for fourteen months and then for two months a few years afterward. The most distressing thing about Portland, and the fact that most belied its liberal image, was its racism. A writer once called Portland the “last bastion of Caucasian culture.” It is certainly a white town; less than 7 percent of the population is African-American. Even the city’s homeless are nearly all white, as are all the young people asking for money. Blacks who gravitated to Portland to work in the wartime shipyards were housed in a floodplain of the Columbia River and were soon enough driven out by high waters. The ghettoes where they were next allowed to live were destroyed by highway construction. Today the tiny black community is scattered over several mostly poor neighborhoods. Despite the small number of black residents, whites were inordinately hostile to them. While we lived in Portland, there were several highly publicized and completely unjustified police shootings of black persons; in the six months before we left, they shot and killed a black woman and a black man. The woman and her male companion were stopped. The man, a suspected drug dealer, was taken from the car and confronted by the cops. The woman moved from the back seat to the front and got behind the steering wheel. She started the engine and was probably about to flee. She was unarmed, and the police knew who she was and where she lived. One of them tried to prevent her from leaving. He claimed that, as he put his arm in the window, he felt his life threatened. So he simply pulled out his gun and shot the woman, leaving her children without a mother. A few months later, two cops, including one who was clearly a psychopath (though presented later as an upstanding Christian by the minister of his fundamentalist church), stopped a black man for failure to use his turn signal when pulling into a strip mall. The man was apparently high on cocaine, but was unarmed and offered no resistance. Within twenty-four seconds from the time he was motioned over by the officers, he was shot dead. Most white people acted as if these killings were justified. The radio talk show hosts ranted that when a person showed anything but complete obedience to police commands, he or she deserved to get killed. And if he or she had had any previous run-ins with the law, something hard for a black person to avoid in this country, then the shooting was not only justified but a positive benefit to society. Letters to the editors of local newspapers made the same arguments. But it wasn’t only police confrontations that got folks riled up about race. Portland has a professional basketball team. Their best player was Rasheed Wallace, an outspoken black man who led the league in technical fouls, seldom spoke with reporters, never dressed up, and made pointed remarks about racism in the National Basketball Association. When he declared in a rare interview that the league loved to recruit unsophisticated black players just out of high school because they were easier to exploit, the media went wild. How could a rich athlete make such comments? Didn’t Portland treat him and the other players like royalty? And now he spits on them. Editorialists, including former white Portland star Bill Walton, condemned him, and the sports show hosts suggested none too subtly that he be driven out of town on a rail. Interestingly, he was eventually traded to the Detroit team, and ever since has been a model citizen. It is hard to imagine two more different cities, in terms of racial mix and attitudes, than Portland and Detroit. In our large apartment building there was one black person. Karen was talking to him and two white women on the rooftop deck of the complex. She asked him what his experiences had been being a black person in a town with such a small minority population. He answered the question matter-of-factly, but one of the women exploded. How could Karen ask this man such a question? When Karen pointed out that Portland seemed to be a city devoid of black persons and was generally lacking in diversity, the irate woman said vehemently that this was not true. It was Karen who was the racist for saying this. “Why,” the woman said, “if you want to see diversity, come clubbing with me some night at four a.m. There are all kinds of persons out then.” It was difficult to respond to such a ridiculous assertion, but the woman kept up her harangue. The other woman, who had worked in customer
