On Friday, we once again received alarming news of the latest victims of white supremacist rage in a seemingly unexpected place. Army veteran Ricky Best and recent Reed College alumni, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche were stabbed to death in Portland, Oregon because they interceded to stop Jeremy Christian’s racist harangue of two Muslim women on a rush hour commuter train. A third Good Samaritan, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, was also stabbed, but narrowly survived.
People were incredulous that an incident like this could happen in Portland, conveniently forgetting Oregon’s entry into the Union in 1859 as a whites only state. They fail to remember that Oregon had the highest per capita Klan membership of any state in the country and that it refused to ratify the 14th Amendment until 1973. They forget that Portland’s existence as a hipster heaven was made possible by housing policies that depressed property values in the Black community so that houses could be scooped up and renovated by the creative class.
Although Americans engage in a constant cycle of amnesia and evasion, Oregon is no outlier. We pretend that residential housing patterns and wealth disparities are due to mystical forces, rather than the predictable result of decades of explicitly racist policies that prohibited investment in property or wealth accumulation by Black people. The borders of those segregated communities were enforced by violence and if Black people managed to create communities in spite of these formidable obstacles, “urban renewal” policies engineered by the likes of Robert Moses directed development projects through the middle of Black communities, destroying them in the process.
We avoid stark words like “racist” and terrorist, privileging polite discourse over Black lives, evading the inconvenient fact that, over the course of this country’s history, African Americans (and their allies) have been its most frequent victims of terrorism. It is no surprise that the election of a man who waged a campaign based on contempt for people of color and immigrants has emboldened explicit and violent white supremacy. It is also no surprise that Trump would stock his administration with hard right racists, like Jeff Sessions, who is eagerly reverse engineering criminal justice policy to impose the maximum pain on Black and Brown Americans. Lastly, it is far from a surprise that an administration so dedicated to white supremacy domestically would turn its back on the liberal democracies of the NATO alliance and find common cause with an autocratic white nationalist like Putin.
The question to ask ourselves on this Memorial Day, as we ponder the deaths of Army veteran, Ricky Best and newly minted Lt. Richard Collins III at the hands of white supremacists is, “What will we choose to remember?”
#MemorialDay; #FightingWhiteSupremacy