No Place Like Home?

In the summer of 1969 the Portland Chapter of the Black Panthers began organizing in the North Portland neighborhood of Albina. A neighborhood whose Black residents faced substandard housing conditions, restricted access to capital due to racially motivated real estate practices and the displacement of residents and local businesses from public projects like the construction of Interstate 5 Freeway and the Emanuel Hospital expansion. The Panthers opened a Children’s Breakfast Program, Free Medical and Dental Clinics and protested and campaigned against the over-policing of Albina with broad support of the neighborhood that they both served and drew their strength from. Almost as important as the “who” did they serve and organize was the “where” did they serve and organize. The two questions often become inseparable when a block number can stand in for class or a street name for ethnicity. Much like how the Black Panthers found a home in Albina, the revolutionary Left has throughout history found its most dedicated base in the neighborhoods, blocks, and villages excluded from the wealth of capitalist society. This can be observed from the Socialist Black and Mestizo majority Barrios surrounding Caracas Venezuela to the Communist cadres of the Adivasi peoples of rural central India, to the Puerto Rican Young Lords of East Harlem. If the historic home of the Left is in the geographies home to the systematically poor and oppressed where is the Left in outer east Portland?

Almost all of my 27 years living and working have been in outer east Portland between 122nd street and 199th. For six months I joined and participated in the Portland Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. I went to meetings, trainings and events, paid dues, joined working groups and volunteered my time. After a while though, I realized I was going a bit out of my way to participate. All of the events were in inner east Portland, even the east Portland working group met quite a ways away from where I stay. My run-down car was surrounded by Priuses parked on the street and I was surrounded by well meaning college educated white folks. I began to get the feeling my participation had little to do with the lives of my neighbors or co-workers. So I quit and as I suspected the DSA had no relevance to my life as a community member of the majority poor and working poor part of town.

The DSA doesn’t represent the whole of Leftist grassroots activity in Portland. The latest wave of leftist mutual aid activity in the face of the Covid-19 Pandemic and stemming from the BLM movement is taking upon itself incredibly necessary work. Exciting as it is to see these projects bloom, it seems as though the on ground work doesn’t often make it past 82nd street. Outreach and awareness is sometimes limited to exclusive corners of the internet which may not be very accessible to communities out here. That said mutual aid is not just a tactic in itself but also building the capacity to feed and support folks. I find the infrastructure of Portland’s growing web of mutual aid networks and the folks they’ve already fed and clothed inspiring.

There are many reasons for Portland grassroots leftist organizing to move eastward. The first is the many unmet needs in outer east Portland that could and should be organized around by grassroots left groups. The City’s report on poverty in Multnomah county from 2019 reports “Outer East Portland has the county’s highest poverty rates, with 22% of its residents in poverty” and that “The most consistent areas of increasing poverty are east of I-205, but there are census tracts with high increases scattered in parts of Northwest, Southwest, and Northeast Portland.”. This is largely due to the gentrification of the historically Black North Portland area whose low income residents have been and are continually being displaced east of I-205. The report also highlights that the census tracts with the least access to affordable, nutritious foods, highest housing insecurity and highest vulnerability to environmental toxins are concentrated in outer east Portland and west Gresham.

This structural deprivation is, as it is in all of the so-called US, inextricably bound with racial capitalism and the second reason local organizing should look east is that organizing towards Black and Indigenous liberation will necessitate the confrontation of environmental racism at its location. The aforementioned areas of town have the highest percentages of BIPOC residents, the report notes “The areas with the highest percentages of populations of color (36% and above) are primarily located in East Portland, the northwestern part of Gresham, Fairview, Wood Village, parts of Troutdale, and areas of North and Northeast Portland. To a large extent, this mirrors the distribution of census tracts with the lowest median household incomes.” To understand how and why Portland looks the way it does requires a look at the city’s past. The genocide and forced removal of Indigenous peoples, Oregons history as an All-white ethnostate, racist landlords refusing to rent to immigrants on the west-side, and the gentrification and displacement of Portlands Black community has shaped the social geography this generation of activists and organizers has inherited. The acknowledgment and study of this socio-spatial reality of Portland has the potential to inform where and how to approach organizing work and shouldn’t be overlooked.

With that in mind I want to stress I am not calling for the formation of a “White Savior Bloc” of organizers to do mutual aid in outer east Portland or even worse, move out here. Far from that, mutual aid is already being done here within the working poor Black, Indigenous and non-white communites of east Portland. Whether that looks like neighbors providing child-care or warm meals for each other, minority Churches providing translation resources for immigrant families, or my relatives at the local Kava Circle pooling funds to support each other through the winter. I think that instead the left has as much potential to learn from existing mutual aid practices, as to offer.

Cultural exchange between the Left and East Portland in the context of ongoing gentrification, must be conscious and self aware. A very large portion, if not the majority, of the radical Left in Portland are white transplants and how organizing happens and who does the organizing is going to matter. That said if the Left can organize fight-and-win campaigns, community defense, food sovereignty campaigns, political education and militant solidarity networks while supporting and learning from existing mutual aid, the potential for the blossoming of a new vibrant movement in a working class and often forgotten part of Portland are great.