To the Barricades: The Red House and the Future of Eviction Defense Archived Message
Posted by sashimi on December 11, 2020, 7:53 pm, in reply to "As COVID Deaths Explode and End of Eviction Moratorium Looms, Portland Community Beats Back Eviction"
David Rovics, 10 December 2020 (quote) Portland, Oregon has been in the headlines again over the last few days, and this trend will continue. The reasons for the headlines will vary depending on who you ask. If you ask the far right they will say something about Antifa terrorists having violent confrontations with the police because they hate law and order. The mainstream media's headlines will also tend to lead with the so-called violent clashes, but then they may inform us that the reasons for the confrontation have to do with folks trying to prevent the eviction of a Black and indigenous family that has lived in the Red House at 4406 North Mississippi for multiple generations. Either way, the stories you'll hear will focus on violence. If you look into it a little, you'll realize that what the stories are really focusing on are destruction of property - particularly the windows of police cars smashed by well-aimed rocks - and the number of times over the past few months of the eviction defense encampment on the front yard of the Red House that the police have been called because of "disturbances." 81 times, according to police records, the police emphasize in the report they issued after they entered the house and arrested occupants in a pre-dawn raid on December 8th. I can only imagine what some of those disturbances might have been caused by. The house is just at the end of the commercial section of Mississippi Avenue, where what remains of one of Portland's two historically Black neighborhoods stands, with its uncomfortable mix of wine-sipping gentrifiers living alongside a perennially struggling and shrinking Black working class, along with increasing numbers of people living in tents that line the highway which cuts through the neighborhood - the highway that was originally routed through that neighborhood in order to destroy it, as was done to so many other Black neighborhoods across the US when the highways were being built. Last time I visited the Red House a few weeks ago, I was only hanging around for a matter of minutes before a man I recognized as a fascist drove slowly past, staring at us from behind his bushy beard, a bizarre new fashion among the fash here in the northwest lately, and in other parts of the world as well. Indeed, if you follow people on Twitter who are involved with the struggle at the Red House, you will see frequent mentionings of the latest spotting of a known fascist, whether Proud Boy or Patriot Prayer, along with the latest prediction of when the riot cops will next come to create chaos. While the broken squad car windows, the conflicted neighborhood, the poverty, the homelessness, and the frequently-visiting fascist trolls are all very real, there is so much more going on at the Red House at this moment than these alarming reports would seem to imply. Primarily, what's going on there is pure beauty, in the form of the most profound expression of human solidarity you're likely to see anywhere. (/quote) -- Cont'd at https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/10/to-the-barricades-the-red-house-and-the-future-of-eviction-defense/
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