“We are in a marathon, not a sprint.”

Yes, it’s felt like a slow-moving marathon since the Covid-19 crisis kicked in – a trudge through a dream of a river of mud. But Damaris Webb, the Portland actor and director, was talking about something more than that. Webb, an African American woman who was born in Tanzania, grew up partly in Portland and spent about twenty years studying and working in New York before returning to Portland. She was talking about the Black Lives Matter movement and Portland’s weeks-long protests that began after the murder via police knee of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the amount of work that looms beyond. “I resonate with the statement that we’re grappling with two pandemics simultaneously, and they’re both international,” she said.

I wanted to talk with Webb partly because she’s a founder with Laura Lo Forti of Vanport Mosaic, an innovative organization that looks deeply into the historical roots of cultural issues in Oregon and elsewhere, and because her work in general has landed in the fertile meeting-place of art, culture, and politics. As the city’s nightly protests move into their third month and the presence of heavily armored federal agents ratchets tensions higher and higher, she is deeply aware of the underlying issues of dissent in a city that is 77 percent white and not quite 6 percent black. “It’s so nuanced. That is always a concern,” she told me in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “There is a sort of disorientation. Especially when being Black is a minority of a minority of a minority in Portland.” As dramatic and attention-grabbing as the nightly protests have been, she said, the issues are deeper and longer. “Keep staying engaged and serious,” she advised. “It’s not going to be over. Not even when the feds leave.”

***

IN FACT, THE TENSIONS ARE LONGSTANDING, and they run in multiple fractured lines. On Monday I ran into an acquaintance, a smart and capable and ordinarily wryly funny Black woman, who had heard an hour earlier that her brother had tried to slit his wrists and had been rushed to a psychiatric ward. She was waiting to be allowed to go and see him, and she was of course upset. It was everything, she said – the protests, the pressure, the pandemic. It all just came down on him. Lots of people are feeling that way, she said. A few evenings earlier, she added, she’d gone downtown to see what was happening, and was shocked: “It felt like I was in the middle of a Third World country.”
 
If you’re Black and American, a lot of that unrelenting pressure that my friend’s brother felt comes from police culture. How do we expect police to solve the problem when to such a great degree police are the problem? I cannot begin to count the number of Black Portlanders who’ve told me over the years of their encounters with the police: being stopped while driving or walking, for no reason other than going about their everyday lives, often in their own neighborhoods; being arrested and illegally searched because they “looked” like a suspect in a crime somewhere else; being on the bad end of cynical and unprovoked stop-and-frisks. Sometimes these stories made the news. Usually they did not. They were just part of the background noise of life as usual – the so-called “normal” of this unnerving stretch of contemporary history.
 
One story that did make the news, several years ago, was from the side streets of North or Northeast Portland – I don’t recall the precise location – which is my sector of the city, and I’ll preface it by saying that in many neighborhoods the streets are unofficial peoples’ property: People stroll in them, idle their cars in the middle of them to stop and chat with friends, treat them as common space, just another part of the village. If you happen to be driving along one of these streets, you simply stop and wait a bit. That’s how things work.
 
On this particular afternoon two teen-age girls were walking home after basketball practice, down the middle of a side street as was their habit, when a pair of officers in a patrol car spotted them and jumped out and took them down, sprawling them on the pavement and handcuffing them. For walking in the street. And all these years later the inescapable question with the inescapable answer remains: Would two white teen-agers, walking down the center of the street in their own neighborhood, laughing and chatting and bouncing a basketball, have been stopped, let alone assaulted?
 

BLACK LIVES MATTER MEANS, of course, that Black deaths matter: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, so many others. It also means that Black lives matter. Inside a fractious political and cultural debate lie individual tragedies. How do you go about living your life in a nation in which you are constantly looking over your shoulder, in which you are legally free but in actuality unfree in so many ways?

Continues…