Today, I answered the summons of the PNW-YLF, and came to Terry Schrunk Plaza.

I arrived shortly before the scheduled start time of 11 am.

What I saw was surprising: the protest appeared to be a combined effort between the Portland DSA and Portland XR. With less than 5 minutes till go time, the PNW-YLF wasn’t there. No one was even wearing a mask.

At first, I tweeted out that the PNW-YLF had had their protest hijacked out from under them by XR. This would have been revenge for the PNW-YLF seizing the momentum of the climate strike, about a month ago.

However, the PNW-YLF’s contingent arrived within minutes of my sending that tweet. Things were odd, though. They were less than twenty strong, and they stayed across the street from the protest proper.

The protest proper, at this point, wasn’t significantly larger than the PNW-YLF’s contingent: it was less than fifty people, and did not grow larger throughout the two hours of the protest.

I went across the street to ask the PNW-YLF what the game plan was. They explained to me that they were staying away from the main protest, at the request of indigenous elders and the protest organizers. Apparently, the PNW-YLF had been asked to show up to provide security — but had also been asked not to directly associate themselves with the protest proper.

I attempted to explain to the PNW-YLF that they were being had, but they were not receptive to the idea. So, I simply took a posed picture of them, then returned to the main protest.

The main protest was some radlib bullshit. A man talked about the power of prayer — he specifically said that it could cure cancer and get you out of prison. He asked that everyone pray for the end of ICE. It’s a nice fairy-tail, but, in the words of Frederick Douglass: “I prayed for 20 years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs”.

A woman came up, and said that some security guard had stopped her and some other activists as they were handing out pamphlets to workers. The pamphlets had been anti-ICE ones, explaining to the workers that the fruit of their labor was being expropriated for the purpose of locking children in cages. According to the woman speaking, the security guard had politely asked her and her friends to leave — when on camera. Off-camera, though, he had (allegedly) told another contingent of the same group that “we’ve been tracking you” and “we know what you’re doing on the 14th”, with the clear implication that this referred to this protest.

Looking around myself, I saw nothing but a tiny (by Portland standards) protest, split up into groups. There was one police officer watching from up the hill, and a DHS officer watching from a car.

There was a TV news camera-man, though. There was media attention, and the liberals with XR had been successful in keeping the anarchists from appearing in front of the cameras.

The PNW-YLF’s contingent did move somewhat closer, while still maintaining a street’s worth of separation, towards the end of the protest. Further, three or four SHARPs (who had been there, bloc’d up, in support of the PNW-YLF) did detach from the PNW-YLF’s group and quietly and respectfully join the main protest. The SHARPs, being more experienced fighters, seem to have made the better tactical choice.

This exclusion of the black bloc served the liberals both by letting them maintain their image of pacifistic mass appeal, and by keeping the anarchists from gaining any prestige or cultural capital — let alone recruits — by appearing on TV along-side the main protest.

This same objective was clearly present at the climate strike — the protest marshalls with the liberal NGOs (XR among them) attempted to keep the black bloc out of the protest, and especially away from the cameras. However, at the climate strike, everyone was smart enough to ignore the marshalls. Apparently, however, this was not due to any special understanding of long-term anarchist strategy, but simply because it was older white women who were asking.

When I made comments to this effect on twitter, the PNW-YLF responded:

https://twitter.com/PNWYLF/status/1183850159593021441

The trick was, it turns out, to simply swap out the white old people for indigenous old people.

There is a terrible tendency within white anarchism to avoid criticism of the traditional hierarchies of people of color. I understand where the impulse comes from — why criticize tribal elders when we have our own terrible leaders, who have much more power and much more relevance to our daily lives?

Normally, there is absolutely no reason to fight indigenous traditions when white traditions are so much more ever-present and so much more capable of exerting their toxic grip on our lives.

However, a hereditary and age-based hierarchy justified by reference to traditional social norms is still bad, even if it’s not white people doing it. Indigenous elders are not automatically on our side, even if they are more victimized by power than they are possessors of it.

Despite all this, it should be noted that the PNW-YLF did have this to say, in further comment:

https://twitter.com/PNWYLF/status/1183854317045895168

Perhaps we should trust that the PNW-YLF made every effort, and took every consideration, in their plans for today. They at least do say that there is non-public information that justifies their actions. Maybe it would. I wouldn’t breach their security on this, even if I had been in on their planning meeting, which I was not — so, short of them making further public statements on the matter, I suppose we will not know.

I do hope that other activist groups can find lessons in this — on organizing, on public image, and on the perils of united fronts.