Shilpa Joshi and other people of color spent last weekend grieving after an extremist threatened two teenage girls, one in a hijab, on a MAX train before police say he stabbed three men, two fatally.



By Monday, three days after the attack, someone had crossed out "Black Lives Matter" at the memorial outside the train stop, replacing it with the rebuke "All Lives Matter." On Tuesday, most Portlanders returned to regular life.



For people of color, that meant going back to work in majority-white offices. It meant searching for rides to bypass a transit system some said felt unsafe. It meant squaring off with white roommates who blamed the attacks on mental illness, rather than the racism the suspect had expressed before the stabbings.



"It feels really tense to be out," Joshi said. "I sat in my car for an hour before I went into New Seasons because I just didn't want to do it."



For minorities in the metro area, the Memorial Day holiday attack was the traumatic climax in a year of mounting tension. A white extremist bore down on an African American girl and an Arab American girl, police said, then killed two white men who tried to calm him down. He is accused of slashing a third who survived.



Only nine months ago, police said a white supremacist chased down and killed a black teenager in Gresham. Two weeks later, a white cyclist attacked a black family in Northeast Portland with bear spray. The 12-year-old boy was so badly burned doctors had to sedate him to wash away the oils.



Oregon experienced 33 "hate incidents," a higher rate than any other state, in the 10 days after the presidential election, according to Southern Poverty Law Center data. The Oregonian/OregonLive has tracked another 20 reports of racial harassment since.



White Portlanders have donated money and grieved alongside people of color after the MAX attacks, but people of color said they don't seem the same outpouring day-to-day.



Most often, they said, it is regular life, the comments that go unreported, that makes Portland feel unsafe. It is the police who follow black men's cars too close, the bus riders who tug at Muslim women's hijabs.



It's even the white chefs who popularize the food immigrants grew up eating buttheir classmates mocked, a form of cultural appropriation.



"The big events frame everything," said Neil Panchmatia, a Portland State University graduate student who is ethnically East Indian and grew up in Kenya. "But there are constant reminders."



Increasingly, Panchmatia said, those big and small encounters have left people of color feeling that the liberal, welcoming Portland they dreamed about might not actually exist for them.



"When I encounter white individuals who moved here, they have these beautiful narratives of how they found a home here, how welcoming everyone is," Panchmatia said. "They're so happy they never intend to move again. But myself and other people of color, we have not had that kind of reception or the day-to-day experiences that say this is your community. This is not our place."



***



People of color move to Portland for the same reasons white people do. They come for the food scene and the volcanic vistas, for the public transportation and walkable neighborhoods. Many uprooted their old lives as Kason Ralph did because they believed Portlanders would accept them in ways more conservative communities hadn't.



Ralph, an engineering student at Portland State University, said he never felt harassed as a black person growing up in Texas. As a transgender man, though, he feared for his safety in the South.



"There, I felt like I may be murdered for being trans," Ralph said. "I heard Portland was this super-progressive, welcoming place, so I thought it would be safer for me. I was fooled."



Ralph enrolled at Portland Community College when he first arrived three years ago. In one of his first classes, he learned about Oregon's racist history. The state's original constitution prevented black people from moving here. When Oregon joined the United States in 1859, it was the only state that forbade black people from working or owning property. Lawmakers lifted the ban in 1926, but when 20,000 African Americans came during World War II for jobs in the shipyards, few landlords would rent to them. In the 1980s, the city was called the skinhead capital of the country.



That history, Ralph soon learned, was still close at hand.



"My first incident was on the bus," he said. He sat down two rows behind a white woman. Ralph said she called him the n-word and told him to get off the bus.



"And it's just been more incidents since then," Ralph said. "I have to ask myself, 'Why did I move here again?'"



Joshi said she braced herself when she moved from Washington, D.C., to Portland last year. She grew up in Beaverton as the suburban city's demographics shifted. The 9/11 attacks happened on her fourth day of high school. Joshi grew up in a Hindu family with parents who came from India on specialized work visas. Other students called her a "towel head" and worse, she said.



Joshi spent a decade away attending school and working on environmental issues. She returned to work as the organizing director of the nonprofit Renew Oregon.



"I knew I'd have some reverse culture shock upon re-entry," Joshi said. "But I guess I wasn't ready for how many new white people have moved here. I do feel the city has changed."



The success of white-owned ethnic restaurants has felt particularly "invalidating," Joshi said. South Asians have toiled across the metro area, she said, but their restaurants haven't received the same investments or media attention that white-owned spots have.



White chefs don't understand how cooking others' food is hurtful, Joshi said, because they don't take time to listen to the immigrants whose culture they're co-opting.



"Because Portland is so white, white people get away with not having anyone check them," she said. "The only feedback loop they have is other white experiences, which creates an echo chamber of whiteness."



***





The gentrification of black neighborhoods and the lack of minority voices in public office long ago left many black and brown Portlanders feeling isolated and unvalued.



Since President Donald Trump's election, reports of racist acts have multiplied.



People have spray-painted swastikas on Hillsboro schools and a Northeast Portland church. In Lake Oswego, as a prank, students created a KKK club. Later, someone wrote threats and slurs on three Lake Oswego High School bathroom walls. In March, an Iranian refugee found his Troutdale home vandalized with anti-Muslim graffiti. Last month, prosecutors charged an active-duty Marine with a hate crime after he allegedly said racial slurs in the Iraqi restaurant DarSalam before lobbing a chair at a server.



Similar things are happening across the country, but Portland feels particularly unsafe because the city is 76 percent white, said Stephanie Duncker, a black creative who has lived in New York and Florida.



"I stand out more here than I would in other cities," she said. "Standing out makes you a target for white supremacists. It's scary because how do you combat something like bear-macing children? How do you stop something like that happens when it's so random?"



Sophia Kinhnarath, a Muslim business-owner and educator who lives in East Portland, said the Islamophobia here feels as intense now as it did right after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.



"For high schoolers now, the Trump era is their 9/11," she said. "Before the election, it wasn't on my mind that something might happen to me. Now people are more verbal. There are actions. People have been given this power to say and do what they want."



As a woman who wears a hijab, Kinhnarath said some days are downright scary. She said a car stalked her through the Clackamas Town Center parking lot recently, with the driver gunning the engine next to her.



"It only takes one thing to bounce you," Kinhnarath said. She called the police, but the officers just told her to be watchful, she said.



This week, Kinhnarath said she was afraid to leave the house. She called her husband every time she arrived or left a new place.



Zahir Janmohamed, the policy director for the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, wrote in a CNN op-ed this week that he has "lost count of how many Muslims, especially teenage black Muslim women, have confided in me that they have been threatened on public transportation, that they have had their head scarves pulled while walking home at night, that they have been called 'ISIS lovers' while walking on their public high school campuses."



Kinhnarath and her husband run the Islamic Book Cafe, a blog aimed at helping people study Islam. They hope to build a community center in East Portland next year, she said, in part to help non-Muslims learn about Islam. She was heartened by white Portlanders' compassion after the attacks, she said, but they don't try to get to know her in more peaceful times.



"We should have a community where people reach out to you regardless," she said.



Panchmatia, the Portland State master's student, said even as a person of color he has realized he hasn't connected with other cultures often enough. While working on his sociology thesis, the Northwest Portland resident has met Somalis who say they feel isolated from Portland's mainstream cultures.



"I had to challenge myself," he said. "Marginalized groups are so out of place and out of mind that people live in these wonderful bubbles where they go on bike rides and march in the streets, but they're unfortunately removed from the ground reality of people living around the corner. People need to make that trip around the corner and ask people, 'What are you experiencing?'"



***



Though Gov. Kate Brown and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler have held press conferences with Muslim leaders in the days since the attack, people of color say they still feel they aren't included in looking for solutions. More than a dozen people interviewed by The Oregonian/The OregonLive said they felt less safe since Wheeler announced plans to add officers and security guards to the transit police force.



Wheeler asked the federal government to revoke the permit for a June 4 right-wing "free speech" rally, but people of color say they are still hurt that the city allowed an April "March for Free Speech" on 82nd Avenue to continue even as participants yelled racist chants.



Jeremy Christian, the man accused of the MAX attacks, participated in that march. He raised his arm in Nazi salutes and wore a Revolutionary War-era flag like a cape. Videos from the march show he shouted, "Die Muslims."



Police spoke with him. Later that afternoon, Willamette Week reported, TriMet buses gave the protesters free rides home.



"There's this fake libertarian ethic here that allows dangerous people to take up places in the street," Duncker said. "Other places, they don't allow that violence to go unchecked. But here, they don't see it as violence. They see it as free speech."



Black protesters haven't been afforded the same treatment, people of color said. And they believe they won't be protected by an increased police presence on public transportation.



"What police presence on the MAX has afforded our communities is a drastically higher arrest rate of black and Latino community members for not having proper fare," Joshi said. "That hasn't afforded any safety for our communities. It only increases the amount of aggression that we experience by just accessing this public good, which is transit. It just means more of our folks will be pulled off trains."



So people of color say they are learning to adapt.



Ralph, the engineering student, said he largely has stopped riding the MAX. Since the election, people confuse him for Muslim, he said, and have called him a terrorist. Ultimately, he plans to leave Portland after he graduates.



Others said the year's violence has compelled them to stay and forge a safer city.



"There's this inner drive to leave as a way of self-protection," Panchmatia said. "But a lot of us are adamant to stay. By leaving, we take away community for other newcomers."



They're pulling closer together. They're hosting potlucks and carpooling to work. They're buying pepper spray and teaching each other self-defense techniques.



"We're realizing," Duncker said, "all we have to rely on is each other."





-- Casey Parks

503-221-8271

cparks@oregonian.com; @caseyparks