Since the presidential election, “In Our America” signs have proliferated in front yards and windows across Portland, spreading messages of love and tolerance to passers-by. But to the casual observer, the messaging may obscure a newly energized underbelly of intolerance in this majority-white city.
On May 26, an extremist’s heinous crimes on a MAX train shocked the community. But the City of Roses has actually had one of the country’s highest rates of hate- or bias-related incidents since the Nov. 8 election. That’s according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which recorded 50 hate and bias incidents statewide in the three months after Election Day. Taking into account population, it was a disproportionately high number compared to all our neighbors: California (154 incidents), Washington (65 incidents), Nevada (seven incidents) and Idaho (five incidents).
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Street Roots recently spoke with Lecia Brooks, outreach director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Ala.-based group that tracks extremists, sues on behalf of their victims and works to counter their messaging.
Brooks spoke about the attack in Portland, extreme-right beliefs in general, nationwide hate trends and strategies for combatting their discriminatory rhetoric.
Jared Paben: As you know, on May 26 we had an incident in Portland where a man intimidated two girls before killing two men and injuring a third. I’m wondering, was Jeremy Joseph Christian on Southern Poverty Law Center’s radar before this happened?
Lecia Brooks: No, Jeremy Christian wasn’t on the radar, though it was really easy to find information related to his white supremacist and extremist-right ties. It was all over his Facebook page, all over his social media. As you know, April 29 he showed up at a free speech rally in Portland and had a little incident with police, so it was real easy to find intelligence on him.
J.P.: What can you tell us about his views? And since the SPLC has a nationwide perspective, are they common views?
L.B.: Well, they are more common these days. As you know, post-election, we saw an extreme uptick in the number of hate- and bias-related incidents across the United States. And, of course, Portland, sadly, has one of the highest rates of hate crimes or hate incidents of a metropolitan area since the election.
J.P.: Wow, I hadn’t realized that. Do you have any data on just how bad it’s been in Portland?
L.B.: I don’t have the figures in front of me, but what we did at the Southern Poverty Law Center was we had a Web portal that we invited folks to report incidents that they either witnessed or were victim to, and we gathered close to 1,500 reports (nationwide). We continue to gather reports. There have been a number of flyerings of white nationalist flyers on college campuses across the United States. And the Pacific Northwest has a history of racist violence and racist hate groups, so we weren’t too terribly surprised that this incident would happen there.
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J.P.: I get the feeling that Portland kind of thinks of itself as a liberal, tolerant bulwark against a rising tide of hate. That image that you just painted contrasts with that. Should we be justified in being surprised that something like what happened last week could happen here?
L.B.: Well, I think so. I mean, Portland has made great strides in moving toward a more progressive side. I think that, generationally, you do have a large majority of progressive liberals in the area who are definitely against hate and bias. But, as I mentioned, the history goes pretty deep. The Southern Poverty Law Center had a case in 1988. There was an attack on an Ethiopian graduate student, a Mr. Seraw, who was attacked by a group called White Aryan Resistance. They were a California-based hate group. But white supremacists beat him to death in front of his apartment building. Portland is also home to a group called Volksfront, which is now defunct but was a very violent neo-Nazi group. A number of adherents of the ideology moved from the South to the Pacific Northwest. As you know, the Pacific Northwest is very mono-racial. Portland is 70 percent white population. So what you find in those instances is that, oftentimes, white supremacists can hide in plain sight.
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J.P.: Have you guys identified Christian as a member of any organized group at all?
L.B.: No. We don’t see that he’s tied to a group. But I will say that he seems to have picked up on the rhetoric that began during the presidential election with Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant, Islamophobic rhetoric. One of his posts talks about purging the country of immigrants. He says if Donald Trump is the next Hitler, then he’s joining the SS to put an end to the monotheist question. Portland police are on record as saying that they thought he had some kind of a mental condition. What we’re seeing at the Southern Poverty Law Center is people just kind of parroting and echoing this message of being anti-anyone out, anti-people of color, anti-immigrant, anti-anything that’s not white nationalist.
J.P.: That kind of gets at one of my questions, which is maybe a psychology question: How does someone get such a warped lens through which to view the world?
L.B.: Well, what we’re seeing is the shifting demographics that are taking place across the country, and that started about a decade ago, where demographers showed that whites would no longer hold the numeric majority in the country by about 2040 or 2050. We began to see major pushback around the time that Obama was elected during the first term, and then the second term. So you find that some whites are feeling marginalized or feeling like they’re being disenfranchised or dispossessed of the country. So you find a lot of working class or disenfranchised white folks who think the country is being taken over. So he’s probably picked up on a lot of that rhetoric.
J.P.: So to ask about Trump, have his positions actually helped to change minds in a horrible way and create hate, or are they simply emboldening the groups that are already out there?
L.B.: We find that his rhetoric is emboldening people and making it OK for people to verbalize and act out what they think. Then, of course, when you have the president of the United States saying “America first,” and “We’re going to build a wall,” and “We’re going to have a Muslim ban,” it kind of provides people with cover to be able to say those same things themselves.
J.P.: How would you describe the president’s response to what happened here in Portland?
L.B.: Oh, it was awful. I think I read that it took three days, four days. That was such an awful tragedy; it should have been spoken to right away. In fact, with the increase of hate and bias incidents, we’ve long called on him to speak out strongly against such acts and call them what they are: un-American. But he doesn’t seem to be able to do so. There’s also criticism, which I would agree with, that it seems that his staffers posted that tweet on his POTUS account and not his personal account. He has far more followers on that personal account, so it would have been a more important message for him to denounce that hateful act from that account, but he didn’t.
J.P.: After this incident, our mayor in Portland called on the federal government to cancel a couple of rallies that were going to be held downtown on federal property. One was a “March Against Sharia” and the other was an “alt-right,” free-speech rally. The General Services Administration declined not to revoke those permits. One of the organizers canceled the event anyway, the March Against Sharia. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the mayor. What would SPLC’s thoughts be on moves like that?
L.B.: Well, the Southern Poverty Law Center certainly supports free speech laws. And no, it should not have been canceled. I think the organizers of that anti-Shariah event did the right thing by postponing it. But, you know, we have to deal with hate by finding a way to counter-protest these gatherings. But to cancel it is not the answer.
J.P.: Attempting to block – or even succeeding in blocking these rallies – what does it do to the psychology of extremists? Does it embolden them? Does it dishearten them?
L.B.: Oh, it emboldens them. We had such an event at Auburn. Richard Spencer, the white supremacist, was supposed to speak at Auburn University, and the university administrators canceled the event. And that certainly emboldened him and his supporters, and it ended up being a much larger thing than it would have been had the administration just let it go forward. We saw the same thing happen at Berkeley. So, yeah, it adds fuel to the fire, and it feeds their mistaken notion that their free speech rights are being impinged upon. We just have to find a way to hold these events and depend on law enforcement to keep them safe.
J.P.: What’s the adoption been like of Southern Poverty Law Center’s education curriculum Teaching Tolerance here in the Pacific Northwest? And could we do more to teach it in schools?
L.B.: The Teaching Tolerance project began in 1991 as a way to kind of inoculate students against messages of hate. What we’re wanting to do is provide educators across the country with free resources so that they can work with the students to develop an appreciation for diversity before they can become subjected to messages of hate. We have an excellent following in the Pacific Northwest and teachers across the Pacific Northwest use our resources. We, of course, want to see them in every single school. After the election, we sent resources to every school in the country. We also sent our magazine to every school in the country with the hope that they’ll adopt and use our free resources.
J.P.: Are there any new strategies that SPLC is considering, given this environment that we’re in right now. New programs that are being pondered?
L.B.: Well, we’re working on some programming within Teaching Tolerance that will help teachers be better at analyzing digital messages and with developing some fluency around digital literacy. We’re also looking to educate them more about hate groups and extremist views so that they’re able to recognize any signs they see in their students early on and intervene. So our program strategy is the same, we’re just developing different resources and materials to meet the present needs.
J.P.: When you mentioned digital literacy, it made me wonder if fake news is a big part of how these groups spread.
L.B.: Of course, of course. I don’t know if that’s how they spread, but it’s how the rhetoric spreads, right? The disinformation, the lies that are kind of floating around as to the danger of Muslims, the danger of immigrants, this kind of disinformation is what feeds people on the extreme right.
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J.P.: Since you guys have been tracking these incidents for years around the country – violent incidents – do you have any advice, generally speaking, for Portlanders who are grieving and trying to figure out how to respond to something like what just happened?
L.B.: Well, I think what happened in Portland is kind of a testament to true America and how we stand up for one another. The gentleman who died, his dying message being, “Tell everyone on the train that I love them,” is a beautiful message for all of us. We certainly don’t want to encourage people to get in harm’s way, but we also do want people to stand up against hate. And if we do it together, united, we have a great chance of pushing back. We have to push back. We cannot allow hateful violence and rhetoric to become normalized. We need to marginalize people who are espousing these beliefs and not give them any credence.