Book Review-ish: Rian Dundon's Protest City

Rian Dundon's view of Portland's Summer of Rage

"The mood was celebratory as the first riot of 2021 was declared. "We did this to remind them that we still can," a smiling protestor told me as the police line retreated from a barrage of paint balloons and fireworks. "We can do this anytime we want."

-An anonymous protestor, from Rian Dundon’s introduction.

My Own Pandemic, which also means, My Own George Floyd Protests, which were largely the impetus of a year of protests and back-and-forth street battles in Portland, was spent in Los Angeles, deep in my own mutual aid work as the Logistics Super Auntie for the Auntie Sewing Squad, mostly working in support of our partners in Navajo Nation. I live near downtown Los Angeles, and I could hear the LAPD roar up Central Avenue almost daily, the sister sound to the protests that would roar though the canyons of DTLA and reach my ears while I packed boxes of essential supplies in between drives out to Navajo Nation.

I did live in Portland for a time, and it is home when I am there. As the protests in Portland turned into a testbed for full-fascism in the United States, every detail of a city at the edge of revolution concerned me. I was very concerned about my friends, who, today, seem as transformed by being on the front lines in Downtown Portland as I was transformed by my work on the supply lines of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

My work during a pandemic meant that I could not merge my body with crowds of protestors that roared in the distance. It meant learning how to play a position in a linked series of social justice campaigns and to hope and trust that others were playing there. It meant learning to love people I will never meet, who fought battles I wished I could fight.

I have a terrible fear. I have a terrible fear that amid our collective trauma from the Pandemic, the racial crisis that is everlasting but that exploded when George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis police will be obscured and forgotten by so many, especially by those who it is most convenient to do so, which has been the core of the problem, time and time again.

There are three introductions to Rian Dundon's Protest City.

Each introduction notes the fuzzy space between the shield walls of the Black Blocs and the organized community-driven work of serious local activists, the everything-all-at-once puzzle where some pieces are hearts and some pieces are minds. That space, between the human need to riot and the human need to build networks of care, feels very fraught in a city where the overwhelming majority of protestors are white, and the issue at hand begins with the abuse and murder of Black bodies.

Two of the introductions make mention of Portlandia, a whites-on-whiteness critique that has always felt more like a tickly massage for white liberalism than comedy - always more of spork than a knife. One cannot understand how power works in Portland without seeing its cheery-facade reflection in Portlandia, one supposes.

The protests and counter protests and police actions shot by Dundon on a Fujifilm X10 pocket camera were about many things, but they were always about power. Who has it? Who wants a share of it? Who wants someone else to have none of it? What is the history of power?

Every imaginable kind of power that exists in what my friend Donnell Alexander, who wrote the first of Protest City's introductions, reminds us was founded as a whites-only state, is at play in a book whose photos cover a wide span of politicized bodies - A pickup truck flying trump flags shares space with Federal paramilitaries and black-clad anarchist activists.

You need to see your fellow Americans in these photos.

You need to see the photos of fascist shock troops, of haphazard shield walls, of ACAB graffiti, of toppled statues, of rubber bullet welts, of militarized police going about violence with ease, of Antifa activists ready for all-out conflict, of balaclava-clad Boogaloo Boys and open-faced Proud Boys, of trucks with white women in the back and Trump flags flying, of rag-tag protestors in rag-tag gear…. You need to see the photos of scarred walls and photos full of Joker-green Hexachlorophene smoke,

You need to see the photo on page 156 of a left-wing activist, tucked behind a car, semi-auto pistol in hand, exchanging gunfire with a man who brandished a pistol at a protest. The back of their black hoodie is a circular screenprint of an elk, an anarchy symbol, florals, and a body of people at the bottom. The text reads "WE KEEP US SAFE."

I almost ordered the same patch off of Etsy a few months ago. Thinking of this, I'm reminded of moon phase patches I received from Kate, an Ukrainian Etsy seller, in the days before the war began. Kate's store closed, and I wrote to her. I've never received a response And I just hope she's okay. I hope that the person in the photo on page 156 is okay, too.

* * * * *

There was a moment - a long-ass moment - during the haze of COVID-19 where full fascism at the federal level was tested, and it was repelled - if only for a moment - in Oregon. This moment should not be forgotten.

These moments cannot be forgotten, because we now see other tests of fascism, most dramatically in Florida, where an autocrat has control over all levels of power in government, and which is home to not one, but two fascist-Presidents-in-waiting. We cannot disregard that as many of a quarter million Americans, largely consisting of transgender people and their families, are now refugees who have fled Florida and other states that are directly attacking the bodily autonomy of transgender people, their medical providers, and their families.

These moments cannot be forgotten, because even in the Blue State of California, neo-Brownshirt thugs, the Proud Boys, are brawling in the streets outside of school board meetings in suburban Glendale, while the “respectable,” but Hitler-quoting, Moms For Liberty, a fascist astroturfing group out of Florida, are inside the meetings, a neo-NS-Frauenschaft (Nazi Socialist Women’s League), playing the media-friendly part of concerned moms and homemakers while their male counterparts strut and threaten outside like overfed roosters.

Just as I was concerned for my friends in Portland, I am now concerned for my friends in Los Angeles and elsewhere, some of whom are now experiencing first hand what my friends in Portland already know - that only we can keep us safe, that the police are effectively allied to right-wing thugs, and that those thugs are ready to fight and looking for any excuse to do so.

When we voted Trump out of office in 2020, we didn’t achieve victory, we achieved a tenuous stalemate - at best. More people voted for Trump after he tested fascism in Portland than did in his first election - about three million more. and he is representative of what they want. They want full fascism, they want full white supremacy, they want full Christian nationalism, they want to hold all power, and if they’re given a chance, it won’t be a test, next time. It doesn’t feel like a test, anymore.

Rian Dundon’s Protest City: Portland’s Summer of Rage is out now, from Oregon State University Press. Have your local bookstore order you a copy if they’re not already stocking it. It has an excellent timeline of events - I almost wish that OSU Press had hired someone to write a teacher’s guide.