OPINION | Reimagine Oregon offers a roadmap to justice we can all follow
I biked down to the waterfront to take in a key protest gathering space, Salmon Street Springs, in the daylight. Like all over downtown, art remains. A painting of Quanice Hayes on a piece of cardboard was propped against a railing, the river a wall of blue behind it. Hayes was 17 years old when the Portland police shot him three years ago.
Our city is inscribed with the art and markings of 70 days of uprisings, much of which has happened at night. The commitment and sacrifices of protesters needs to be carried into the daylight of our work, policies and intentions.
We need to carry it forward — how longtime organizers have put decades toward this moment, and how new leaders have risen up. How hard people work to build coalitions, and how, built out of crisis, some of those efforts cannot hold. How people summon their own truths in front of throngs of strangers. How people provided mutual aid, grilling ribs in a park, handing out bottled water, shifting money to people who need it. How too many people breathed in tear gas, their lungs compromised, menstrual cycles thrown into chaos. How too many people suffered head injuries from impact munitions. How journalists braved the streets to get the facts down. How artists painted murals so that we can visualize knowledge.
I call on myself and all of you to see all of these efforts — no matter how fractured — as an inheritance. Let no lift of the human spirit be wasted. Together we are confronting brutalities sustained by unchecked white supremacy, and there is so much work ahead.
Almost two decades ago, I counted among my mentors the poet Lucille Clifton. I was living in Southern Maryland at the time — in an area where, miles down the road, a county monument displayed a confederate flag — and I would sometimes go on “field trips” with Lucille. She would instruct me to show her where the graves of enslaved Africans were in the area where we lived. I couldn’t see them looking out on the cemetery. We were standing where mostly white Colonial settlers were buried. But they are here, she reminded me. The grave markers might be the rocks gathered up to build that wall, or wood long worn into the soil. But the graves are there, and we have to summon our political imaginations to see them and remember them.
Her poems did this work of insistent political imagination. She wrote of the murder of James Byrd, a Black man killed by white men who dragged him from a truck in Jasper, Texas, in 1998:
if I were alive i could not bear it.
the townfolk sing we shall overcome
while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth
into the dirt that covers us all.
The life of James Byrd, she insisted, must be remembered in our work toward justice.
Right now, on Portland’s streets, there’s a great deal to be reminded of visually. The protests, the art; it’s all there to summon that kind of imagination. But plenty of days, it’s not right there. And, for those of us who navigate our lives as white people, we must dedicate ourselves to an indefatigable commitment to this kind of expansive political imagination.
It is this political imagination that has been rendered into the initiative, Reimagine Oregon — an extraordinary effort from Black leaders and organizers over the last two months to chart a policy path forward over the next two years.
Unchecked, Oregon is a state founded in white supremacy, and it takes extraordinary commitment and labor to reimagine it as one where those white supremacy values are undone.
I urge you, if you have not already, to read through Reimagine Oregon’s “Policy Demands.” They contain steps toward accountability and action through the mode of legislation.
For many of us in our kitchens and our tents, we don’t know where to start. The plan breaks it down by jurisdiction. Where can we push on the federal level? The state level? The regional level? The county level? The city level? Each has its legislative body and particular areas where change can take root. The organizers from Reimagine Portland lay it all out, including point people with whom to press forward.
This is collected wisdom, a gathering of research and documents, with a focus on what’s to come. It is a summoning for us to not only remember the work that has already been done — the Urban League’s "State of Black Oregon," Portland African American Leadership Forum’s “People’s Plan,” Coalition of Communities of Color’s “Communities of Color in Multnomah County: An Unsettling Profile” and “Leading with Race: Research Justice in Washington County,” Unite Oregon and PAALF Action Fund’s “Defund. Reinvest. Protect” policy platform, and Washington County Ignite’s “Reimagine," as well as policy demands from the protests – but see the work to completion.
I encourage you to look through the proposals and find the areas that you are committed to and that you can lend your support to — police divestments, education, transportation, housing, health and well-being, economic development, legislative process and community safety.
We at Street Roots will be supporting this work, including the work we've been putting toward the Portland Street Response, expanding “a program where social service providers respond to mental health crises among houseless populations to decrease interface with police,” as Reimagine Oregon describes it. This week, we saw progress on the federal level when Sen. Ron Wyden introduced legislation to support similar efforts around the nation with enhanced Medicaid funding. Street Roots staff met with Wyden earlier this month to advise him on the work toward Portland Street Response thus far.
There’s much work directly ahead laid out in Reimagine Oregon, including much work to be done to keep people housed, making sure that rent assistance gets to Black Oregonians and that people are supported with rent relief.
On the streets, we’re 70 days in and counting. Let us carry it forward into all the work we do, realizing the justice we can imagine.
Director's Desk is written by Kaia Sand, the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.
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