YSWNPY-Zine 20, final - Flipbook - Page 24
“There is nothing I can see in our world today, in our
history, giving me hope that one day antiracists will win
the fight,” he says.
The decision was made on the same night officer
Darren Wilson received a non-indictment for the killing
of unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson,
Missouri. The Disarm PSU campaign stood firmly in
front of the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter
movement. It existed as the student flank of the uprisings
in the name of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray in our
city, primarily led by Don’t Shoot PDX, which is
Portland’s primary iteration of the Black Lives Matter
movement. Disarm PSU was a small testament to the
legacy of the student radical’s role in the Black liberation
movement. Over the next five years, student organizers
fought back, holding continuous actions including
shutting down the Board of Trustees meetings and
orchestrating a student walkout.
In truth, I spent many of my years in the Disarm PSU
campaign without any hope we would win. I only knew
that if we stopped we would surely lose. Our campaign
significantly changed the discourse on our campus
around policing. It rippled through the Oregon
university system and inspired multiple other
powerful campaigns calling for the disarmament of
campus officers. Disarmament was worth fighting for,
and so we continued, even when there was no evidence
we would win.
In June of 2018, officers James Dewey and Shawn
McKenzie shot and killed Jason Washington, a Black man
breaking up a fight across the street from a campus bar.
That fall, students occupied the front steps of the
campus security office for ten days, gathering thousands
of signatures on a petition calling for the disarmament
of the officers. Still, the administration shut us out and
refused to listen to students.
I was eighteen when it started. I am twenty-four now.
This campaign was my coming of age. I grew up here.
I became an organizer, finished my degree, left school
and continued to bear the weight of the campaign on
my back. I lost sleep agonizing over everything we didn’t
do. Every action we didn’t organize. Every escalation we
should’ve put forward. The anxiety became even more
intense after Jason Washington was killed. That’s to say
nothing about what his entire family experienced, its just
to say that the already high stakes felt even more
astronomical. Ibram X. Kendi ends his book ‘How to be an
Anti-Racist’ with a quote that has defined my experience
as an organizer.
“What gives me hope is a simple truism. Once we lose
hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the
odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give
humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in
communion, a chance to forever be free” (Kendi 2020).
It was during this global pandemic, where I fear for my
life daily as a chronically ill person, and during the most
significant racial justice uprisings in the history of this
country, which have inspired me, but also demolished
me emotionally, that I learned that the fruits of our labor
had finally paid off. It was in 2020, which has been a hell
my eighteen-year-old self never could have imagined,
that the tireless organizing of this small group of
students collided with the moment it was meant to see
all along. In the political climate, Portland State could no
longer justify engaging in this seven-year stand-off with
students. If we had given up when we had no hope, this
opportunity would have passed us.
This is the power of organizing — when the work you’ve
done meets a moment when the rest of the world is
ready to fight.
The work is nowhere near done. Removing police
weaponry and decreasing police power cannot halt
systemic violence, but you can’t maintain hope without
commemorating the battles you’ve won.
25
YOUR SILENCE WILL NOT PROTECT YOU 24
O
n August 13, 2020, Portland State University
announced that its officers would no longer
be armed come the beginning of their Fall
Term. The disarmament of PSU’s police
officers was the central demand of the campaign Disarm
PSU. This movement began in 2013 when students, staff
and faculty found out that the university administration
was planning on creating an armed and deputized
campus police force. Disarm PSU officially launched in
2015, after the PSU Board of Trustees overwhelmingly
voted in favor of the creation of the police force.
Photograph by Audrey Barrett
Olivia leading a demonstration in downtown Portland on Monday, September 24th 2018
