President Trump ‘out of pocket,’ say city’s African immigrants, while mostly-white PDX protests turn violent
At the same time protests of President Donald Trump’s Executive Order targeting Muslim immigrants from seven majority-Muslim nations were turning violent at Portland International airport, Poor for a Minute tried a different tack to get at the story.
Why go talk to mostly-white protesters about an issue that disproportionately affects people of color?
Here in Portland, America’s whitest big city, there aren’t that many places where one is more likely to see brown faces than white.
But there are some. Like the Real McCoy.
The park, that is. You know it? It’s the one at the center of New Columbia, the Portland neighborhood with the state’s largest public housing complex.
I used to work there, so I know it a little. It’s home to Muslims and Mexicans, Somalis and Sudanese, white, black, brown, poor, working class … real diversity.
These are people who may have to cancel travel plans to see family due to the President’s order. These are people who actually work at PDX.
A fire truck and ambulance interrupted one interview, and a kid using a hoverboard to push a stroller with two babies in it was a distraction.
But there was no questioning the authenticity of what people said.
When you’re trying to fix your car, feed your kids, or understand how an Executive Order may prevent you from going home to see your family, you tend to speak simply, honestly — with #nofilter.
“It’s all over my Snapchat,” said Ayaan Adan, 17, speaking of the PDX protest and executive order. “Of course it concerns me, because it is my family.”
“We’re not from here, so we can’t really do what we want without somebody saying something,” Adan said.
Then Adan flashed a defiant look. “If they do deport us, I could care less. I do want to go back to Somalia.”
“In Africa, there’s not as much opportunity as here,” noted Mahamudi Moussa, 22. Moussa is Kenyan and an American citizen, he said, and was briefly detained at Portland’s airport four days ago while returning from seeing family in Tanzania.
“They hold me for like five minutes trying to identify who the hell is me,” Moussa said.
Moussa’s comments suggested an affinity with another immigrant group: Mexicans. Even as Adan began peppering a reporter with questions — “Is it true that [Trump] cut the Affordable Care Act?” and “So, if I go home to [Somalia] to visit, would I be able to come back?” — many of Moussa’s comments focused on Mexicans.
“The Mexicans are angry right now,” Moussa said. “He is going to build that stupid wall.”
“Mexicans are not having it.”
“It’s just crazy how racist [Trump] got with just the switch of a light,” Adan said. “It is out of pocket to say that Muslims can’t come here. If he wants to make America great again, he can’t just half and half.”
“It feels like the whole Nazi thing is coming back,” Adan added. “When I seen that movie, it was crazy.”
“It looks a lot like how the Holocaust started,” said Natasha Kamplin, 29. Kamplin said “at this point, it’s out of our hands.” Yet, while she didn’t see how anything she might do about it would change things, when pressed, Kamplin didn’t find it hard to imagine making different choices that involved the #MuslimBan, as tweeted by a well-known Portland rapper who’s the son of Ethiopian immigrants:
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>uber's headass ceo supports the muslim ban, everyone please use lyft</p>— Aminé (@heyamine) <a href=”https://twitter.com/heyamine/status/825741054573936641">January 29, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8"></script>
“I like that idea, going with Lyft instead of Uber,” Kamplin said.
“It just goes to show how much money can rule the world — it’s just a numbers game,” said Tanjanika Cook, 37, who describes herself frankly as “just an urban girl just looking at what the TV is telling us.”
“If you’re pocket’s big enough, you can make things happen. You can make your immigration status disappear.”
“Shit, we got a reality TV host who’s president.”
“Everybody’s fed up,” Cook said when asked about the protest, “but it’s not going make higher power move any quicker. They want the money.”
Cook works at Portland International Airport, she said, in a car rental company — as do more than a few who live in the neighborhood.
“It makes me sad to say it, but other countries laughing at us, like ‘Y’all First Lady [Melania Trump] is a nudist.’” Cook said many of the clients she works with at PDX from other nations are unabashed in their criticism.
“Today alone, I checked in like 34 people from Israel, four from Saudi Arabia,” Cook said. (Neither nation is among the seven affected by Trump’s order, which is being fought in multiple courts, though they’re both surrounded by others that are.)
“I hated going to work the first week of that [new presidency], because literally, other countries are laughing at us.”
Cook says she has an eight-year-old and four-year-old and “I don’t sugarcoat nothing.” To her, that means basically letting them know they live in a country where money determines people’s fates.
So — is America a democracy, Tanjanika Cook?
“Hell, yeah,” she said, with gusto.
How can it be a democracy if money rules everything?
“Good question,” she said, turning thoughtful. Then she found the balance:
“I can’t knock Donald Trump; he’s a hustler. I don’t have respect for him because he doesn’t have respect for women, [but] he hustled America and won.”
“I don’t have any use for him,” said Jean Goin, 67, smoking outside on a bench. “I think we’re in for a sad four years — if he lives that long.”
“He’s not going to last long,” said Sharon Kerney, 66. “He’s going to get killed, or impeached.”
“He a Ku Klux Klan,” Kerney added. “His whole family is KKK.”
Issue executive orders, Kerney asked — what about Trump’s wife, who was born in Slovenia?
“He should send [Melania Trump] back too,” Kerney said.
“He said they’re going to try to give a drug test to get SSI,” Kerney said. “He can’t do that. I get SSI. I’m disabled; he gonna make me work too? I ain’t never done drugs.”
“I think it’s fucked up,” said Sarah, who declined to give a last name. “The [threatened cuts to] health care is screwing everybody up.”
“I believe he’s a piece of shit,” said Shannon A, speaking while deftly maneuvering her electric wheelchair to assist a friend working on repairing an older-model van. “I think [the PDX protest] is awesome.”
“I keep telling everybody, ‘When my health insurance and Social Security disappear, I’m moving in with you,’” Shannon A. said with a wry smile.
“Grandma voted for him,” came a muted refrain from Shannon’s friend, an older woman whose head was buried underneath the hood.
“I don’t hate her for it,” Shannon responded. “Petitions are the way to go: Change.org.”
