“You are squatters, [the Executive Director of Albina Vision Trust] told the board. “You are sitting on what should be 1,000 units of housing.”
Winta Yohannes' demonstrably false, confrontational and divisive statement doesn't reflect well on Albina Vision Trust and its racially motivated collective land reclamation project. Albina Vision Trust has a record of racist practices, namely holding racially segregated public meetings on the same topic, one of them for blacks only. In a better world, that manifestation of reverse racism would have been condemned on the spot and halted by authorities responsible enforcing nondiscrimination laws.
With the exception of Native American sovereign nations and cases of unconstitutional takings, it is antithetical to American notions of equality and fairness for any identity group to assert race-based, historical claims to real estate. That's especially true in Portland, where a shortage of buildable land is one of the major causes of the shortage of affordable housing. If there is to be any redevelopment of real estate in Albina, every phase including planning, financing, demolition, site preparation, construction, lending, borrowing, purchasing and leasing should be open to any qualified person or legal entity without regard to race, color, ethnicity or national origin.
This isn't an expression of racism. It's the law.
As for the 1803 Fund, it is a little publicized fact that, to quote The Oregonian, "economic development is not part of the . . . [fund's] charter. [1] Evidently there are limits to Phil Knight's philanthropy.
Thanks, Larry. How did I miss that? According to a study last year by the University of Southern California, “white drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.'s people of color.”
The LA Times found this study so credible, it published a story and announced the findings in a tweet. Twitter initially labeled it “fake news,” but it turned out to be a real news story in the LA Times.
Portland’s Peter Boghossian had a nice rejoinder on Twitter/X telling NPR: “This should have been your scoop!”
In my opinion, the real headline about Albina Vision Trust is that the property developers and private equity managers who actually profit from it are [mostly] white people, and [exclusively] richer than God.
I've met Mr. Drury a couple times, and the most striking thing to me has been how little he knows about the world, generally. I dont want to call him an idiot, but he's I can promise you he's not anyone's useful intellectual.
The fact that the everything-is-racism brain virus hit Portland so hard is, in my opinion, a consequence of more than dumb ideology.
Public schools here have been failing multiple generations of kids, and frankly, I'm not sure how to inoculate a population from the idea that literally every inequity here is rooted in slavery, without an education system that graduates kids who know when and where the Civil War happened. At the same time, the very, very wealthiest folks here [who certainly have the private school diplomas to know better] seem weirdly happy to endorse the nonsense. Perhaps because it feels better to blame social problems on policies from 200 years ago, and not the massive public theft happening. Right now. By them. (See: Oregon Community Foundation tax returns of 2020 & 2021 - in which they launder $36 million, and then $40 million in Covid money to cartels).
I initially encountered Lakayana Drury several years ago at the first meeting of the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing when he was immediately elected co-chair. He struck me as very ambitious and a young man with a plan. At the time, he was a teacher at Rosemary Anderson alternative high school, but he also was promoting Word is Bond.
To his credit, Drury works hard and is self-motivated. I suspect he had the same low opinion of public school education that you do and eventually left teaching to throw himself into Word is Bond. He spends a lot of time with some of these young men, lining up mentors and projects. He has also become a booster for Portland, going into rougher neighborhoods and promoting small businesses in need of customers. (Last week he was at Old Town Pizza.)
On the downside, he can be blatantly racist as I have written elsewhere. For example, while running a high-profile public meeting he announced blacks would speak first and whites last: https://www.heldtoanswer.com/2020/06/americas-black-curse/
Politically, he is naive. Eventually all these groups vying for race-based money are going to start clawing at one another. Even Phil Knight's wealth isn't a bottomless pit.
You'll never see me argue that anything Drury (or any of the carbon-copy activists just like him) said has merit. It doesn't. Whether he has the capacity to understand *why* he's wrong is unknowable, but I'm sure I would have better luck explaining the Constitution to my toddler.
Still, I don't think he's racist for two reasons:
1. He doesn't hate white people. Especially when they're rich.
2. He doesn't love black people. Especially when they're poor.
That article you wrote a while back touches on something huge, that very few people seem to remember: the disbanding of the Gang Violence Reduction Team. You, like many, pinned that on Jo Ann Hardesty alone, but as the Commissioner in charge of the Police Bureau, Ted Wheeler had final say.
And of course, as anyone with a high school diploma and a working conscience could have predicted: gang violence skyrocketed. In each of the following two years, more people (the majority of whom were young black men) were killed by gun violence than in any other year in Portland history.
If Drury were genuinely concerned about all young black men, he would have been outraged. He might have mobilized Word is Bond to direct "culturally-specific services" exactly where they were most needed: African-refugee families and their American-born children. He did not. Even though the demographic trends were as clear as day, the attention stayed on the African American descendants of slaves (who were not at greater risk) and the money flowed directly to grifters and the untraceable void we call "Community Based Organizations."
As someone who has seen this movie before, I would encourage everyone in Portland to be more like Drury, and follow the money.
Thanks for that story. I missed it. The photo of Drury brought a smile to my face. I had forgotten how he used to look. He cut a very different figure at the world premiere of “The Black Stars.”
There was a point early on when Jo Ann Hardesty (before she was on the city council) supported body-worn cameras. Then studies showed something significant: Not only did the police behave better — but so did the people they came in contact with. It occurred to Hardesty, et al that body cams don’t just show cops behaving badly, they also can show black people behaving badly. If you’re looking to make a case against the police and win a generous lawsuit, body cams may not be your friend.
There’s a quote in the OPB story from somebody in academia, saying police who wear body cams “temporarily change things for a bit,” then relapse back into business as usual.
What academia and the police reform experts quoted in the media don’t look at it is the behavior of criminal offenders. They have gone beyond business as usual. Offenders know better than ever what they can get away with. You want to change the behavior of cops? Change the behavior of criminals.
In the past decade, the Oregon state legislature has passed several police reform bills. Some of these new laws have made it harder for police to do what the law-abiding public wants them to do: enforce the law.
The assistant professor is also quoted saying, “If you’ve got dysfunction in a local law enforcement department, that (cameras) will only be another tool to reinforce that dysfunction.”
I can think of no institution in America that doesn’t show signs of dysfunction — including academia and the news media.
I agree with most of that. My suspicion is that Jojo's change of heart had to do with protesters, and the business interests of one of the hands that feeds her, Jason Kafoury.
Jason's income is largely based on settlements his
clients win filing claims against PPB.
His other claim to fame is writing the ballot measure that eventually led to the Police Accountability Commission, and the 5% of the Police budget they expect to bring in every year for their stupid board.
For me, it would be well worth the time for the Ghana and the Albina groups to get together and work towards finding the real common ground they share living in America. It’s almost like instead of learning how blacks were abused by their own far distant relatives, they could reconcile that past in America like Ghana is trying to do and apply that to what the United States has been trying to do since 1840s. And do that as partners with their countrymen instead of adversaries.
Black at TED
Loury, Coleman Hughes, McWhorter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHaQd-TXBJ0
“You are squatters, [the Executive Director of Albina Vision Trust] told the board. “You are sitting on what should be 1,000 units of housing.”
Winta Yohannes' demonstrably false, confrontational and divisive statement doesn't reflect well on Albina Vision Trust and its racially motivated collective land reclamation project. Albina Vision Trust has a record of racist practices, namely holding racially segregated public meetings on the same topic, one of them for blacks only. In a better world, that manifestation of reverse racism would have been condemned on the spot and halted by authorities responsible enforcing nondiscrimination laws.
With the exception of Native American sovereign nations and cases of unconstitutional takings, it is antithetical to American notions of equality and fairness for any identity group to assert race-based, historical claims to real estate. That's especially true in Portland, where a shortage of buildable land is one of the major causes of the shortage of affordable housing. If there is to be any redevelopment of real estate in Albina, every phase including planning, financing, demolition, site preparation, construction, lending, borrowing, purchasing and leasing should be open to any qualified person or legal entity without regard to race, color, ethnicity or national origin.
This isn't an expression of racism. It's the law.
As for the 1803 Fund, it is a little publicized fact that, to quote The Oregonian, "economic development is not part of the . . . [fund's] charter. [1] Evidently there are limits to Phil Knight's philanthropy.
[1] Manning, Jeff and Jayati Ramakrishnan. "Knight-seeded fund for Black Portland offers few specifics, but optimism abounds." The Oregonian/Oregon Live. 27 April 2023; updated 28 April 2023. https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2023/04/knight-seeded-fund-for-black-portland-offers-few-specifics-but-optimism-abounds.html
a classic of the genre:
https://twitter.com/Greentownmayor/status/1750532366219772280
I don't misunderstand black men at all. Anymore. Doing so can be fatal
Thanks, Larry. How did I miss that? According to a study last year by the University of Southern California, “white drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.'s people of color.”
The LA Times found this study so credible, it published a story and announced the findings in a tweet. Twitter initially labeled it “fake news,” but it turned out to be a real news story in the LA Times.
Portland’s Peter Boghossian had a nice rejoinder on Twitter/X telling NPR: “This should have been your scoop!”
Another great article. Thought provoking. But I'm sure you'll get criticized and called a racist as I have so many times I've lost count. LOL...
In my opinion, the real headline about Albina Vision Trust is that the property developers and private equity managers who actually profit from it are [mostly] white people, and [exclusively] richer than God.
I've met Mr. Drury a couple times, and the most striking thing to me has been how little he knows about the world, generally. I dont want to call him an idiot, but he's I can promise you he's not anyone's useful intellectual.
The fact that the everything-is-racism brain virus hit Portland so hard is, in my opinion, a consequence of more than dumb ideology.
Public schools here have been failing multiple generations of kids, and frankly, I'm not sure how to inoculate a population from the idea that literally every inequity here is rooted in slavery, without an education system that graduates kids who know when and where the Civil War happened. At the same time, the very, very wealthiest folks here [who certainly have the private school diplomas to know better] seem weirdly happy to endorse the nonsense. Perhaps because it feels better to blame social problems on policies from 200 years ago, and not the massive public theft happening. Right now. By them. (See: Oregon Community Foundation tax returns of 2020 & 2021 - in which they launder $36 million, and then $40 million in Covid money to cartels).
I initially encountered Lakayana Drury several years ago at the first meeting of the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing when he was immediately elected co-chair. He struck me as very ambitious and a young man with a plan. At the time, he was a teacher at Rosemary Anderson alternative high school, but he also was promoting Word is Bond.
To his credit, Drury works hard and is self-motivated. I suspect he had the same low opinion of public school education that you do and eventually left teaching to throw himself into Word is Bond. He spends a lot of time with some of these young men, lining up mentors and projects. He has also become a booster for Portland, going into rougher neighborhoods and promoting small businesses in need of customers. (Last week he was at Old Town Pizza.)
On the downside, he can be blatantly racist as I have written elsewhere. For example, while running a high-profile public meeting he announced blacks would speak first and whites last: https://www.heldtoanswer.com/2020/06/americas-black-curse/
Politically, he is naive. Eventually all these groups vying for race-based money are going to start clawing at one another. Even Phil Knight's wealth isn't a bottomless pit.
You'll never see me argue that anything Drury (or any of the carbon-copy activists just like him) said has merit. It doesn't. Whether he has the capacity to understand *why* he's wrong is unknowable, but I'm sure I would have better luck explaining the Constitution to my toddler.
Still, I don't think he's racist for two reasons:
1. He doesn't hate white people. Especially when they're rich.
2. He doesn't love black people. Especially when they're poor.
That article you wrote a while back touches on something huge, that very few people seem to remember: the disbanding of the Gang Violence Reduction Team. You, like many, pinned that on Jo Ann Hardesty alone, but as the Commissioner in charge of the Police Bureau, Ted Wheeler had final say.
And of course, as anyone with a high school diploma and a working conscience could have predicted: gang violence skyrocketed. In each of the following two years, more people (the majority of whom were young black men) were killed by gun violence than in any other year in Portland history.
If Drury were genuinely concerned about all young black men, he would have been outraged. He might have mobilized Word is Bond to direct "culturally-specific services" exactly where they were most needed: African-refugee families and their American-born children. He did not. Even though the demographic trends were as clear as day, the attention stayed on the African American descendants of slaves (who were not at greater risk) and the money flowed directly to grifters and the untraceable void we call "Community Based Organizations."
As someone who has seen this movie before, I would encourage everyone in Portland to be more like Drury, and follow the money.
Here's what Drury thinks about body cameras, by the way: https://www.opb.org/article/2021/03/10/oregon-washington-police-body-cameras-effectiveness-costs/
Thanks for that story. I missed it. The photo of Drury brought a smile to my face. I had forgotten how he used to look. He cut a very different figure at the world premiere of “The Black Stars.”
There was a point early on when Jo Ann Hardesty (before she was on the city council) supported body-worn cameras. Then studies showed something significant: Not only did the police behave better — but so did the people they came in contact with. It occurred to Hardesty, et al that body cams don’t just show cops behaving badly, they also can show black people behaving badly. If you’re looking to make a case against the police and win a generous lawsuit, body cams may not be your friend.
When I was a reporter in Southern California, I covered the Rialto Police Department for a couple of years. Here’s what I wrote about the study cited in the OPB story: https://www.heldtoanswer.com/2021/07/body-cams-neutral-third-eye/
There’s a quote in the OPB story from somebody in academia, saying police who wear body cams “temporarily change things for a bit,” then relapse back into business as usual.
What academia and the police reform experts quoted in the media don’t look at it is the behavior of criminal offenders. They have gone beyond business as usual. Offenders know better than ever what they can get away with. You want to change the behavior of cops? Change the behavior of criminals.
In the past decade, the Oregon state legislature has passed several police reform bills. Some of these new laws have made it harder for police to do what the law-abiding public wants them to do: enforce the law.
The assistant professor is also quoted saying, “If you’ve got dysfunction in a local law enforcement department, that (cameras) will only be another tool to reinforce that dysfunction.”
I can think of no institution in America that doesn’t show signs of dysfunction — including academia and the news media.
I agree with most of that. My suspicion is that Jojo's change of heart had to do with protesters, and the business interests of one of the hands that feeds her, Jason Kafoury.
Jason's income is largely based on settlements his
clients win filing claims against PPB.
His other claim to fame is writing the ballot measure that eventually led to the Police Accountability Commission, and the 5% of the Police budget they expect to bring in every year for their stupid board.
For me, it would be well worth the time for the Ghana and the Albina groups to get together and work towards finding the real common ground they share living in America. It’s almost like instead of learning how blacks were abused by their own far distant relatives, they could reconcile that past in America like Ghana is trying to do and apply that to what the United States has been trying to do since 1840s. And do that as partners with their countrymen instead of adversaries.