Beyond approving the funding, the vote actually doubled the public cost of the project due to a little reported unlimited leaseback agreement with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The city is leasing the 85-acre plot of the Weelaunee Forest to the APF for about $10 a year, and councilors voted to lease it back for access to the training facility for $1.2 million per year for the next 30 years (about $36 million total). This flies in the face of the nearly two year Stop Cop City movement; it also ignores  the many commentators who pleaded with the councilors to redirect this funding toward Atlanta’s marginalized populations, the major housing problem, and to help the 20% of the city’s children and 14% of adults who face daily hunger.

In the city council’s previous election, there was a major turnover, largely due to the rejection of harmful policing policies after the murder of George Floyd and Atlanta resident Rayshard Brooks, bringing in seven new officials. The new city council was touted to be younger and more “ideologically progressive” than previous iterations. But the vote tally in favor of doubling funding for Cop City was 11-4, with eight of the eleven being Democrats. Once again, the fascist ideology of capitalism has held firm thanks to its stabilizing left wing, the Democratic Party. In a struggle with the far right for dominance in government, they have eagerly served the interests of the ruling class, despite their hollow words.

One of these new councilors, Byron Amos, has been fueled by developers and airport concessionaires throughout his political career. Another younger member, Matt Westmoreland, who has served since 2018, used his post as the Chairperson of the Community Development/Human Services Committee to cut time for public comment in half. He has also come under scrutiny for violations of the Open Meetings Act, which requires details of all votes to be recorded. In one meeting, Westmoreland appears to have falsified the votes of his colleagues in order to discuss legislation in a private, executive session. In a video, nobody, not even Westmoreland himself, was recorded voting on the motion before it was approved.

The true purpose of these offices — to serve the interests of the ruling class — is illustrated by Councilor Westmoreland’s former Chief of Staff, Wayne Martin, who came under investigation for conflicts of interest in 2019. The staffer became an employee of Comcast a few months after leaving his government post, which is a clear violation of Georgia law. According to the ethics complaint which triggered the investigation, his employment was a reward for helping the company secure another seven year franchise agreement with the city. While working for Comcast, Martin twice addressed the council, and personally lobbied them during the debate about the Comcast Franchise Agreement. He used his relationships and knowledge about the council process to secure the contract with a unanimous vote. Although Martin was careless enough to get caught, his is not the only example of the city government’s service to capital.

The City Council has awarded many lucrative contracts to corporations in the name of improving public safety with little evidence to prove that these new investments actually deter or prevent crime. One of these initiatives, One Atlanta – Light Up the Night, expands the city’s network of streetlights in areas with higher crime rates and traffic accidents. Georgia Power has installed 10,000 new LED street lights with multi-node capabilities, meaning that many of these lights are equipped or can be equipped with two cameras, microphones, A.I. filtering technology, and 5G capabilities. The partnership combines technology from GE, Genetec, AT&T, and CivicSmart that allows for detection of illegal parking, surveillance of the street and sidewalks, and uses ShotSpotter, which is an audio detection technology that alerts police to loud sounds that may be gunshots, and has a track record of being used to violently target Black and Latino communities.  In Chicago, it was a ShotSpotter alert that deployed police to Little Village, a majority Latino neighborhood, who then chased down and murdered 13-year old Adam Toledo. There, researchers at Northwestern University MacArthur Justice Center found that at least 90% of ShotSpotter alerts yield no evidence of an actual gunshot, meaning that system produces dangerous, racist over-policing.

Georgia Power has also gotten a contract with the city through APF’s Operation Shield, selling them surveillance and license plate reading technology. Operation Shield has made Atlanta the most surveilled city in the U.S. Empire. The license plate reading tech is made by FlockSafety, whose products are now being used across the empire after being tested in Atlanta. Georgia Power and Flock Safety are both donors to the APF.

Corporations not only get contracts through the APF, but this foundation, like all other police foundations, are a means for private direction and guidance of municipal police forces. The police are molded to more effectively serve powerful interests. The over-policing of the U.S. Empire’s nationally oppressed communities, like Atlanta’s historically Black neighborhoods, goes hand in hand with their accelerating gentrification. This results in increased police murders and terror, which has led to many uprisings across the empire this past decade. The state is building Cop City in response to these uprisings; it was first proposed in 2017 and approved shortly after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. In this training ground for domestic occupation, as Kwame Olufemi of Community Movement Builders in Atlanta puts it:

They [will be] practicing how to make sure poor and working class people stay in line. So when the police kill us in the streets again, like they did to Rayshard Brooks in 2020, they can control our protests and community response to how they continually murder our people.

The council’s vote comes not out of dismissal of the empire-wide movement against racist police terror, but because of it. Fear is growing in the hearts of the capitalists, as can be seen with the staggering $28.1 million in revenue the APF had in 2021, triple the amount from the year before. This is higher than the New York City Police Foundation, and with a population 6% of its size. As cities across the empire double down on escalating police violence, a pattern seems to emerge: an endless barrage of police terrorism and murders that will inevitably result in more uprisings. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy that increases the already egregious funding and militarization of the police, and siphons more public funds to megacorporations.

Housing prices are skyrocketing, forcing impoverished people to move further out to the city’s edges and into a food-desert apartheid created by disappearing grocery stores and rising food prices. These struggles are exacerbated by deteriorating public transportation as a result of divestment and  increased policing, resulting in fewer social services and increased police terrorism. This is a horrific, but all-too-common, example of U.S. capital’s  assault on the working classes, which continues to intensify as another periodic crisis in capitalism looms. 

White people are indeed suffering the consequences of a settler-colonial empire in decline — an empire their colonizing ancestors built, and an empire they carried forward with a regime of racial apartheid — but these hardships are much more severe for working-class Black and Indigenous communities across Oregon. The same is true of other racially marginalized and nationally oppressed peoples across the state. Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest is grounded in settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and racist and xenophobic immigration and property ownership laws. Oregon became Oregon through the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous and Black people, mob and legislative violence against Asian immigrants, and the state-sanctioned support of white settlement, wealth, health, and property at the expense of all others. Oregon is a white supremacist state. Progressive? Hardly! Today’s problems have been centuries in the making. Consistent racist and patriarchal policy throughout the entire U.S. Empire’s history has brought us to this moment.

From 1804 until 1806, the U.S. Army Corps of Discovery carried out a military operation to chart the geography and learn how to economically exploit the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. This would become known, and is today taught to schoolchildren as, the “Lewis and Clark Expedition.” While an express goal of the operation was to study the terrain and wildlife, Lewis and Clarks’ notes also conflated the many Indigenous peoples with the flora and fauna. This practice went on to influence the historical work on the frontier until about the 1980s. Left out of the fictionalized, classroom retelling of the expedition are the indispensable contributions of Sacagawea, an enslaved 14-year-old Agaidika girl and child-bride of a French-Canadian fur trapper, and York, an enslaved 34-year old African man, whose request for his freedom was denied upon the expedition’s return. The violent coercion of Black and Indigenous labor quite literally paved the way for the settlement of Oregon. Once the operation had concluded, the U.S. military sent soldiers to establish forts along their expanding empire’s so-called frontier, with the express purpose of defending the encroaching white settlers and permitting them to conduct terror-raids and attacks of extermination against the Indigenous populations of the territory. These settlers were guided by Protestant ideas of private property, enclosure, and “rights of conquest,” as well as the wink-and-nod lie that the land was “uninhabited.” Fort by fort, settlement by settlement, the U.S. moved further West until its Destiny was made Manifest.

Just before the American Civil War, the provisional government of the Oregon Territory passed a law banning slavery. Far from a triumph of abolitionist progressivism, the same law required all Black persons to leave Oregon Territory at once. The white legislature then passed another law — one that forbidding free Black persons from entering the territory. The punishment for the violation of any of these new laws was public flogging, repeated every six months until the offending Black person left the territory — not dissimilar from the punishments enslaved would experience. 

The white property owners in Oregon passed these laws not only because the Territory could not be admitted to the Union as a slave state, but also because they needed to exclude Black people from the workforce, in order to prevent them from owning private property. Black private ownership of the land would undermine the white-supremacist order, predicated on the theft of Indigenous land and its repurposing into a “reward” for white settlers. Any white male could receive 650 acres of land upon arrival, plus an additional 650 if married, encouraging as many as 400,000 white settlers to flock to Oregon during the mid-19th Century. The ultimate goal of this policy was to relieve the economic (class) tensions on the East coast. To reduce the conflict between white workers in the East and their industrialist bosses, the government engaged in systematic dispossession of land in the West through broken treaties and military occupation of the “frontier.”

Oregon’s white supremacist policies of exclusion also applied to Indigenous people in the state. In 1919, an Indigenous Tillamook woman, Ophelia Paquet, wished to claim the property of her recently deceased white husband of 30 years, Fred Paquet. The Tillamook county court recognized her as his widow and appointed her as the administer of the estate. “Two days later, though, Fred’s brother John [Paquet] came forward to contest Ophelia for control over the property.” The legal battle took place over the next two years and was eventually seen in the Oregon Supreme Court. Despite John’s horrible reputation (described by a county Judge as “a man of immoral habits… incompetent to transact ordinary business affairs and generally untrustworthy”) his status as a white man under the Oregon miscegenation laws was enough to ensure that he won his case against Ophelia. Not only were her people dispossessed of their ancestral lands by the state, but Ophelia, as an individual, was excluded from legally reclaiming even a small parcel of that land under the new private property regime. 

These horrific events are merely local instances of the systemic dispossession of oppressed nationalities, primarily Black people, across the U.S. Empire. Property relations have always been racialized in this country.

One of the many Supreme Court cases that helped codify the boundaries of racialization in the U.S. Empire comes from Oregon. In 1923, an Armenian immigrant, Tatos Cartozian, gained citizenship; this was challenged by the state in 1924. Cartozian argued that he was a white man and was, by law, guaranteed a pathway to citizenship and the right to continue his business as a rug dealer. In the resulting 1925 Supreme Court case, United States v. Cartozian, the Court ruled that Armenians were white and not Asian based on the provided “scientific” evidence. Race is not a biological fact, but rather a social construct and a legal category. The boundaries of whiteness can be restricted and expanded to suit the needs of the ruling classes.

Oregon eventually “allowed” Black settlement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Black persons were relegated to the Albina neighborhood in North Portland through a myriad of interwoven systems of discrimination carried out by the state and private institutions, but most notably through a process called redlining — a process in which banks refuse to give mortgages to Black people or extract unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. During World War II, Portland’s Black population grew significantly, from roughly 1,800 to about 15,000 in five years. Three major shipyards were established in the Pacific Northwest, two in Portland, Oregon and one in Vancouver, Washington. These shipyards employed about 97,000 workers in total at their peak, and the prewar population of 340,000 was simply insufficient to meet the amount of ships commissioned by the U.S. Maritime Commission. Only fulfilling 27% of the commissioned vessels by the end of the war, it was clear that white male labor alone couldn’t maximize the market potential that was begging for ships. Thus, Oregon’s white capitalist class opened the doors to more workers and the general entry of women into the industrial workforce. To house the massive influx of people, Portland established a new, racially integrated city called Vanport to serve as temporary housing. The city was built in a dried lakebed between Portland and Vancouver and surrounded by locks to keep the water from the Columbia River out. Intended only to serve for the duration of the war, the buildings lacked foundations. In 1948 the locks gave way. Vanport was flooded, and the racially integrated, effectively autonomous, growing city was razed and swept away by the Columbia River. Portland refused to rebuild Vanport or compensate residents for the loss of property. The Black residents who could not find housing in Albina were then forced out of the area — through redlining. 

During the Second World War, Oregon and Southwest Washington also dispossessed 3,676 Japanese of their property via Executive Order 9066, issued by Franklin Roosevelt. The state imprisoned the Japanese at the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Center, known today as the Portland Expo Center. Upon their release, most families found that their homes, businesses, and personal belongings had been auctioned off by landlords or the state and were now occupied by white families. In commemoration, “Portland artist Valerie Otani created Voices of Remembrance (in the form of [traditional Japanese torii gates] most commonly found at the entrance of a sacred space)” at the Expo Center MAX Station. Each gate is adorned with hanging metal luggage tags to represent the individuals who were interned there. There is no sign or indication of what the art installation represents to passersby.

Throughout the twentieth century, Portland continued to wage economic warfare on the remaining Black population in the Albina neighborhood through various “urban renewal” programs. Programs like the 1961 Albina Neighborhood Improvement Project were established by city officials and were then awarded to private construction firms. From 1956 to the 70s, the city ripped through the neighborhood, splitting up the community with various construction projects and highways—specifically Interstate 5 and Highway 99 (ironically, OR-99 was named Martin Luther King Boulevard). Most notoriously, the Legacy Emanuel Medical Center expansion plan, which covered 76 acres of land,  dispossessed 300 Black families of their homes and businesses. The area was razed, but the hospital expansion was never actually built. Today, a fenced-off empty lot is all that remains. 

City officials had proposed the project at the height of the Black Panther Party’s Portland chapter. The Panthers had built interracial solidarity between the Black community concentrated in Albina and other poor communities, including white workers, in Portland. The City effectively ended the Black Panther Party’s solidarity work through aggressive dispersal of the Black community, robbing the Panthers of a place to organize. Today, minor and insignificant-looking signs dot the sidewalk of Albina’s North Williams Avenue — a pitiful attempt to tell the story of the historic neighborhood. 

Since the 1980s, conditions for Black people in Portland have not improved. Under the so-called Urban Renewal projects, Black residents were either forced out of their homes or continued to live in the increasingly disjointed neighborhood. Redlining has further prevented Black people from creating new communities outside Albina. Banks and policy-makers have worked hand-in-hand to prevent the reappearance of significant Black communities. Systemic disinvestment in Albina gave rise to further problems, ultimately resulting in more families abandoning their homes. Across the United States, the 1990s abounded with gentrification projects, and Portland was no exception. This project continues today with the unrelenting construction of expensive apartment buildings, expensive restaurants, and boutique shops in historically poor and majority-Black neighborhoods. 

Free and fair trade are nothing but capitalist fairy tales, meant to justify the obscene wealth of the rulers and the obscene poverty and deprivation of the masses. When the underlying logic of an economic system is to generate endless profits and amass unlimited wealth, why would the powerful allow “fair” competition? The capitalists and other property-owning classes mitigate competition through exclusion; they nurture and manufacture racism, misogyny, and other prejudices to suit their own ends. Whiteness is an elastic identity that can include or exclude groups of people depending on the needs of a given moment in time. Blackness, however, is a highly policed identity, allowing whiteness its elasticity through exclusion. Non-white nationalities, so long as they are not Black (or in the case of the U.S., Indigenous), may be incorporated into whiteness (i.e., Jews, Irish, Italians, light-skinned Latinés and Asians, etc.). The “right” to the various spoils of exploited labor is mainly bestowed upon those considered white, while privileges and benefits are granted to assimilated non-whites (re: Armenians). At the same time, the U.S. Empire frequently intervenes to thwart the “anomaly” of capital accumulation by Black and Indigenous people — those who cannot be subsumed by whiteness and the colonial project. The history of Portland provides a stark local portrait — unfortunately, only one among many across colonized North America — of how vile, cruel, and relentless the capitalist U.S. Empire is in its construction of race.