Revisiting Portland’s “Summer of Rage”

An obvious challenge of protest photography, like war photography, is its absence of context, the severing of action from motivation and belief. In “Protest City,” we see broken windows, toppled statues, looted stores: we see, graphically, what the protesters have done. But why did they do it? In Portland, more than in Minneapolis or in other cities convulsed by the historic uprising for racial justice in 2020, the answer is complicated. The subtitle of Dundon’s book—“Portland’s Summer of Rage”—somewhat elides this complexity. The period covered begins on May 30, 2020, five days after the murder of George Floyd, but it continues until August, 2021. During those fifteen months, the rage that Dundon references was directed at a variety of targets: federal agents, the city’s Democratic mayor, the Portland Police Bureau, local foreclosure and eviction policies, juvenile detention, the Supreme Court, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Proud Boys and other Trump supporters who held their own provocative rallies downtown, annexation of Indigenous lands, the Presidential Inauguration of Joe Biden, capitalism, colonialism—the whole “system of oppression,” as one protester put it to me.