A rally of far-right groups and counterprotesters signals the glaring disparity between Portland\u2019s racist history and its image today as a liberal bastion.<\/b>
\nPORTLAND, Ore. \u2014 When Callista Fink told her father 10 years ago that she was moving to Oregon\u2019s largest city, his response was immediate: \u201cYou\u2019re moving to a place with a lot of white supremacists,\u201d Ms. Fink remembered her father saying.
In the years since, Ms. Fink, who grew up in Illinois and works in hospital administration, has not fully convinced her father that he was wrong, despite the prevailing image of Portland as a beacon of tolerance. She has wondered, in her travels around the state, whether a different, more troubling Oregon was never far away, lurking beneath the surface.
That conundrum came to the fore on Saturday. Far-right groups began arriving for a rally on the Willamette River waterfront, with lots of blustery talk of violence. Leftists, many of them masked and apparently equally committed to fight, were prepared to march across town in counterprotest. And the police, in a city where demonstrations routinely turn violent or destructive, were preparing to hold the line against both sides, with a staging area to confiscate weapons and explosives.
Portlandia, as many people call their city, in shrugging resignation or embrace of the caricature from the television comedy by that name, might seem to many Americans the least likely of places to be on the boil as a political caldron. But the deep disparity between where the city began and where it ended up \u2014 from an openly racist territorial capital in the 19th century to one of the nation\u2019s most politically progressive cities \u2014 has never fully been resolved, or healed.
\u201cIt\u2019s still trying to find its identity \u2014 that\u2019s why it brings in the extremes,\u201d said Mark Landers, 39, who works for an art supply and framing store.
Mr. Landers said that because Portland did not get as big a wave of immigrants as many other cities did, it remained frozen in place in terms of diversity. \u201cStuck\u201d was his word for it. Portland is one of the whitest big cities in America, almost 78 percent, and has a smaller percentage of foreign-born residents, according to the census.
The piercing shops and tattoo parlors, the running jokes about everybody being in a band (or preoccupied with \u201c artisan knots \u201d), can sometimes obscure the lesser-known aspects of the city\u2019s identity.
\u201cThere\u2019s a massive state of denial,\u201d said Randy Blazak, a sociologist and chair of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crimes.
Both the left and the right can see the Portland they want to see, and refuse to see the parts they don\u2019t like.
For some, the old image of the nation\u2019s white Northwest \u2014 sometimes called Cascadia, a piney, mythical homeland free of immigrants and minorities \u2014 lives on as a place worth defending, even though it is now largely a mirage, Mr. Blazak said. And many Oregonians refuse to study or acknowledge the legacy of their history, from the state\u2019s founding to the rise of its Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to the gentrification and displacement of communities of color today, he said.
Language incorporated by popular referendum in the 1857 State Constitution prohibited blacks from living here, owning property or entering legal contracts, and made Oregon the only non-slavery state admitted into the union with a so-called exclusion clause. The provision was never strictly enforced, historians said. But some racist language remained in the Constitution through as late as 2002. Oregon\u2019s population is still only 2.2 percent black.
\u201cWhen I talk to people and say Oregon was formed as this whites-only state, there\u2019s this look of \u2018How that could possibly be?\u2019\u201d Mr. Blazak said. \u201cPeople are just shocked that this is our history.\u201d
That history still endures. Skinhead groups rose to prominence here in the 1980s, and last year, a man spouting what witnesses said were racist and anti-Muslim language stabbed two people to death on a transit train.
Oregon for many years deliberately sought to cordon itself off from the rest of the country, and by some measures succeeded. In the early 1970s, Gov. Tom McCall famously urged Americans to come and visit \u2014 with a caveat: \u201cBut I also ask them, for heaven\u2019s sake, don\u2019t move here to live.\u201d (Some have speculated that Mr. McCall was using reverse psychology: Tell people not to come and they\u2019ll immediately think they\u2019re missing out on something great.)
Insularity, and the idea that some kind of different society \u2014 whether racist, utopian, progressive or something else \u2014 could be conceived and built at the Northwest fringe of the continent, still runs deep in the culture.
Though Portland is the economic engine of the state, with a majority of the jobs and about 59 percent of the state\u2019s population of 4.1 million living in the metro area, its progressive politics can sometimes come off as hostile to business. That is in stark contrast with Seattle, which to the Northwest is both a rival city to Portland and its polar opposite. Seattle has cultivated for generations the idea that it would one day become a great global city and an economic titan. Portland just doesn\u2019t dream that way.
\u201cSeattle will do anything to promote business,\u201d said Todd Brundage, 51, an investment adviser who said his plan for Saturday\u2019s rally was to stay as far away as possible. \u201cHere, they\u2019re like, \u2018Whatever, we couldn\u2019t care less. Stay or go.\u2019\u201d
Divisions over the region\u2019s identity have prompted repeated clashes and protests, especially since the election of President Trump. The rally on Saturday was organized in part by Patriot Prayer, which espouses anti-immigrant rhetoric and obtained a legal permit from the city for the event. A group called Rose City Antifa started in Portland more than a decade ago, and its members, often masked, have shown themselves to be as interested in breaking windows, vandalizing businesses and challenging the police as fighting the right wing.
There is a pattern, and it long predates the recent protests and the election of Mr. Trump: To groups on the fringe, attention is oxygen, and Portland is a great place to get it.<\/p>\n

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