CHAZ
2020-07-02
Yesterday morning the police retook the chaz, removed the protesters, and started cleaning up the place. The zone gained a lot of recognition globally, which I think is warranted, but there are a lot of people who couldn’t go there and see it for themselves.
I’m a local, and I wanted to describe in plain terms what’s true and not about the former chaz.
I (to my shame in contributing to the site) wrote a stackexchange answer trying to give an idea what the zone was like. I’m told that it came off as a very positive spin piece - so I want to expand even more, here.
It’s all true
Everything bad you’ve heard is factual and accurate. Murders, rapes, shootings, exiles, choking out preachers, harboring thieves, brutality, drug trade, segregation, assaults that occur on an hourly basis - look it’s all true. All of that happened, and to my knowledge there’s no widespread fake news that paints the chaz in a bad light. It was really like that. It’s not a smear campaign.
But that presents a divide - some people portray chaz as a very peaceful and normal place, with the mayor even describing it as a "summer of love." So are they just lying? Well, no. If you went to chaz during the day, you’d probably come away with that impression. 99% of the minutes that pass in the chaz go by without anything terrible happening. The difference is, in most of the rest of the country, that number is closer to 99.9999999%. 1% of time is still a lot of time.
Who Are They?
Before I go on, I have to note that the daytime and nighttime are so different because the population completely shifts once the sun goes down. That’s because the people in the chaz do not live in the chaz. They go home at night. By and large, the chaz is filled with "foreign" protesters - people from Portland, California, sodo, georgetown, u-district, and so on. I met a guy from Renton, even. Depending on how you label these things, you might say it’s a "local" movement, but it’s certainly not made of neighbors.
You’re probably wondering what these people do all day. I want to illustrate with what I think is a perfect example; the trash.
I found a guy who was replacing trash bags in trash cans, and so I asked him what happened to the trash - did they give it to the city? Was there a place in CHAZ it was processed? The moment that I did this, four people came up behind and asked to help. The trash guy had ostensibly been doing this for hours and was completely surprised that anyone wanted to help now. So what happened?
As soon as i stopped to talk to him, the four people sensed an opportunity to gain social credit. They realized someone else was going to get the virtue points for helping the trash guy, and so they swooped in like vultures to get in on that action too. This is what people did in the chaz all day. They sat around talking, tweeting, spray-painting, and ravenously looking for opportunities to feel good about themselves.
They were continually busy, but nothing was different at the end of each day
Their output was not substantial, it was neurochemical.
The Night
When the sun goes down, these outsiders who spent all day scoring points leave the zone. The class of people who come in (or stay over) at night are fundamentally different than the people during the day. These are the watchmen.
A key component to the zeitgeist of the zone was paranoia. They wanted to fight - or more accurately, they wanted to be fought. In interviews with anyone in the zone, you’ll probably hear someone say that they’ve been under constant threat by proud boys, that they’ve suffered dozens of vehicular assaults, and so on. Raz even said as much on CNN. What he says just isn’t true, but let’s set that aside - this is emblematic of how the people in the zone need to feel attacked.
If they didn’t lie about being victims, they’d have to be seen as the attackers.
This is a critical component of what happens at night - the armed guards and people out there are not earning virtue points, they’re constantly chasing "proud boys" and white supremacists. They reinforce the idea that the zone is under siege, that everyone outside is trying to kill them. A guy I talked to insisted that (during the protest, before the zone) the protest line believed the national guardsmen would storm the protesters and slaughter them all any minute. He was earnest, it was not an exaggeration, it was genuine faith.
So the watchmen are there to fight. They want to find bad guys. They prowl the zone eyeing everyone, looking for a reason to interrogate someone or start a fight. But they’re not totally alone at night - there are also the gang members.
Out of all the shootings in the chaz, only the final one was done by security. The rest were criminals shooting criminals. Black men getting into disputes and not backing down. Drug negotiations gone sour. Feuds flaring into arguments, flaring into shootings. None of the victims spoke to police, not for any ideaological reason, but because they were part of the gang culture.
This very point is paradoxically used to defend the chaz - these things would have happened with or without SPD, so it can’t be blamed on the zone. But if that were true, the zone is not an improvement. If black lives mattered, wouldn’t the zone prioritize some system that prevented gangs from killing each other? If the system of policing is truly the problem, then changing to a different system should’ve improved it, right?
The Last Shots
Before I continue, I have to lay out the circumstances of the final shooting. Skip this if you know it already. On the 29th, a silver car performed a drive-by against the chaz - firing around 15 shots, missing every single time. It sped off, and security was on high alert. They believed it to be proud boys, despite not having any description of the attackers, and drive-bys being a fixture of target assassinations, not mass murders. Security bristled at every barricade. Ten or so minutes later, two teenagers stole a silver SUV, and took it for a joyride by the chaz; peeling out and squealing the tires. CHAZ militia mistook this as the drive-by car, and fired at it. The driver was injured, lost control of the car, and crashed into the barricade. CHAZ militia proceeded to dump a magazine into the car, breaking most of the windows, critically wounding the passenger and driver. The driver tried to throw it in reverse and escape, but was too heavily wounded. The militiaman yelled "oh, you’re not dead yet huh?" and executed the driver with a single shot.
I take pains to point out the nature of CHAZ violence, because chaz members are quick to point out that the final shooting (by security) was preceded by a drive-by attack. To this day, chaz supporters will try to tell you that it was a white nationalist attack, and they had every right to be on guard. But this is the very problem;
CHAZ security is trying to guard against phantoms, but they end up fighting black criminals. They’re killing the only people the zone claims have any value.
So it was a nightmare zone?
The zone’s ideology is hard to describe as anything other than distilled hatred, the people therein concerned completely with their own vanity, and establishing a racial caste system. During the day, their intolerance would usually just result in a few beatings. If you made the mistake of staying overnight, you’d be subject to gestapo-like scrutiny, searching for disloyalty.
Despite that description, it was more of a prime example of the banality of evil, rather than a militia-dominated failed state. The evil that went on there was done because all the people there were little Eichmanns; they were not smart or impressive, they were insecure and wanted to belong to something, wanted to feel like they were more important than they ever would be. So they searched for victims, dehumanized them, and inflicted evil upon them - satiating their insecurity. They needed an enemy to distract from their own flaws.
The chaz is dead, good riddance. But it’s important that we understand that it was a product of ideology and opportunity - and it can happen again, it is still happening. These people’s bigotry has not gone away with the chaz. We mustn’t believe that the chaz was a paramilitary no-go zone with clear leaders and structure, it was not a revolution or secession. It can happen to you. It probably is happening to you. If you know people who use terms like "anti-racist", "racial justice", or "person of color"; those might be Eichmanns desperately waiting for opportunities to create the same atmosphere the chaz had. In the same way that religious sectarianism doesn’t need leaders to flourish, neither does this.
