, Columnist
What Happened to Portland?
Looking for the roots of the city’s violent summer.
Photographs by David Shipley
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In May, I went back to Portland, Oregon, my hometown. It was the week George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.
Protests in Portland followed, as they did around the country. Unlike the rest of the nation, though, what began as peaceful and constructive political expression devolved into something else entirely. In fact, a cruel inversion took place over the summer: The proximate (and righteous) cause was increasingly buried by violence. One receded and the other rose, a dynamic that paused only when the larger, more lethal force of wildfire took hold.