Speech Transcript:

On the night of June 28th, 2018, Jason and his best friend Jeremy were out for drinks at

the Cheerful Tortoise bar in Portland. After a handful of drinks, in the late hours of the night, Jeremy got into a verbal altercation with a group of guys at the bar. The altercation escalated and moved outside, to College St. between Broadway and 6th ave. Jeremy had brought his gun with him to the bar, and at one point Jason removed it from Jeremy so that he wouldn’t make any violent or irresponsible decisions after the drinks he had had. As the fight turned from verbal to physical, Jason ordered an Uber for him and Jeremy, trying desperately to break the altercation up so that they can both go home. As this mess unfolds officers Shawn McKenzie and James Dewey roll up. Their lights are off. Jason doesn’t even notice they’re there because they announce themselves so faintly. They immediately entered themselves into the scuffle, trying to break people apart as Jason was already doing. In the madness Jason trips, Jeremy’s gun falls from his body. Jason was in the Navy, so his brain repeats to him what he was trained to do, retrieve up his weapon as soon as it hits the ground. And though the gun was never hidden or obfuscated before it fell from his side, two seconds after Jason picks up the weapon, with his back turned to the police, seventeen shots rang out. None of them were from Jason. Nine of them struck him. All from behind. Jason Washington died at 1:30 am on Friday, June 29th of this year.

On July 19th, 2015 in Cincinnati, Ohio, police officer Ray Tensing pulled over Sam because his front license plate was missing. After a couple minutes of inquiring about Sam’s drivers license, and Sam not being able to present it, Officer Tensing asks Sam to step out of his car while pulling on the driver’s side door. Sam pulls the door toward him and begins to drive the car away in order to flee. The officer yells stop, then immediately pulls out his gun and shoots Sam point blank in the head, the gun not two feet from his face. Samuel DuBose died at 6:30 pm that day.

I need us to have a two minute moment of silence for both of them now. [2 minutes]

We must not be shy in understanding, and vocalizing that it is a severe contradiction, that educational institutions, in theory, meant to educate young adults in our society, so they can be employed, so they can be critical thinkers, so they can be successful, so they can grow our economy, so that they can be a benefit to the community around them — is able to take Black lives away the same way we see city, state and federal police officers do everyday. What does it mean that the same militaristic mechanisms of control that have terrorized communities, specifically poor communities, specifically poor communities of color, are continuing to expand into our education system. Even when the campus community protests it. Even when it proves to be violent. Even when it is opposed by scholars of social welfare and racial justice on these very campuses. Simply put, it means that at these educational institutions education — shockingly — is not actually being prioritized. What is being prioritized is social control, wealth, and a neoliberal agenda.

Jason Washington was Black, and so was Samuel DuBose, and both of these police murders took place on college campuses at the hands of campus police officers. Sam DuBose was murdered one mile from the campus grounds of the University of Cincinatti. Jason Washington was murdered in front of the Broadway dormitory at Portland State. These stories are not unusual, they are painfully familiar, and I’m sure most of you here could name five similar killings off the top of your head right now [name five]. But these two have specific relevance to me today, both in terms of my personal life and work, and in relation to what I want to share with all of you.

First we can talk about Samuel DuBose. Campus police officer Ray Tensing murdered Samuel almost exactly one month after 2,371 miles away, the Board of Trustees at Portland State University voted to arm our campus security. At this point I’m about to turn nineteen, I’m going to be a freshmen at Portland State in the fall and I’ve just joined the Portland State University student union, who had been the leading voice in opposing the potential armament. A lot of people were involved in the initial opposition, but at this point it was summer, momentum had died down, defeat at the time of the Board’s final vote had been looming for a while, and the group I was joining mostly consisted of ten people. Sam DuBose’s murder echoed very loudly to us across two thousand miles. It reinforced what we had been telling the board at our school for months — when you hand police officers guns, they will be used to kill, and we knew that eventually, the bullets would tear through the body of a Black or brown person, if not persons, on our campus — just like they did at University of Cincinnati. We still remember Sam DuBose to this day, and we’ll never forget him.

So for context, let me back up. My name is Olivia Pace, which most of you probably know by now but maybe you forgot. I grew up in Beaverton, Oregon. My parents are Lisa and Kermit, and they are here which is really, really sweet and exciting. My father is Black, and was born in 1955 in Duarte, a suburb of Los Angeles. My mother was born in 1967 in Cottage Grove, Oregon. My parents got divorced when I was an infant, and during the duration my childhood lived with my mother in Beaverton and spent the weekends with my Dad until he moved back to California when I was seventeen. This meant, that I spent most of my life with my white parent in a majority white suburb. Now, Beaverton is actually more diverse than Portland — however, whiteness lives in Beaverton in a much more powerful way a lot of the time. Beaverton has relatively nice schools, nice houses — an extremely stereotypical suburb. And by the time I entered middle school, I had entered into a much less diverse environment than I had been in Elementary school. Beaverton’s white hegemony weighed heavy in my life. I identified as Black, I never felt white, I had a lot of conversations with my Dad about race, but living in a relatively affluent suburb, of an extremely white and immensely liberal metropolitan area, I had a hard time contextualizing my experience as a Black person. I had very few Black peers to connect to, and therefore very few ways to understand what it meant more broadly to be Black in the 21st century in the United States.

Michael Brown was murdered the summer after I graduated high school. Officer Darren Wilson shot him in the back while he had his hands up and left his body laying in the August sun in Ferguson, Missouri for four and a half hours. This, on the heels of the murder of Trayvon Martin and the words of Alicia Garza who first said to us #BlackLivesMatter, was the catalyst for where we are with today’s racial justice movement. I was so confused. I had honestly never engaged in discussions about police violence. I had never had to interface with police. At first Ferguson felt so distant. As I got closer to becoming a student at PSU I became closer in proximity to the protests. It struck me truly, for the first time in my life, that people in this country were being murdered, because they were Black, just like I was. People around me who I grew up with were beginning to talk about issues of racial injustice for the first time. Issues of privilege and oppression. At seventeen and eighteen these were truly my first interactions with these concepts and they were having a profound effect on me. What I remember the most is wanting desperately to get plugged in — to go to protests, to be involved with “Black Lives Matter.” But having literally no access to the activist community and having no fucking idea how to get started.

Then one day, Winter term of my freshman year, I was able to wedge my foot into the door for the first time. I was walking into the Millar Library and there was a chalking on the ground advertising a rally in the Park Blocks an hour from then. I went, and this was my first interaction with the PSU student union. It was a small rally with a handful of speakers talking about the fact that PSU was about to arm our currently unarmed security officers, turning them into armed and deputized police officers. As light was being shed on the prevalence of police violence against Black and brown bodies, and as PSU’s student population was becoming increasingly diverse, these students said that putting guns in the hands of our security officers would not make us safer, but would actually increase the prevalence of violence on our campus. They said that our university had a noted Conflict Resolution program, capable of developing alternatives to defending ourselves through lethal weapons. These ideas were completely new to me and yet I was won over immediately. A system of policing which we’ve learned is inherently racist should not be given the power to take people’s lives. And obviously this was only scratching the surface.

See, law enforcement as a profession has its origins in slave patrols. Slave patrols were first implemented in South Carolina in 1704 and existed for over a century and a half. Serving on these patrols were often freed white indentured servants, paid to return runaway slaves. These patrols were not just for the simple maintaining of property, but to specifically prevent the possibility of slave uprisings. The need for slave patrols intensified with the risk of indentured servants joining forces with slaves, posing a threat to the wealth and property of the ruling class. However, slavery eventually ended, as dictated by the thirteenth amendment of the constitution. But I imagine most of you in this room understand the complications of the thirteenth amendment. The thirteenth amendment outlawed slavery except in the place of imprisonment. Seeing this, we can point to the emancipation proclamation as the point at which slave labor was shifted from proper slaves to prisoners, knowing that Black people still make up a hugely disproportionate amount of those who are imprisoned, we can understand that the abolition of slavery was not a moral revelation on the part of the American government, but the beginning of an economic shift which entailed the movement of cheap labor from the system of slavery to the prison system. If this is true, than the work of law enforcement is still that of drawing more bodies into this system of exploited labor. Policing serves the state in a multitude of ways. In the very municipality where Michael Brown was killed, fines charged during interactions with law enforcement account four over a quarter of the municipality’s revenue. Despite the fact that this system is inherently rotten, in our society police for some reason have a monopoly on the use of force. Police consistently protect wealth and property, and consistently kill poor people, people of color and the mentally ill. Police are trusted so implicitly with lethal weapons, that they are almost always able to get away with murder. Arming police on our campus was an economic decision from the beginning. The corporate interests of a majority of the Board members drove them to prioritize locking in further business investment and development on campus by being able to say they could properly take care protect the buildings on campus, rather than a community vision of safety. These facts are only a part of why we said #DisarmPSU.

So after this first rally, and getting my first glimpse into what I would later learn about the criminal injustice system. Six months later I came into contact with the student union again, on May Day of all days, and I officially joined about a month later, after being taken under the wing of one of my best friends, and my mentor Alyssa Pagan. Days after I joined, on June eleventh 2015, the Board of Trustees officially voted to implement an armed campus security. Our small group of eleven organizers at the time spent the entire summer gearing up to fight back. We started off the year with a bang, interrupting former President Wiewel’s freshman convocation speech and holding a rally outside. We gained forty members that day. We spent the entire 2015-16 school year holding action, after bigger action after bigger action, ending the year with a 500 student walk out for #DisarmPSU. We shut down two Board of Trustees meetings. We got a huge amount of media coverage. We built strong ties with unions at the university and organizations across Portland who supported us. Through all of our efforts the board and the administration would not budge. We said with guns in the hands of our police officers, somebody on our campus will die. Just like Michael Brown. Just like Sam DuBose. They refused to listen, and a huge amount of investment and development has occurred on the campus from a number of businesses since then. If you wake up early enough you can see CPSO sweeping the houseless people away to make sure things look nice.

After the election of Donald Trump, organizing in Portland became aimless in many ways. Sometimes explosive, but mostly chaotic, disorganized and confused. Many people including the student union lost their focus, scrambling trying to figure out how to most sharply fight back at Trump as a new and massive threat to all marginalized people. #DisarmPSU came to a screeching halt until Jason Washington was killed by officers James Dewey and Shawn McKenzie.

Historical memory at PSU was profoundly acute. It was truly like not a day had passed since the walk out in May of 2016. Everybody, meaning the student union, faculty, staff, students at large, and the entire Portland community understood, and have often expressed it in these words: We told them. They didn’t listen. An innocent Black man is dead. PSU has blood on their hands.

It is one thing to organize around a hypothetical person who may be killed someday. It is something quite different to have somebody you have never met, completely innocent, with a life completely separate from yours, collide with, and lose their life, from a force that you have been fighting for years. It is another thing to see the pain that surrounds the loss of that person’s life. Jason Washington has three daughters, a granddaughter, a wife, a brother, in-laws, nieces, nephews. They are all kind. They are all giving. They have all given so much to us, and have taken up this fight alongside us, even in the darkest moment of their life. They are a testament to everything they describe Jason as: kind, strong, selfless. Seeing the love and humanity that surrounded Jason, seeing the person whose life we had been unknowingly fighting for this whole time, deepened our anger and sharpened the urgency we all felt.

We began working internally and with Jason’s family on a plan to attack stronger than ever at the beginning of this school year. Over the summer, in the weeks before and after Jason’s death, the OCCUPY ICE movement had begun in Portland. Many members of PSUSU were there often, not as core organizers but as helping hands, bodies and observers. All of us learned a lot of organizing lessons from being there, and learned about the strength of occupations as a tactic. Through occupations you create a central organizing space, that everybody in your community who wants to plug into your struggle can come to. You cause your enemy to directly face the threat of your movement. You create a central location for the media to focus. You build community, which must be a part of building our movements. Seeing all of this, we decided to take on this challenge ourselves, and on September 24th of this year, the first day of the new school year, we marched with hundreds of people to our campus public safety office at PSU and staged a ten day occupation on the office steps. People were working for quite literally 24 hours a day at the occupation, gathering signatures and support for our three demands: 1, #DisarmPSU, 2, Fire officers Shawn McKenzie and Jason Dewey, and 3, a permanent memorial to Jason Washington on our campus. We started a call-in campaign, whose information got national distribution, targeting the administrators who have the power to unilaterally disarm campus police. We got covered by DemocracyNow! We distributed tens of thousands of flyers for the Board of Trustees meeting scheduled 10-days into the occupation. We gathered over 6,000 signatures of students, faculty, staff and community members endorsing our demands in only eight days. This number amounts to more people ever surveyed, in any way by any other entity at the university. In 10 days we spread our campaign’s reach farther than ever before and ensured our university administration, and our campus police that the community would not forget what they did to Jason Washington. We filled the Board of Trustees meeting with hours of testimony. Everybody who showed up was there for Jason Washington and the #DisarmPSU campaign. We still have not won yet, but we know that with the immense amount of movement building that we’ve done on our campus and in Portland more broadly, every step we take gets us closer to a win than ever, even after an already five-year struggle. A win for the Washington family, a win for Black lives, for #DisarmPSU, for student power, and for everyone who suffers under the boot of the ruling elite pursuing profit-based interests.

You see, unlike many people believe, the university is not a microcosmic version of “actual” society. Student activists are constantly told by older people, no longer in school, that we what we’re doing won’t work in the “real world.” The work of student activists is constantly portrayed as a tantrum, rather legitimate rage. But again, the university is not a microcosm. The university is an institution, that is an active part of our society, and a site of various forms of real exploitation, particularly economic exploitation. The university is where thousands of, primarily, young adults, are paying thousands of dollars to achieve an education that they have been told is basically a necessity for survival in society. Higher education is a choice but...really it’s not. And our government is profiting off of the loans students must take out to pay for college to the tune of about 135 billion dollars. This is real life economic exploitation. And where there is economic exploitation, a huge variety of other forms of exploitation and oppression will follow. The Board of Trustees at Portland State voted to arm our campus security with the primary motivation of attracting more investment from businesses across the city on the campus. Jason Washington died for PSU’s investment. It is not happenstance that the same kind of police violence we see in regular city streets permeates the communities of universities. Where financial interests take priority over the well being of regular people, the mechanisms we have, theoretically, meant to protect and serve that community protect those interests. We must never think of the violence and oppression within the university as separate from the rest of the world. We must never think of it as just coming with the territory of pursuing higher education. Because corporate interests over the interests of the wellbeing of masses of people who make communities work will always have damaging and often fatal consequences.

We are in a critical political moment right now involving a massive contradiction. On one hand, we see the continued prominence of grassroots movements. The continued sustainment of the me too movement and the fight for Black lives. We see truly progressive politicians being elected across the country. We see the politics of socialism and anarchism becoming more popular than the ideas of capitalism. At the same time, we’re living under the Trump presidency, beginning to face the brunt of climate change, seeing a greater concentration of wealth within the elite, and across the world seeing apartheid, unending police murders, imperialistic aggression and famine. We are more ready than ever to fight for change, and as that happens the force of the boot on our neck is increasing. Something is going to give. We know now that it is not small incremental change that we need. We are entering a battle to fundamentally change society. Our campuses are in fact some of the sites of these huge contradictions. And so our actions as student activists are not inconsequential. They are not a side struggle. Our organizing as students must be the center of our focus, and intertwined with all other struggles that we’re engaged in throughout the rest of our communities.

And this idea is not new. I feel like so often people forget the way that student organizers have actually shaped grassroots struggle throughout history. Today, with the remarkable midterm elections which have just passed, and to me, a reignited commitment by many to using their voting power to make change, let us acknowledge that it was not through proper and polite channels that marginalized people won voting rights, but through grassroots organizing, and at that, student grassroots organizing on the part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC was the backbone of the successful battle for the voting rights act passed in 1965. These students organizers were so powerful, so organized that the decentralized sit-ins beginning in the 1960s compelled the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to attempt to bring these southern students in, to build a student branch of their organization. Ella Baker, a member of SCLC had a different idea about this. Through the guidance of Ella Baker, the most unsung hero and critical thinker of the Civil rights movement, something more powerful was established — a coalition of students who would play a critical role in the actions and campaigns of the civil rights movement which guide our vision of racial justice to this day.

We must remember that SNCC was part of Ella’s vision for sustainable community organizations whose power would be able to not only help get wins, but maintain gains for marginalized people. Baker saw the work of young people, the work of students, as something powerful in and of itself. Not as an add-on to the broader Civil Rights movement, but as a critical institution of the movement.

I have grown into an organizer and watched my friends grow into some of the most powerful organizers in our city almost solely through student organizing. I have seen our work drastically change our campuses climate around policing. Our campus community has directly called into question not just if policing on our campus is corrupt or violent, but the general monopoly police have over violence, and how we might dismantle that.

Student organizers, for the time that they attend school are in extremely close proximity to corporate power, and at PSU we have been able to do remarkable things with this proximity — through directly confronting the likes of people like former Nike lawyers and general managers on our board of trustees. We are able to expose those who belong to one of the top layers of power in our society specifically through our student power.

So with everything that I just said, which is a lot, I want to bring some concrete advice to all of you today. I’m not in student government, but I know a very large amount of you here are.

I often see neutrality on campuses, often from student leaders, or rather those who are specifically named student leaders through entities on their campus. There is a pressure to not be directly integrated into grassroots movement. To be a respectful leader. A neutral one, who listens to both sides, and perfectly synthesizes each side into a stance that will not offend anyone, will not challenge anyone, and will allow a “reasonable” amount of compromise on both sides. I’ve seen this done by student leaders who are personally on the political right, left and somewhere in the middle. The time for this has to be over.

As Desmond Tutu said in 1984. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." The time of acting out of respectability, out of neutrality, out of respecting everybody’s opinion as a virtue in and of itself is over. It serves no one but those in power. We must begin to use our massively important tool of student power, to act on a collective vision of justice. One that prioritizes those who make our society work, and yet are the most marginalized. We are at the center of a 135 billion dollar profit for our government, we are sitting in the middle of a public good that is being increasingly privatized and militarized, we stand toe to toe with the deception and corruption of corporate interests. Neutrality is not needed. We need tuition strikes. We need zero tolerance for police violence. We need a rejection of development that drives up the price of our university and drives out houseless people. We have the power to win and so it is our duty to win, and we are the only ones who can do it.

The issues that distort the education system have much broader effects than just in our classrooms. We must take lessons of the student movements of the past, merge them with the urgency of the future, and move forward to use the power that we as students know we have to stop violence and exploitation in the place where we have power — our campus — as a part of the greater project to end oppression of masses for the benefit of a few, because this oppression reaches farther than us. Sam DuBose and Jason Washington were not students. They were completely innocent civilians, good people, whose lives needlessly and avoidably collided with institutions that prioritized profit over their well being. And they paid for this with their lives. We need to fight for them, harder than we ever have before.

In fall of 2016 a member of the student union, Bakari Hill took his own life. Bakari was one of the most intelligent, kind, giving, determined and selfless members and friends we had. Bakari was one of the few Black members in PSUSU. Months before his death, at a Board of Trustees meeting he brought a bouquet of white flowers to the board. They were flowers for his grave, he said, in case he was killed by campus police. He told them “the first person you kill is going to look just like me.” I want to dedicate this talk to Bakari, if we here, he would undoubtedly still be fighting militantly along side us, for a world where he would not be able to predict the results of an unending assault on Black lives. He knew that another world was possible. I truly hope all of you know that too. This speech his dedicated to him. Thank you.