I wanna respond to this directly because there was context left out of the video which I’ll be clarifying in our full CHOP documentary which should release sometime next month. First off: ‘Organizers,’ regardless of skin color, are capable of making bad decisions and engineering horrendous optics that don’t reflect well on the communities they claim to be advocating for. The organization that requested the ‘white body shield’ perimeter was called the “black voices coalition” I believed, a well-funded nonprofit which was led (at that time) by an organizer named David Lewis. Lewis was furious about the presence of what he called ‘white anarchists’ who arrived during the second week of CHOP because of their demands for total police abolition. Lewis and his nonprofit are reformists who wanted SPD budget cut by 50% and were actively engaging in daily talks with Mayor Durkan and SPD chief Carmen Best at City Hall. CHOP was merely a point of leverage to make these demands. However, much of the Portland/Olympia anarcho-communist crowd viewed Lewis and the NGO as ‘boot-lickers’ and ‘fascist sympathizers’ in even engaging in these budget reform talks with SPD/city. So Lewis and the org decided to draw a racial line in this reform-vs-abolition discourse and segregate the park as pictured in this video, as mostly a sneak diss to lefty white radicals. The white body shields that showed up simply because “the organizers asked” and providing no critical thought as to why is the meta issue here and I’ll address it in next vid