Earlier: WASHINGTON POST: Small News From Portland (A Mostly Peaceful Police Station On Fire)
Why has Detroit been so calm during the Summer of George while Portland has been so riotous?
Detroit is the blackest big city, while Portland is the whitest.
Assume for the sake of simplicity that there are two types of Not-So-Peaceful Protestors: BLM looters and Antifa rioters. The former are disproportionately black and the latter disproportionately white. The former break store windows to steal the merchandise inside, while the latter break store windows to break store windows.
My guess would be that there isn’t too much left to loot in Detroit after all these decades (2020 looting in places like Fifth Avenue and Melrose Boulevard has been unprecedentedly covetous and ambitious). And Detroit is too scary for Antifa, who, while they aren’t scared of the police, are scared of black criminals. Plus, Detroit serves as a sort of giant object lesson that the conventional wisdom of 2020 is stupid.
In contrast, Portland, because of its tiny number of blacks, is ideal for incubating the most extreme versions of Establishment thought among whites.
