In Conversation with Olivia Pace - 'Disarm PSU: When we fight, we win.'
One of the most important things I’ve had to keep in mind throughout this racial reckoning that has taken place over the past few months, is that none of the demands - to dismantle systemic racism, white supremacy, and more specifically the prison industrial complex - are new. There are organizers throughout the United States and the world who have been calling for an end to police brutality and the PIC entirely, before we collectively met this moment of unprecedented social unrest. One of those movements being the Disarm PSU Now at Portland State University, led in part by writer and organizer Olivia Pace.
In our interview, Olivia discusses the significance of the abolition movement on university campuses, and how movement workers can remain hopeful throughout a sustained fight.
“The worst-case scenario is that you make your community a little bit better, the best-case scenario is that you win...And even if you don’t win, like properly in your campaign, you are creating a bigger opening for people after you to do that work.”
What’s your story? Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today.
I’m from Portland. I was born and raised mostly on the west side of Portland in Beaverton, which a suburb west of the city. My dad’s Black, my mom’s white, and Portland is famously the whitest major city in the United States. Growing up I didn’t have a lot of room to contextualize my experience as a Black person in the schools that I was in. The schools that I went to when I was younger were really diverse, the schools I went to when I was a little bit older were extremely white and insulated.
But the summer I graduated from high school was the summer that Michael Brown was killed and I started school at Portland State University at the same time. Two years before that, the University had been going through the process of creating an armed and deputized police force for the first time at Portland State.
As Black Lives Matter was really exploding and I am using that moment to contextualize a lot of the experiences that I’d had for the first time - and wanting really badly to be involved in the political moment and wanting to organize but not knowing how to get plugged in - the campaign at PSU was starting. The first protest I ever went to was the protest before the Board of Trustees at PSU voted for the first time - the approval vote - to, in July of 2015, implement an armed police force on our campus. That hadn’t existed before we just had unarmed security officers. It was very clear that all of the motives for it were economic. There was no - and this is a flawed argument - there was no spike in crime, there was not a safety issue, they just kind of did it.
At the same time that Black Lives Matter was exploding students, staff and faculty were like “What are you doing?” So that was kind of my intro to doing the work that I wanted to start doing. I got involved with that campaign and ended up being one of the lead organizers of the campaign for five years. And I’m still working on it now as we go into this transition period of disarming the police and seeing what we can do next.
Outside of that I’ve organized in a lot of socialist spaces in Portland and that’s my political training, but I feel like in the past couple years I’ve been more engaged in trying to figure out how to bring my personal experiences, emotions and vulnerability into my work more often. That’s the purpose that writing serves for me.
Also, I’m chronically ill – I have cystic fibrosis – so I’m also trying to rethink about how I engage in movement building and retraining my brain to not feel like I have to be physically on the front lines all the time.
I really liked your piece because it reminded me that my own introduction to Black radical politics really came from seeing student organizers at Howard. And disarming our campus police has been a talking point for a while too - can you talk about the importance of organizing around that issue on college campuses specifically?
The University is a site of a lot of really intense economic exploitation that I feel gets covered up, especially towards marginalized communities. You could explain it in two ways: At campuses like PSU, where it’s like this urban campus in the center of the city - if you’re walking around downtown and end up on campus and you will have no idea that you were even near a college two seconds ago - and it’s very “diverse” and “innovative.” The year we armed our campus police, the freshman class was 43 percent more diverse than ever - it was the most diverse freshman class they’d ever had. And they’re luring these students in through this rhetoric and at the same employing these armed police forces.
And I didn’t go to Howard obviously but in my head when I think about it, HBCUs market to Black students through this lens of empowerment, history and Black radicalism but then perpetuate the same kind of corporatism that all other universities do and exploit their Black students in ways similar to what other universities do.
That aim is to expand so many of the business interests that are already operating in the city. Like PSU has ties with Nike, with the Portland Business Alliance. Portland is rapidly gentrifying and PSU is in the circles of different business interests, committees and conglomerates that are perpetuating that gentrification. So it’s not insignificant to fight back against policing at Portland State.
‘Cause our work hasn’t just been about taking the guns away - through our work and through the fight we have systematically destabilized the policing mechanism and Portland State. We just want it to not exist, we don’t want to just fuck it up, but the work has done that, they’re not thriving at all. And that’s not insignificant because PSU does perpetuate gentrification and all of these class and race issues that are so rampant in Portland.
Also, just in a practical sense - this work radicalized so many students and so many people who come to the university and are disempowered by the way the administration treats students of color and poor students. This work helps to mitigate that. All of my friends that I’ve made through this work have gone on to do more work on these issues more broadly in the city with this knowledge base of how PSU perpetuates racism and classism, and how policing at Portland State serves larger business interests in the city. Even though people try to treat the university like it’s insulated and like it’s not real life, but it is and real-life economic exploitation is happening there.
Your piece also illustrated that although we’ve seen this explosive moment, there are organizers and folks on the ground who have been doing the work for months if not years, what would you say to people who may be losing hope or fatigued, honestly?
The quote I put from Ibram X. Kendi in the piece about hope and that if you lose hope then you just lose. That’s so simple, but that’s the only thing that you have and you just have to try your hardest and make what seems like the best decision in that moment, and keep going but also pat yourself on the back for that.
It doesn’t happen overnight and you can’t possibly be the person to make it happen overnight. You’re learning - when I started working on this campaign, I was 18 and I’d graduated high school less than a year before and I had no experience in any kind of political organizing. When we won I was so overwhelmed by thinking back and being like “Every single time things were too overwhelming. Every single time we didn’t know what to do. Every single time I felt like we fucked up or didn’t do enough - if we had stopped then this wouldn’t have happened. None of it was in vain and literally, all of it mattered.
The worst-case scenario is that you make your community a little bit better, the best-case scenario is that you win and if you win all of it will have mattered. It’s all building up to something bigger. And even if you don’t win, like properly in your campaign, you are creating a bigger opening for people after you to do that work.
Olivia Pace (she/her/hers) is a Black, queer woman, organizer, educator and writer born and raised in the Portland metro area. She received her B.A. in Child & Family Studies and a minor in Black Studies from Portland State University in 2019. Olivia is still an organizer with Disarm PSU, helps to organize childcare workers around Portland, and is the social media manager for Portland in Color, a non-profit providing opportunities for BIPOC artists in Portland. You can learn more about Olivia at oliviapace.com. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.
