21 
BILLBOARDS
I ONCE HEARD that the 7-Eleven around the corner from my house, across the street from the apartments where we used to live, was the place you were most likely to get shot in all of Portland. It did not mean all that much to me until someone did die, a young man named Larnell Bruce Jr. He was nineteen years old, he was Black, and he was chased and run over repeatedly by two avowed White supremacists in a truck.
Our community was shaken, both by the violence itself and by its racially charged circumstances. Two White supremacists—a man and his girlfriend—in a truck, one Black man running for his life. Over the next few days and weeks, makeshift memorials were set up on the wall outside of the 7-Eleven. Spray-painted hearts and messages of love for Larnell. A teddy bear. Mylar balloons, shiny and silvery. I wanted to add something but felt as though my grief were displaced. I didn’t know Larnell, and now I never would.
But still—it was my neighborhood, my corner store, my country’s racial tensions demonstrated in this violent death. In a book of prayers put together by friends and fellow activists, I found a prayer specifically for this kind of event: a prayer for a death in the neighborhood. “For the unbearable toil of our sinful world, we plead for remission. For the terror of absence from our beloved, we plead for your comfort. For the scandalous presence of death in your Creation, we plead for resurrection.”1
I went to the spot where Larnell had been murdered and awkwardly prayed this prayer. It didn’t feel like enough. Eventually, the messages of love and remembrance were painted over—first in the bland beige of the surrounding store, then with a brightly colored mural. The mural, I suppose, was meant to evoke feelings of goodwill for our neighborhood —it showed the MAX train, buildings, and birds. In the center, a large tree with hearts all over the trunk, hearts with expressionless heads in varieties of black, brown, and white. I know it was supposed to make me feel better, but it didn’t. It felt instead like it was telling a lie. It felt like that mural had painted over the truth.
Thomas Merton wrote about the two kinds of American myths that the White person needs to reckon with. Writing in the midst of the civil rights movement and the subsequent waves of racial violence perpetrated by White people in the 1960s, Merton said the two legacies to be dealt with were the plantation owners and the pioneers. As someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest, I feel comfortable with the first category because I am comfortable vilifying people from other parts of my country who profited off of explicit racial injustice like chattel slavery. The plantation owner narrative does not pierce me because I view it as so separate and far away from me. I do not feel indicted or implicated. In fact, mulling over their sins makes me feel better about myself.
But it is the other category that Merton introduces, the pioneers, where things get a bit more slippery. As Merton knew, the pioneer mythology is more complex, more discreet, less likely to be challenged with an uproar. And yet the threads of oppression that run through the narrative of chattel slavery are also present in the pioneer narrative. The pioneer takes, the pioneer owns, the pioneer is viewed as first when really they were just had better weaponry. They are the outsider perpetually proud.
But just as you can’t have a plantation owner without enslaved persons, you can’t have a God-ordained pioneer without the idea of “savages” to be conquered. To truly begin to view and then dismantle both of the myths of White supremacy—the plantation owner and the pioneer—we first need to question the structures and beliefs that uphold them. My friend Melissa asked me this once: who pays for our myths? I want to ask myself that question nearly every day. Every time I wake up in my house, when I walk the streets of my neighborhood. Who pays for my cherished identity as a pioneer—as good and deserving, as outside, yet also benefiting from these power structures? Who pays for our inner beliefs? Who benefits? And who, in the end, gets to tell that story?
One day I noticed a billboard in my neighborhood, a few blocks away from the 7-Eleven. It showed a White man in a cowboy hat squinting into the camera. The crows’ feet around his eyes are deep, and his face is tanned and pleasingly worn. Like the Marlboro Man, everything about the image is telling us that this fellow is a man’s man, an iconic American. He’s earned his way in the American frontier. There is a logo for Coors, the brewing company, on the right, and in large font it says, “Out here, we answer to no one.”
I went back to my house and felt compelled to learn more about the history of the company and the message on the large board in my neighborhood. Coors was built in Colorado by immigrants from Europe over a century ago. As the company grew, so did the mystique—the founders refused to sell their beer in the majority of the country, focusing only the West, adding to the mythology (people on the East Coast in particular found it had a certain Western cachet). Their brand is built on rugged thirst, beautiful mountains, cold cans of beer—masculinity married with a sense of freedom and ownership. Selling the pioneer myth to a neighborhood of immigrants and refugees and people displaced by rising housing costs, selling the myth to people who experienced violence and tragedy, who constantly were expected and needed to answer to each other.
I kept digging, discovering that controversies surround the company in later years, including large-scale boycotts by Chicano labor activists and LGBTQ groups for workplace discrimination, while the Colorado Civil Rights Commission found that Coors discriminated against Black employees repeatedly in the 1970s. The Coors family itself responded by becoming increasingly opposed to government regulation, expanding on the pioneer mentality. Joe Coors, son of the original founder, believes that “the government which governs the least governs the best,” at least when it comes to suit him and his business needs.2 Self-described as an “ultrapatriot,” Joe Coors went on to help fund and form the Heritage Foundation, the most influential conservative think tank in American politics (from Nixon to Trump; Trump leans heavily on nominations from Heritage to staff his White House).3 The Heritage Foundation works to uphold free enterprise and limit government regulation while promoting “traditional American values.” For conservative think tanks, the Heritage Foundation has been hailed as a “pioneering effort.” But what precisely are they pioneering?
I thought about my research every time I saw that billboard in my neighborhood. That pioneer man, those crinkly eyes, that message: out here, we answer to no one. And the questions began to bubble up, a sour spring within my heart: Who benefits from this particular myth? And who ultimately will pay the price?
Across the street from the Coors man there’s another billboard that went up a few months ago. I was walking my children home from the library when I saw it and gasped aloud. It showed a picture of a Black boy in a football uniform posing for a school portrait, one knee up, a small smile on his face. Below it were the words: “21 white supremacist groups active in Oregon.” At the bottom, in much smaller letters, it read, “Live and Love Larnell Bruce Jr.”
I said his name over and over again in my head as I walked my children the few blocks home. I had only seen the photos of Larnell used in news reports when he was older, wearing a dark-colored jacket, unsmiling, looking like an adult instead of the teenager that he was. This billboard was another view of his humanity, one designed to be reckoned with. Then there was that number, the number of White supremacist groups active and engaged in Oregon. Once I might have felt shock or terror at that number—twenty-one groups, in 2018, in a supposedly progressive state—but now I felt weary with recognition of the reality.
The organization that put up the billboard about Larnell Bruce Jr. is called Portland Equity in Action. For three months they put up billboards all over the city designed to address the complacency and racial disparity in Portland—from signs that said “Black Lives Matter” to “Your White Fragility Is Showing” to “Who Is Allowed the Presumption of Innocence?” Whenever I saw one of their billboards, especially on the outer east side of the city, I felt a thrill of sorts. This is what slogans are designed to do—to get a reaction, to spark conversation, to push back against the narrative that all is well in Portland.
But it was the billboard closest to my house, a few blocks past the 7-Eleven, that always stopped me cold. I always wondered if my kids would notice it tucked up between the large daycare center and the Taco Time. My daughter, going into the third grade, tried to walk while reading at the same time, something I used to do at her age. She wandered down the sidewalk, past homeless people sleeping in the doorways of an old Grange Hall, past a pawn shop with huge pictures of gold coins and dollar bills. She walked, confident that I would direct her if she strayed too far away. Above us, Larnell Bruce Jr. kneeled in his football uniform. I don’t know how old he was in that picture, but he was on the cusp of no longer being viewed by American society as a gorgeous child (if indeed he ever was valued as such). Perhaps the second he got up from that pose and took off his uniform, he became the threat that so many wanted to say he was.
But as the billboard made clear, Larnell Bruce—Larnell Bruce Jr.: he was somebody’s son, don’t ever forget that—he is not responsible for his own death. It’s the large lettering and that large number that looms a shadow over my heart. Twenty-one active White supremacist organizations in Oregon, simmering both under and over the surface of our supposed progressive utopia. They are the ones we need to answer for. They are made up of some of our brothers and uncles and church members and coworkers. The problem is not only that Larnell Bruce Jr. is dead. The problem is that my neighbors killed him, that they continue to live marinated in an ideology that has an extensive network of roots and vines tunneling throughout the American landscape: an ideology that needs to subsume, to consume, to silence in order to thrive.
I can walk around my neighborhood and see trucks with the Confederate flag on them, trucks with “Redneck Nation” emblazoned on the back, houses with “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and “I Don’t Call 911” signs with an image of a gun pointing straight at me, the reader. I see symbols of violence everywhere I look, decals of guns and staking claim and territory, trucks gunning up and down the busy streets, huge American flags whipping by in the air, almost always driven by White men. I look at them and feel afraid, and then resolve not to. That’s what they want people to feel. I stare at their bumper stickers, their flags, their symbols that lay claim to their rights above the rights of others. When I feel the fear rise up, I pray it away. I pray blessings on those men, and I pray the same thing for both of us: Lord, take our fear and replace it with love.
I often walk by the mural that was painted at the 7-Eleven by my house, a makeshift billboard of a kind. The mural was designed to make people feel better about the spot where Larnell Bruce Jr. was murdered. But when I see it—the faceless people of different hues, the hearts, the tree a symbol of our interconnectedness—I do not feel like we are one happy family. I feel like maybe the mural was painted to stop people from spray painting a specific name on the wall. When I look at those black and brown and white hearts floating up an imaginary tree of life, they do not comfort me. Whoever painted it, and whoever paid them to do it, contributed to the erasure of Larnell Bruce Jr.’s name and life and death. It is cheerful, beautiful, and glosses over the truth of my neighborhood. Whenever I walk past the 7-Eleven with my children, the colors of the paint catching their eyes, I want to point out to them how significant it is. I want to tell them this mural was designed to silence lament in the name of false peace. We walk to the library, to the store, to school. And I want to teach them with every step that if they only pay attention, they’ll see billboards everywhere they look whose purpose to try to make us forget who does and does not pay for the sins of the pioneers.