Confused about antifa? Leah Sottile of High Country News spoke to Effie Baum of Portland’s own Popular Mobilzation to break it down for you.
Effie Baum: “Antifa” is short for anti-fascist. It is not a unified organization. Anybody can use (the term), and anybody who identifies as an anti-fascist could also say they are antifa. You don’t have to “join” antifa. It is a self-designated thing. If you are anti-fascist, you are antifa.
Where it gets muddy is that the media representation of “antifa” is often images of people utilizing a tactic known as “black bloc,” which is big groups of people dressed all in black that you see on television. And the issue with that is that, in addition to equating antifa only with that specific tactic, it does a huge disservice to all of the work that anti-fascists do besides that one very small thing, which is community defense. Ninety-eight percent of the work that anti-fascists do does not happen in the streets. Black bloc is a tactic — it is not an organization or a group.
The stereotype is that (people in black bloc are) disruptive, that they’re just troublemakers, but the fact of the matter is they are our front lines of defense from state violence and from violence that would be inflicted on us by the right.