The Best Shows and Events in Portland This Week, March 2026
Image: courtesy Bethanie Hines
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Ibram X. Kendi’s 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist, made him America’s most prominent “racial-reconciliation guru,” as Zak Cheney-Rice recently wrote in New York magazine. Today, Cheney-Rice goes on, the book “is widely remembered as a self-flagellating manual for bleeding hearts.” The hate hasn’t pushed Kendi out of the public spotlight. His new book, Chain of Ideas, takes on the favorite racist conspiracy of everyone from Marine Le Pen to Tucker Carlson to one Donald John Trump, known as the great replacement theory and sometimes called white replacement theory. Sunday, US Sen. Jeff Merkley will interview Kendi about the book onstage at Revolution Hall (7:30pm; $55 tickets include a book).
Kendi has said that with How to Be an Antiracist, he wanted to advance the use of the word “racist” as a descriptor—a policy is racist if it increases racial disparities—instead of its more common use as a jarring but increasingly ineffective insult, e.g., calling someone a racist. Adopting this concept, I did not call the far-right celebrities above racists; I described the philosophy they support as racist. And great replacement is about as definitionally racist as ideas get.
As the theory goes, elites have conspired to replace the predominantly white populations of Western nations with immigrants. This is the fearmongering of South Park’s “They took our jobs.” Never mind that immigrant labor is the bedrock of the US economy. Yet here we are. Nationalist panic about culture, employment, and electoral power ensues, a panic political leaders are quick to leverage, Kendi’s book argues. It’s an emergency that warrants compromising democracy. And this pattern is not unique to present US politics. In fact, the book, subtitled The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, spans the globe, locating the same weaponized fear in Putin’s rise in Russia, support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and no doubt the US’s ongoing, violent war against its own population, masked by ICE’s neck gaiters.
The message great replacement supporters peddle is that we “are facing an existential attack that only a strongman can prevent,” reads the jacket copy of Chain of Ideas. What’s all this sociopolitical manipulation trying to achieve? “The endgame for Great Replacement politicians is authoritarianism,” Cheney-Rice writes, “which they recast as protection.”
More things to do this week
COMEDY Jacqueline Novak
8PM SAT, MAR 21 | ALADDIN THEATER, $40+
Novak turned her off-Broadway one-woman show Get On Your Knees into an Emmy-nominated Netflix special in 2024. The New Yorker described it as “a ninety-minute reflection on the blow job.” Novak, who cohosts the podcast Poog with Kate Berlant, is a stand-up, but Get On Your Knees involved the choreographed, narrative storytelling that pushes past the wiggle room a stand-up set traditionally allows. The joke around her current tour seems to be a self-consciously empty vamp. “ALL NEW SHOW!” the promotional blurb begins. “IT’S ME WITH MY NOTIONS,” reads an Instagram post. Winging it? Considering Novak rehearsed Get On Your Knees for five years, and minding her hilarious mode of performed neurotics, I doubt it.
DRAG DAPPERLESQUE
8PM SAT, MAR 21 | ALBERTA ROSE THEATRE, $37+
If “gender-bending burlesque cabaret” doesn’t sell you, allow me to elaborate. DAPPERLESQUE, from Portland’s Lacy Productions, extends the often femme-dominated striptease form to include masculine and androgynous performers. The show adds drag kings to the traditional bill of burlesque performers, as well as boylesque and draglesque artists. This installment of the ongoing series, the Otherworldly Edition, looks to the stars for inspiration.
VISUAL ARTS Sense of Place
THRU MAY 2 | ELIZABETH LEACH GALLERY, FREE
“What makes a place?” is a fitting question for a gallery that’s played a humongous hand in building Portland’s contemporary art scene. Continuing celebrations of its 45th anniversary, Elizabeth Leach Gallery’s current group show, Sense of Place, answers the question with both a local art history lesson and a prospective gaze into the future. Henk Pander watercolors and an early Lee Kelly sculpture establish this town’s early big names. A Malia Jensen sculpture of a polka-dot bindle and an oil study of the Johnson Creek Floodplain from Derek Franklin represent the city’s current working artists. And pointing to the gallery’s long history of bringing new work to Portland are photographs by LA artists Shannon Ebner (of an obscured American flag) and Ray Anthony Barrett (of a “flag barn” obscured by a blinding, angelic sun).
Elsewhere...
- Hannah Krafcik on the latest from Lewis & Clark’s theater department, Sleeping in Trees, a performance blending dance and theater into a story about “two sets of neighboring housemates and one mischievous cat that stirs up trouble and connection between them.” (Oregon ArtsWatch)
- “Images of cats tend to serve as landing pads for emotional projection,” Lindsay Costello writes of Joseph Jones’s current show of paintings at Adams and Ollman. “How you interpret them says something interesting about your inner landscape.” (Portland Mercury)
