As she has watched white leftists engage in street battles with white nationalists on Portland’s waterfront, Debi Smith has been struck with a sense of gratitude for those willing to fight, in a sense, for her. After all, Ms. Smith has also watched black people, by both choice and force of circumstances, leaving the City of Roses, their numbers declining since 2010. Progressive to its core, Portland is also America’s whitest big city – in part the troubling legacy of Oregon’s founding goal in the 19th century of creating a white utopia through exclusionary laws.

After last weekend’s violent protests in Charlottesville, Va., many Americans feel a need to make better choices about public expressions of racism, such as in Confederate symbols or hate-filled Facebook postings. The responses are quite diverse, ranging from the farcical to the coercive, which makes it important to look for a common thread that ultimately makes a difference. In a “Saturday Night Live” skit, comedian Tina Fey urged Americans to respond to neo-Nazi hatred by ordering “a cake with the American flag on it ... and just eat it.” That is the “ignore it” response.

It was just after 1 a.m. when Tomassina Hessel heard the knock on her door. The tower was Grenfell, a 24-story residential block that Ms. Hessel’s low-rise building abutted, part of the same public-housing estate. Grenfell Tower was a torch in the dark night, a charnel house that would claim at least 80 lives in London’s deadliest fire since the Nazi bombing in World War II.

It is perhaps the most serious, direct criticism of President Trump by one of his fellow Republicans in Congress since his remarks about last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville, Va. On Thursday, Sen. Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters in his home state of Tennessee that Mr. Trump has yet to demonstrate the “stability” or “competence” to be a successful president – which the world needs, he said.