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Comment by qshaman | Hacker News Reader

Lived in South Florida for a while, this is exactly how it is. Also those "small mountain towns" are deeply conservative and intolerant, if you are white you are in luck, but I don't think they are thrilled to see an influx of non-white folks coming to their town, same with LGBTQ+ people. Those places fit a certain type of people but definitely not everybody that have the money to move there.

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I couldn't agree more.

I was born in the US to Asian Indian parents. We lived in a small town in the southern US and dealt with a lot of racist crap. I went to college in a big city and while racism still exists the majority do not have racist views and are more accepting of people that do not look like them.

I've travelled to 47 states and I am most scared when I am in a small town in the mountain west. Burns, Oregon. Moscow, Idaho. Everyone was staring at me in the grocery store. I got some intimidating comments like "Are you new in town?" "No, just passing through." "Good."

Not welcoming in the slightest.

I live in a pretty backwoods part of Washington and even as a white but liberal looking person I get that to a much lesser extent. I can't imagine what you've had to deal with.

After my trip through Burns, Oregon where I got some of those comments at the grocery store I went to John Day, Oregon. I mainly went to see the fossil beds national monument but I also stopped at this small museum which was a Chinese run store and apothecary in the late 1800's and early 1900's

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kam_Wah_Chung_%26_Co._Museum

The tour guide mentioned how welcoming the people were to their Chinese immigrants. She went on to say that when the Aryan Nation tried to set up their headquarters there the people organized to tell them to go away. Unfortunately they keep trying to come back. This story is from last year.

It's great that the people of John Day are fighting against racism but I got the feeling on my trip that the Aryan Nation would be welcome an hour south in Burns.

https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/john-day-to-aryans-w...

Boy, do I doubt "how welcoming the people were to their Chinese immigrants", given Oregon's history with non-white folks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws

Lots of supposedly liberal states had Black Laws.

European here, who has clocked up about 3.5 years of living in New England: in cosmopolitan areas, I didn't see much racism against what I might call "melting pot" ethnicities although I heard of some, but I often saw and heard of racism by middle-class Americans against American blacks, including by white fellow students of a black Yale undergraduate. I think that racism in the US is very much a two-lane thing.

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