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Comment by dumbfoundded | Hacker News Reader

For reference, this is about 100K people of 4.2M in Oregon (1). The rural counties of Southern Oregon and Northern California have been proposing the state of Jefferson for a while now (2). From my experience living there for a few years, it's the most libertarian place I've ever seen. It's like Texas without the Christianity. People there generally support gay marriage, abortion, and cannabis legalization but also low taxes, no gun restrictions and limited government.

(1) https://www.oregon-demographics.com/counties_by_population

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_st...

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The counties that make up Jefferson could also be absorbed into Western Nevada, but that's not as sexy as becoming your own state.

It varies a lot. I spent some growing up years in Southern Oregon and there definitely was a strong evangelical, anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion etc. contingent in the town where I was. Lots of Birchers & KKK types as well. This was in the 70s and while the whole QAnon thing now is epistemlogically shocking, it seems like we had a lot of similar kinds of conspiracies running rampant in small southern Oregon towns back then as well.

My dad was a science teacher so we felt pretty much like an island of progressivism in a sea of very right wing folk. More than once I recall him shaking his head and muttering something like "These people are nuts!" after an exchange with a local that went off the rails into conspiracy land.

I mean Oregon was founded as a white only state it's right in there constitution.

> No free negro or mulatto not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside or be within this state or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; and the legislative assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such negroes and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ or harbor them.

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

So it's not surprising so much of the state is like this. People give the south crap but the Pacific Northwest was literally founded on these ideals and it still very much persists to this day.

The current racism in Oregon is certainly not something I want to understate but it's unfair to compare Oregon now to the deep South now. The whole of the United States was founded on slavery but a lot has changed. Not nearly as much as has changed in the South. For example, President Obama lost the national white vote 43% to 55% in 2008 (1). In 2008, more than 89% of the voters in Oregon were white and voted for Obama by 59% to 41% (2). I think it's fair to say at least recently, the white people in Oregon think very differently than the white people in the South. Of course, issues around race continue to exist in significant and meaningful ways in Oregon. But saying it's all the same is deceitfully misleading.

(1) https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2008

(2) https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2008/results/states/exitpo...

> The whole of the United States was founded on slavery

Citation needed. I'll be curious how you show that each state was "founded on" slavery, and how that was true from the inception of each of those states.

Slavery was the chief issue preventing the colonies from creating a united government. At first, the Articles of Confederation created a shell of a government that quickly fell apart leading to the constitutional convention and the creation of the US Government as we know it today. At the time, slavery was the most contested issue when writing the current constitution.

It's important to recognize almost all of the economic power of the US came from slave labor exports like tobacco. That's why we have so many Virginians as founding fathers and why the capital was put in Virginia. The compromise that led to the Southern Colonies accepting the US constitution is famously known as the 3/5 compromise. This compromise heavily impacted US politics for decades as new states had to be evenly added to maintain the balance between slave holding states and non-slave holding states. When this balance fell apart, the civil war started.

The issue of slavery weighed heavily in the creation of the US from political, economic, and cultural perspectives for decades. Slavery formed the economic basis of the early United States and 250 years later, we're still feeling its impact.

You said, "the whole of the United States was founded on slavery." That statement is what I take issue with. If you feel like amending that, to something like "some parts of the United States leaned heavily on the use of slavery", I would agree. It's the extreme claim of your first statement that I take issue with.

In general, you've limited your claims to some of the original 13 states / colonies. That's a far cry from "the whole of the United States". I'd like to see your sources for each of the other 50 states, that they were each founded on slavery.

Not only that, but you seem to be defending your very general statement by only looking at a very limited time frame. Were each of the states so heavily dependent on slavery that it could be said that, e.g., Wyoming or Wisconsin or even Alaska were founded on slavery?

I don't think so.

This assumes all votes were based on race and that voting for a white person makes you racist and voting for a black person makes you not racist. There is just so much wrong with that.

Your response is disgustingly incorrect. President Obama's election as the first black president certainly included significant racial elements. When comparing it to Clinton vs Dole in 1996, Clinton lost the white vote 42% to 44% (1). Obama lost the white vote 43% to 55% (2). Both Clinton and Obama won by 8% differences.

Yes, not voting for the black candidate over the white candidate doesn't make you racist. But to ignore race altogether as a factor is just as ignorant and even more damaging. The 2008 president election was one of the most racially divisive elections in US history (3).

(1) https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1996

(2) https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2008

(3) http://www.columbia.edu/~tko2103/GVF20110722.pdf

Your are overlooking a few big factor. Those are two completely different people, from different states with different policies, against different candidates, and at different times. Yet you are claiming race was the biggest factor in their voting differences with zero evidence.

You left out something important. In 1996, Clinton won the African-American vote 84% to 12%. In 2008, Obama won the African-American vote 95% to 4%. That's a far larger difference.

You're right: let's not ignore race. By your own logic, if you're saying the white polling numbers show white racism, then you have to admit that the African American polling numbers show far more extreme racism on the part of African Americans.

I know you already know how silly this comparison is. Replace White with Han Chinese and Black with Uyghur if you need help.

It's not exactly a surprise when the repressed and discriminated against minority sees race as a more important issue. Equating racism without considering the context of who holds what power is simply disingenuous.

I used exactly the same argument you did, with equivalent data. You're now trying to wiggle out of admitting equivalent conclusions.

That stinks of gross and explicit doublethink.

You're so goofy. I love it. We should hang out sometime.

Edit: I apologize for doing this as an edit but HN won't let me reply so here it is. I've made my points and you've made your's. You haven't brought up any new points and you've been ignoring mine previous ones that already anticipate your response. So let's trivialize it because it's not going any further. Seriously though. I hope you have a wonderful day.

Aw, you can't come up with a rational response. I'll admit, trivializing is a decent follow-up when you've got no arguments left.

EDIT: I'll answer with an edit also. For my part, it seems like my response went unanswered and you didn't really anticipate it, and I do think the argument has places to go. However, I do wish you the best, and I hope you have a wonderful day too.

It doesn't assume anything. It registers evidence for one hypothesis over another. If the evidence doesn't move your priors at all, then you're not thinking rationally. Of course there are other factors as well (which perhaps dominate), the strictness of the Dem/Rep split, etc. but this one piece of evidence should move you in the direction described.

That isn’t evidence for anyone voting based on race or that Oregon having more whites voting for a black person makes them less racist. Just being a different color has absolutely nothing to do with any of their qualifications, policies, personality, opponent, and more. Assuming race is the biggest factor based on the voters race and the candidates race is extremely racist in itself. An outcome alone based on race doesn’t determine the motive of voters. Even just candidates campaigning in a specific area would result in very different numbers.

There were exclusion laws in a fair bit of the Midwest back in the day. I don't know that those states are any more or any less racist than the rest of the US.

I recently moved from Eagle Point so probably not too far away from where you were. It's certainly a strange and diverse set of people. Everything from weed growers to hippies to evangelicals to conspiracy nuts and everything in between. Most of the people I met there generally distrusted the government and couldn't care less about what you did on your own land.

It really is kind of a weird place. I recall that soon after we moved there one of my dad's colleagues explained the situation something like this: "You know about Appalachia, right? Well, it's like there was a part of the Oregon trail that went directly from Appalachia to Southern Oregon - this is Appalachia West." The KKK was really active in that area for a long time which seems weird for a place on the West Coast - but then again, Oregon was founded on excluding Black people.

But then we also had The Rainbow People which were a large hippie group that traveled around the PNW and often came into our area for big camp outs. Talk about a cultural divide.

Oregon has a long history of encoding racism into law, from the Black Exclusion laws from its early history to sundown laws that lasted into the 20th century.

Idaho, too -- the Aryan Nations had their headquarters in the Hayden Lake area for a long time, until the early 2000s if I remember.

It's only in the big cities that you get a lot of a liberal/progressive presence, outside that you get anywhere from libertarians to evangelicals to the outright racists/alt-right types.

The University of Washington in Seattle was super progressive and accepted black students. Cool, right? Nah, the campus was north of the Montlake Cut, so black students weren't allowed on campus past sundown -- a little past 4 PM in the winter -- until the late 60s.

This wasn't somehow special to Seattle, either, but I grew up south of the cut and always wondered why the north end was so white until I learned my history[1].

In public schooling, the framing of the civil rights movement in history classes made me think that it was somehow a problem that the South had. Turns out, every major city I've looked into was segregated, until that became illegal. And even so, real estate agents subtly perpetuate the intent of those old laws to this day [2].

[1] http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/realestate/blacks-minorit...

Neo-nazis and other racial separatists explicitly advocate for the pacific north west to be their home, as they consider it to be the furthest from Atlanta, which they consider to be majority black. The PNW is also home to Christian nationalist terrorists like Matt Shae, who advocate forced conversion and murder of non-Christian minorities.

Fun fact: Oregon arrests and prosecutes minorities more aggressively than every other state in the nation.

Wandering around the back roads near Cave Junction, I rode past a barn with a giant mural advocating world peace and love for all. The fence around the barn was plastered with 'trespassers will be shot' signs. It is, indeed, it's own world...

>while the whole QAnon thing now is epistemlogically shocking

only if you have forgotten, as you say, the great satanic panic(s) of the 70s and 80s. And, every few decades, going back to about Carthage...

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997559036/americas-satanic-pa...

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