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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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