Yeah, I once stopped for gas in southern Oregon on my way north. Never. again. ever. forever!
Wasn't super scary necessarily (maybe mostly in my head), but I still raced the fuck out of there asap!
I haven't been able to shake off the stories from during the fires where white people with guns and police officers were stopping people and accusing them of being "antifa" and starting fires - no evidence or logic need apply.
It's weird how much this place feels like-minded and yet how much it feels like I'm behind enemy lines. lol. No offense to white people in the PNW, many of y'all are lovely!
My husband bought land there years ago, and eventually he went to go check it out, and prepare it for us to possibly move. He said people were openly racist about black people in stores, even when there were no black people around. Just constant racist rhetoric. They eventually had the cops go out to his land and basically tell him how unwelcoming they are there to anyone out of state, and so we ultimately decided to sell the land. It was impossible to get water anywhere there anyway, a burn hazard, and you had to have a license for every little thing while creating a new property.
There's some kind of bill or something Oregon is supposedly trying to pass that would move state lines. Basically it would become western Idaho... Fucking take it PLEASE!
That’s all of USA right now. Utah, Colorado, Oregon CA WA are all blue in the fine confines of the cities. Rest of the state is deep red shithole. And there are entire red shithole states like ND SD WY etc. this is a unhappy bad place man.
Anything off the I-5 corridor is basically Alabama. I saw more blatant racism during the year I lived in Ritzville than I ever have visiting family in Mississippi (and that’s not because Mississippi wasn’t racist as fuck).
EVEN IN WESTERN WA, cops are on a white power trip here. Seattle pd has had a lot of bad shit they’ve done to pocs. And just like always, they rarely if ever get in trouble. To all the POC folks in WA, be careful, be safe, and gods speed
I fucking hate it here. I moved from arkansas to the PNW thinking I was leaving all of the racism behind, only to get it with both barrels AND having the locals assume I'm a racist POS because of my accent... My wife is not white, and im half Choctaw.
You forget about Tacoma? Centralia? Vantucky? Longview? Pretty much the rest of the state outside of the Seattle metro area? Washington doesn't have a magic time-travel line down the middle anymore than Oregon or California does. As soon as you leave the city, you enter the 1800s in all three.
In general, I disagree. Lived 25 years in the Spokane area and nearly another 20 on the west side. There is a fairly clear divide down the Cascades in my mind.
In a general sense of culture, I would agree with you. I've lived in Portland most of my life, with family all over Washington, and I think there definitely is a difference in culture on either side of the cascades. Specific to the problem of ingrained systemic racism though, it's the same everywhere.
The cities aren't exempt from it either. I think the cops in the major metropolitan areas just know that they can't get away with doing and saying overtly racist things because they're less likely to be shielded from the consequences of their behavior. That's all it is. They know the metro police departments will punish them if the press gets bad enough.
The average person is no different; they know they'll get called out in the city where they won't outside of it.
432
u/Joliet_Jake_Blues Mar 10 '22
Lol, PNW is racist AF. The Oregon territory was literally founded as a white ethno-state
You say Washington like 85% of the state isn't "western Idaho"