Politico has an article on racism in the Pacific Northwest, the U.S. region with the fewest African-Americans. I spent three years in Oregon and didn't see much racism or many blacks; however I was in a university town (Eugene) which was more accepting and multicultural than most. Oregon's KKK past was talked about.
One thing is for sure, the region is very odd ... the bizarro Twin Peaks type of odd. Some grad students in the Business school were into hallucinogens; imagine what the social science and liberal arts kids were doing.
It's no accident Starbucks and other coffee mavens started in the region, blame the gloomy weather. Massive caffeine infusions help stave off the "no-sun" depression and keep folks moving.
When I lived there, some decades ago, the single car accident was the most common automotive fatality. Conventional wisdom held many of those crashes to be suicides, I know of one for sure.
In 1969, the acting president of the University of Oregon, pressured by campus radicals making "nonnegotiable demands," drove his VW head-on into a loaded logging truck with instantly fatal results.
As he was CEO of the city's largest employer, we learned the details of his crash. Most of those who drove into a tree or overpass abutment were just sad anonymous statistics, obscured by the endless rain.
