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[olivermoss]

Last night I was trying to give a fic a last polish before reveals. But, when I'd take a break and look at twitter it was fully of video of trucks deliberately trying ot ram into protesters in my town and spraying them with mace from the back of pick up trucks.

They've come here and beaten, driven through and maces wherever they felt like. They are going to get away with it and it's going to happen again. Portland is surrounded by people who hate us intensely and dream of treating us like animals.

I had been working on a timeline to better explain why. Oregon was founded as a white supremacist state, but it's become solidly liberal. There were long term plans, multi-generational plans to make this a KKK stronghold. It's in the state's constitution. Portland becoming a desirable place to live highly correlates to it becoming liberal. Right as the city began flourishing, it was also lost to them as a power base. I think that a lot of Portlanders know this history in bits and pieces but don't really look at the whole and realize what a symbol it is to the militias and those for whom hate is a family value passed down.

The thing that tripped up me making a timeline was trying to figure out when slavery ended in Oregon. People winding up in indentured slavery over bar bills happened at least as late as 1915, but I guess we never outlawed it?

Anyway, yeah, there are reasons Portland gets a lot of special attention from the alt-right. We were supposed to be their New Eden.

Comments

[olivermoss]

I am going to work on it some, but there aren't many resources. This project looking at population data to identify Sundown towns in Oregon has been dormant for a while. In the cities Sundowns weren't like in Lovecraft Country where none are allowed ever, but more they are all rounded up and run out when too many get comfortable. The linked census data on Eugene, one of our larger cities, is deeply unsettling.

Why Portland went from Racist's New Eden to 90 days of BLM marches I really only have some random oral history. There is one detail I've been chasing for a while now. I know there have been attempts every few years to find more actual data or pictures of first hand accounts of Sundowning but they haven't managed to find more yet.