Feels like an interesting book. I will sure try to get my hands on it. As a black African I always feel that the insistence of the word 'black' is too much in the US. What is this nonsense of 'black life' for example? Nobody talks of 'white lives'. It always impacts me as nonsensical. To my mind it betrays the continued ostracism of black people there. You also have 'black music', when most of the quality music in the US is by black people I always wonder what qualifying it as black should really mean. No, being black in the US can be a really sad thing.
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Terrible book review. It’s all opinion, with little from the book to back it up.
Doesn’t make me want to read this book.
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Does anyone know which was the last of our wonderful states to repeal Jim Crow laws? Please educate me.
Thank you, Mr Moore. What a wonderfully written review. Now I am going to have to buy Mr Jackson's and your books. At 62, I still have so much to learn.
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Looking forward to reading this. As a child in Oregon, the clause that attempted to prevent African-Americans from taking up residence was not taught as part of the state’s history.
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I grew up in Portland, and your characterization of an imagined hard right Trumpian "Oregon" is nuts, and it misses the larger point.
The fact that Oregon in general -and Portland in particular- is a deep blue liberal place, shines a harsher (and much more interesting) light on it's lousy treatment of black folks.
Because really, if oppressed black people left the South for a place that was the social, civic, an political opposite of the South, it seems reasonable that they could expect the opposite kind of reception. Instead they kept getting kicked in the teeth.
And why is that, exactly? Liberal Portland should answer for this, but your article allows Portlanders to point to an easier answer: "It was all the fault of those awful rednecks, and I'm not one of those".
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Portland is not representative of rural southern and eastern Oregon. Anyone who says they know about Oregon because they’ve been in Portland needs to think again.
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I read ‘The Residue Years’ and I love Mitchell Jackson’s work, but I disagree with your statement that he grew up surrounded by white working class Trump voters. Portland is very white, but it is definitely not full of trump voters. I grew up here when Jackson did during the 80’s.
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I am presently studying the first black family in my hometown.
They arrived in about 1838 it’s not a pretty picture.
The racism displayed towards them was almost as bad as the paternalistic attitude.
By 1915 the last family member in town died.
That didn’t stop the local paper from telling blatantly racist family history 25 years after they were gone from town.
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I'm interested, what town?
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