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1
"Portland’s lily-white demographics aren’t just a weird accident of migration. There are very real, very nasty reasons for why this city is as un-diverse as it is today. What’s with all the white people? Oregon’s founders wanted it that way."

There's also the fact that Oregon was a long ways from the South where the majority of black Americans migrated from in the 1940s and onward to Northern and Western cities during the migration and it wasn't as large an industrial center so it didn't attract as many migrants as cities in the Northeast or Midwest... There's never been a large black population in the western US for the most part. Racial diversity is a pretty recent thing in most US cities--in 1940 at the start of the Great Migration and prior to the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, only 7% of New York was non-white.

But let's keep believing that in a nation that has plenty of racism in it's past, that Oregon was somehow more racist. At least it will keep all the liberal white transplants who gentrified North Portland in the last decade who keep asking "What's with all the white people?" satisfied.
2
Your second paragraph makes a good point Deezus. I am not going to comment on whether or not Oregon was historically more racist than other West Coast states (I would say they all were frankly), but consider two things. Oregon and California were the end zone of Manifest Destiny. Not only in terms of Geography but as you pointed out we are farther away from the East and South.
There was a "migration" of sorts in WWII when black people from the south were brought here as a labor force for military and civilian construction and manufacture. I know two families who originally came here from Georgia during this time. The book should be interesting

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