"Want to Meet America’s Worst Racists? Come to the Northwest"

"tucked away in the Pacific Northwest of the United States is a vicious group that most people have never heard of but the nation’s most virulent online racists know well...

To be sure, the Northwest Front represents a fringe campaign, a minority of a minority seeking to expunge the Pacific Northwest of any color but white. According to Harold Covington, the group’s leader, the union of Washington State, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana would be “kind of like the white version of Israel. I don’t see why the Jews are the only people on Earth that get their own country and everyone else has to be diverse.” Covington knows precisely what he’s gone in for: “Of course it’s racism. What’s wrong with racism? It’s the purist form of patriotism.”...

Covington tapped into a racist longing that has long festered in this part of the country, a tide of American history that’s never been properly addressed. From its earliest American outset, the Pacific Northwest was long meant to be a land for the white caste. “Whites Only” writ large...

Today, not only does Portland remain the whitest major metropolitan area in the country, but the city managed to slough its remaining African-American population even further in the 21^st century, dropping from 6.6 percent in 2000 to 6.3 percent in 2010. Seattle’s decline has proven even steeper, with the city’s black population sagging from 8.4 percent to 7.9 percent in just 10 years, with no end to the drop in sight."
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/northwest-front-americas-worst-racists-119803.html#ixzz3fPdE8FCm

(there is a lot more historical detail that's interesting, but also this article is weirdly trying to link to Dylann Roof)

Oregon was literally established to be a state for white people - I learned this while on a roadtrip through Oregon and couldn't accept it at first because that seems like way too much. Great job, America.