"White Trash" in Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

This excerpt, from Bill Bryson's 2007 memoir of his 1950s childhood in Des Moines, Iowa, is one of the best depictions I've read of "white trash," though it doesn't actually use that term.  Note the "white trash" hailed from either Arkansas or Alabama, southern places essentially indistinguishable from each other and associated with such hoi polloi.  

The only real danger in life was the Butter Boys. The Butters were a family or large interbred, indeterminately numerous individuals who lived seasonally in a collection of shanty homes in an area of perpetual wooded gloom known as the Bottoms along the swampy margins of the Raccoon River. Nearly every spring the Bottoms would flood and the Butters would go back to Arkansas or Alabama or wherever it was they came from.

In between times they would menace us. Their specialty was to torment any children smaller than them, which was all children. The Butters were big to begin with but because they were held back year after year, they were much, much larger than any child in their class. By sixth grade some of them were too big to pass through doors. They were ugly, too, and real dumb. They ate squirrels.

Generally the best option was to have some small child that you could offer as a sacrifice. Lumpy Kowalski was ideal for this as he was indifferent to pain and fear, and would never tell on you because he couldn't, or possibly just didn't, speak. (It was never clear which.)Also, the Butters were certain to be grossed out by his dirty pants, so they would merely paw him for a bit and then withdraw with pained, confused faces.  

The worst outcome was to be caught on your own by one or more of the Butter boys. Once when I was about ten I was nabbed by Buddy Butter, who was in my grade but at least seven years older. He dragged me under a big pine tree and pinned me to the ground on my back and told me he was going to keep me there all night long.

I waited for what seemed a decent interval and then said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I can,” he answered, but pronounced it “kin.” Then he made a kind of glutinous, appreciative, snot-clearing noise, which was what passed in the Butter universe for laughter.

“But you'll have to stay here all night, too,” I pointed out. “It'll be just as boring for you.”

“Don't care,” he replied, sharp as anything, and was quiet a longtime before adding: “Besides I can do this.” And he treated me to the hanging-spit trick—the one where the person on top slowly suspends a gob of spit and lets it hang there by a thread, trembling gently, and either sucks it back in if the victim surrenders or lets it fall, some-times inadvertently. It wasn't even like spit—at least not like human spit. It was more like the sort of thing a giant insect would regurgitate onto its forelimbs and rub onto its antennae. It was a mossy green with little streaks of red blood in it and, unless my memory is playing tricks, two very small gray feathers protruding at the sides. It was so big and shiny that I could see my reflection in it, distorted, as in an M.C. Escher drawing. I knew that if any part of it touched my face, it would sizzle hotly and leave a disfiguring scar.

In fact, he sucked the gob back in and got off me. “Well, you let that be a lesson to you, you little skunk pussy, Poontang sissy,” he said.

‘Two days later the soaking spring rains came and put all the Butters on their tar-paper roofs, where they were rescued one by one by men in small boats. A thousand children stood on the banks above and cheered.

‘What they didn’t realize was that the storm clouds that carried all that refreshing rain had been guided across the skies by the powerful X-ray vision of the modest superhero of the prairies, the small but perfectly proportioned Thunderbolt Kid.

In case you didn't figure it out, Bryson referred to his childhood self as the Thunderbolt Kid. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

A focus on working class youth displaced by the Camp Fire

A great deal of coverage of the Camp Fire has focused on the elderly and those with disabilities, who made up a disproportionate percent of the residents of Paradis, California, and a disproportionate percentage of those killed in the fire.  Now, Dan Levin reports today in the New York Times under the headline, "After Wildfire, Class of 2019 Faces Uncertain Future."  As a student in this class and I suggested in posts a few weeks ago on Working Class Whites and the Law (here and here), Paradise, the small city destroyed in the so-called Camp Fire last month, was very much a working class town, and its population was predominantly white.  Here's a data point from Levin's story that reinforces the point:

• 67 percent of Paradise High School students qualify for free or reduced lunch

The story features many profiles of Paradise High students.  One profile in particular reminds me of my Legal Ruralism post from a few days ago regarding the struggles of rural students in the higher education context:   

[Elie] Wyllie, 17, grew up in Paradise “way below the poverty line,” she said. Problems at home motivated her to get stellar grades. Her zeal for perfection made her Paradise High’s top tennis player and earned her the nickname The Comeback. She dreamed of becoming a cardiothoracic surgeon, believing that college was the sole path to changing her family’s fortunes.

She was in the midst of applying to a dozen colleges, including Yale, when the inferno reduced her home to ashes. While California state schools extended their application deadlines, she still does not have all the paperwork they require.

Levin quotes Wyllie:

Everything is crashing down.  Now I’ll be the only person in my family to have a future. They’re going to expect me to take care of them when I can barely take care of myself. 

Wyllie has moved in with her now-retired AP history teacher, the only way she could complete homework and her college applications.

Here's another sobering quote from Ms. Wyllie:

The Camp Fire tore up more than just my town; it took away my peace of mind.  Everything for the rest of my life is going to be affected by this.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Does Michael Bloomberg's $1.8M gift really help the working-class student?

Michael Bloomberg announced last week that he would be donating $1.8 billion to set up a college financial aid fund at his alma mater, John Hopkins University in Baltimore. His motivation for the unprecedented donation he said, is that "no qualified high school student should ever be barred entrance to a college based on his or her family's bank account." I think we can all agree this is a great gesture, full of generosity, and one we should all be supportive of.  But who, really, will reap the benefits of this donation?

John Hopkins University is a private institution ranked by US News as tenth in the country for undergraduate education. According to Chetty data, private colleges that serve the greatest percentage of low-income students are non-selective universities. Non-selective private universities are those that tend to be the poorest, with few endowments, and they admit most students who apply. At schools such as these, low income students (low income in this data means the lower forty percent of median income) make up roughly a quarter of the student body. On the other end of the spectrum, of highly selective private universities such as John Hopkins, along with even more selective ivy league private universities, the percentage of low-income students plummets to sub ten percent.

The evidence suggests, as does Mr. Bloomberg in his opinion article, that the selective private schools are less likely to admit a student who may have trouble affording the cost of attending, in place of students who can afford to pay. This means that for highly selective private universities, low-income applicants likely only enroll if the admissions team agrees to provide them with scholarships and grants to attend, essentially a full ride. Even though many of these highly selective schools have the funds to provide low-income students a full ride, they often opt for those who can pay full sticker price. This low acceptance rate and outbidding by students coming from wealthy families further discourage low income and working class applicants from applying. Data suggest working-class and low-income applicants will opt for the colleges with the least resources, such as community colleges, regional state schools, or non-selective private universities. Once at these colleges, the lack of cash flow for the college coupled with the lack of present resources means the low-income and working-class student likely will not be afforded the same opportunities, especially as it relates to upward mobility, as are those who attend a selective private university.

Another troubling issue is that most-in-need low-income and working-class students are those at public schools in k-12 that do not have the resources or support to help students achieve their potential. There may be a systemic issue here, in which students with great ability never reach the level of merit described by Mr. Bloomberg in his article. The students who need the most help for upward mobility need the help when preparing for college. Working-class young people realize that they don't have the tools and resources to succeed in college, because they weren't provided those tools or taught how to manage academics in their adolescent lives. In her article in the Atlantic, Alexandria Radford discusses the many reasons working class students with great credentials do not apply to selective private universities. The bulk of the information leads us to the same notion, that working-class students just don't know they can get in to the college of their choice, or that they would be accepted with financial aid available.

Working-class students are not often from schools or cities that have the counselors necessary to advise them. These students often need to be sat down individually to discuss their many options. Often, though, these students only hear about a small number of options available to them through announcements made to their entire class. The majority of high achieving working-class applicants say they just go where they were told to or where they have heard of (the regional public university). I find it hard to believe that such a donation by Mr. Bloomberg will do much for working-class college applicants (except for a few who are the exceptions) and will ultimately allow applicants in the top twentieth percentile to get a better scholarship or even a free ride so that they may further separate themselves from the working class and contribute (even if inadvertently) to the widening of socioeconomic class in the United States.

If Mr. Bloomberg was really interested in serving all applicants who have the merit and high academic credentials to go to an elite college, shouldn't he try to use this money for more than just supporting one of the most selective and exclusive universities in the United States? Why not develop a national scholarship fund that can support working-class applicants who wish to attend a multitude of different universities based on need? Do we want to see one of the largest gifts ever made go to a top-ten selective university that already can provide all of their students with need based financial aid? I am happy that a successful business mogul is announcing to the world that our education system needs help and reform, and his actions are admirable, but are they really accomplishing the goals that he claims catalyzed his donation in the first place?

On upward mobility, the "American Dream"--and China?

The New York Times today reveals a fact that will shock many:  One has a greater prospect of upward mobility in China than in the United States.  This finding (which I'll not scrutinize here in terms of methodology; I'm hardly qualified to do so) flies in the face our cultural assumptions--not only about capitalism v. socialism/communism, but also more strictly about the United States v. China. Here's the gist of the article:

There are two 18-year-olds, one in China, the other in the United States, both poor and short on prospects. You have to pick the one with the better chance at upward mobility. 

Which would you choose? 

Not long ago, the answer might have seemed simple. The “American Dream,” after all, had long promised a pathway to a better life for anyone who worked hard. 

But the answer today is startling: China has risen so quickly that your chances of improving your station in life there vastly exceed those in the United States.

Journalists Javier C. Hernandez and Quoctrung Bui report on the reasons for this surprising conclusion, attributing China's primacy to "an economic expansion without precedent in modern history": 

Eight hundred million people have risen out of poverty. That’s two and a half times the population of the United States.

* * * 

Not only are incomes drastically rising within families, but sons are outearning their fathers. That means expectations are rising, too, especially among China’s growing middle class. 

Life expectancy has also soared.

That brings me to a topic I have explored on these pages (and on Legal Ruralism) in prior posts, such as here, here, here, here, here and here, which is deaths of despair and the the role of optimism--or in the case of the United States pessimism--and mobility (is it upward or is it downward?)  in relation to health and wellbeing.  See more here, including references to the work of Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University, who has theorized white despair in relation to, well, (among other characteristics) whiteness and the current lack of optimism among the white working class, who no longer expect to move up, but instead see themselves slipping backwards. 

Demographic trend of "natural decrease" among whites spreads quickly across Southwest, South, Northeast

The New York Times reported a few days ago on demographic changes in the United States.  The story, by Sabrina Tavernise, reports a natural decrease--more deaths than births--among whites in a majority of states.  Part of the story focuses on rural places:

The Census Bureau has projected that whites could drop below 50 percent of the population around 2045, a relatively slow-moving change that has been years in the making. But a new report this week found that whites are dying faster than they are being born now in 26 states, up from 17 just two years earlier, and demographers say that shift might come even sooner. 

“It’s happening a lot faster than we thought,” said Rogelio Sáenz, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a co-author of the report. It examines the period from 1999 to 2016 using data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the federal agency that tracks births and deaths. He said he was so surprised at the finding that at first he thought it was a mistake.

* * *

The aging of the white population began in rural counties long before it ever took hold in an entire state. Martin County, a bear-shaped patch of eastern North Carolina, first experienced it in the late 1970s. In recent years, deaths have exceed births among its black population, too. Hispanics make up less than 4 percent of the county’s population.

Other states subject to this trend include several won by Donald Trump in 2016: Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Michigan ... as well as Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and the Carolinas.  Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana and Texas are exceptions among southern states.

Of interest elsewhere in the country is the fact that all of New England is experiencing more white deaths than births.  Indeed, among states in the northeast, only New York is an exception to this trend.  The Midwest--broadly defined--is the most persistently resistant to this trend.

The New York Times published this op-ed last month which analyzes the trend from a global perspective. The piece, by Philip Auerswald and Joon Yun, also discusses the political correlations to this demographic trend, in countries from Italy to Japan.

In the past decade people in rural, remote places have been disproportionately losing not just jobs and opportunities, but people, elementary schools and confidence in the future. ... Against such a backdrop of general decline, populists’ promises to revive dead or dying local industries are understandably welcome. 

As youth have continued to migrate from rural areas to cities, their movement has widened not only the median age gap between rural places and cities, but also gaps in attitude, since the young, regardless of where they live, tend to associate more with urban outlooks.

* * *

Election data from the past two years plainly describe the consequences of these demographic dynamics: Most advanced industrialized countries are dominated by two competing political movements that either awkwardly inhabit the bodies of existing political parties or create new ones more to their liking. One movement extols the values that are a practical necessity in dense, interconnected cities: interdependence, internationalism and the embrace of “diversity” (defined along multiple dimensions). 

Another movement extols the equally necessary virtues of people in rural areas: self-reliance, autonomy and the embrace of immediate community and place.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

What is the diversity that affirmative action seeks to promote?

Professor Pruitt discusses the struggle of low-income white students to gain access to an elite university education in her 2015 article “The False Choice Between Race and Class and Other Affirmative Action Myths.” The stats are alarming. A 1997 study found that lower-class blacks had an 87% likelihood of being admitted to elite private colleges, while lower-income whites had only an 8% likelihood.

Scholars have traditionally argued that affirmative action is a zero-sum game that may promote either racial diversity or socioeconomic diversity, but not both. Professor Pruitt argues that affirmative action policies can and should promote both racial and socioeconomic diversity.

Although I do not support affirmative action as a matter of policy, I do agree that existing affirmative action programs should be broadened to include both racial and socioeconomic diversity. Professor Pruitt points out in a Legal Ruralism post that Ree Dolly (the heroine of “Winter’s Bone”) is similarly disadvantaged to minority students, and should be a beneficiary of affirmative action, just like a similarly disadvantaged urban minority student.

I believe that accounting for socioeconomic diversity would align with the intent behind affirmative action programs. While most of the responsibility for reformation will fall on state and university administrators, the Supreme Court can help enact change by returning to a constitutional standard for affirmative action similar to that announced in 1978’s Regents of the Univ. of Cal. V. Bakke.

Writing for the court in Bakke, Justice Powell stressed the importance of what Professor Pruitt coins the “content” of diversity. Justice Powell wrote that diversity which “furthers a compelling state interest encompasses a far broader array of qualifications and characteristics” than an “interest in simple ethnic diversity[.]” He concluded that the UC Davis School of Medicine’s affirmative action program, which focused solely on ethnic diversity, would actually “hinder rather than further attainment of genuine diversity.”

Although Justice Powell criticized the UC Davis affirmative action program for its rigid focus on ethnicity, he endorsed affirmative actions programs such as Harvard’s that “expanded the concept of diversity to include students from disadvantaged economic, racial and ethnic groups.” Justice Powell pointed out that a farm boy from Idaho can bring a perspective to Harvard that a Bostonian could not, just like a black, inner city student can bring something that a suburban, white student could not.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have strayed from Justice Powell’s focus on a broad definition of diversity in affirmative action admissions programs to limit the definition to ethnic and racial minorities. In 2003 the Court heard the companion cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger regarding the University of Michigan’s undergraduate and law school affirmative action programs respectively. In both cases the Court avoided any discussion of the validity of including socioeconomic factors in university admissions diversity programs. Likewise, in 2013’s Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the Court declined to opine on the inclusion of socioeconomic considerations in the definition of diversity.

Although the Court’s majorities have gone radio silent on the definition of diversity, Justice Souter’s dissent in Gratz supports a broader definition of diversity. The Gratz majority invalidated Michigan’s undergraduate affirmative action program because it was too rigidly focused on race. Justice Souter argued that the program was constitutional because it did not suffer from the same defects as the invalidated program in Bakke. According to Justice Souter, one of the factors that Michigan’s program included that differentiated it from Davis Medicine’s is its consideration of socioeconomic disadvantage.

Professor Pruitt argues this is a reprisal of Justice Powell’s treatment of “socioeconomic disadvantage as on par with racial/ethnic disadvantage.” I believe this equivalency is critical to promoting the benefits of diversity that affirmative action is supposed to generate.

In Bakke, Justice Powell wrote that the only constitutionally legitimate rationale for affirmative action programs is obtaining the benefits that flow from a diverse student body. The Court approvingly quotes Harvard’s Dean of Admissions who defended his school’s affirmative action program by explaining that “[t]he effectiveness of our students' educational experience has seemed to the Committee to be affected as importantly by a wide variety of interests, talents, backgrounds and career goals as it is by a fine faculty and our libraries, laboratories and housing arrangements.”

Justice Powell held that Davis Medicine’s program was unconstitutional because it was too narrowly focused on racial diversity. The benefits that flow from diversity is the diversity of viewpoints in the student body. While admitting racially diverse students helps widen the diversity of viewpoints, it is only one viewpoint. A farm boy from Idaho would bring a different and unique viewpoint. As would a military member, retired athlete, immigrant, or single mother.

A 2013 study found that socioeconomic diversity on college campuses enhances racial interaction. If socioeconomic diversity both enhances racial interaction and provides the benefits of viewpoint diversity that affirmative action programs are supposed to promote, why are so many of them narrowly focused on racial diversity?

Justice Thomas has postulated that universities are more concerned with “racial aesthetics” than the benefits that flow from viewpoint diversity. I tend to agree with his conclusion. It is difficult to signal socioeconomic diversity in the pages of the booklets and websites that administrators fill with tokens from every race.

Virtue signaling to the progressive world of academia is not the only motivation for the narrow emphasis on racial diversity. The all important university rankings consider racial diversity but ignore socioeconomic diversity. The Law School Admissions Council tracks the race of candidates with 32 subcategories but completely ignores socioeconomic status. University evaluators have reinforced the Supreme Court’s recent holdings by considering racial statistics but excluding socioeconomic ones. They have essentially told administrators that socioeconomic diversity does not matter.

University administrators are more than happy to ignore low-income whites because of their poor perception of them. Professor Pruitt points out that coastal elites associate working class whites with “bad taste, conservative politics and racism.” She quotes New York Times columnist Charles Blow who in 2010 described the left’s perception of the white working class as “hollow, dim and mean.” Instead of engaging with low-income whites and their viewpoints, university administrators have elected to isolate and exclude them.

University administrators have resorted to devaluing achievements stereotypically associated with the white working class. Part-time jobs and career-oriented clubs such as Future Farmers of America are considered evidence of a lack of academic ambition.

Placing a greater value on a liberal arts club over a professional club is misguided and frankly stupid. Devaluing a part-time job is straight up discrimination against low-income folks. It’s amazing to me that university administrators never stopped to think that the student with a job after school everyday might have liked to be in the Drama Club but had to work to put food on the table. By valuing the French Club over holding down a part-time job it’s almost like admissions officers want to produce unemployable alumni with Mickey Mouse majors and enhance the student debt crisis.

According to a 2016 Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans believe that universities should base admissions decisions solely on merit. The pollsters defined “merit” as evaluating students for admission without any consideration of an applicant’s racial or ethnic background. According the same poll, only 26 percent of respondents believe that diversity should be promoted by the consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions. Professor Pruitt cites a similar poll from 2013, which found that only 29% of respondents believed blacks and other minorities should receive preference in college admissions to make up for past inequalities.

Not only does a narrow focus on racial ethnicity not makes sense, it is extremely unpopular. Eight states, including California, have already banned affirmative action in public universities. Five of them have done so through direct democracy on ballot measures. Considering affirmative action’s growing unpopularity, more will likely do so in the coming years.

If affirmative action advocates want it to survive, they might want to consider broadening their view.

To read more of Justice Powell’s analysis see Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978). For Professor Pruitt’s take on the 1997 survey that found low-class blacks had a ten times higher likelihood of gaining admission to elite private colleges than low-class whites and some of the criticism that followed click here. For an international perspective, see this blog post by a former student who argued for a form of rural affirmative action in China.

The role of whiteness in the State of Jefferson separatist movement

I've been following the phenomenon that is the State of Jefferson movement for a number of years, with many posts over at Legal Ruralism, including here, here and here.  Now, High Country News has run a feature on the movement, "A Separatist State of Mind," in which journalist Tay Wiles goes inside the "movement."

The story is somewhat focused on the economic complaints of State of Jefferson advocates, including the fact that many young people have left the region because they cannot find work.  Indeed, the one young woman featured in the story, Kayla Brown, bargained with her husband to stay in Redding for five years when he had been looking for work out of state; she was gambling that they could make the proposed State of Jefferson secession happen within that time, a shift she thinks will bring more and better jobs. No, however, that five-year stint is nearly up, and the now expanded family (two young children) is again considering leaving the state, for better economic opportunities in Idaho.

Older State of Jefferson agitators mentioned the economy directly or indirectly, including in relation to the population loss the region has experienced.  Here's one excerpt about Mark Baird, the leader of the State of Jefferson movement:

Baird believes the best way to improve the economic prospects is through opening more land to mining and timber. This, he says, would revive the extractive economies that have declined across the region in recent decades, in part due to federal environmental policies but also in response to market trends.

Later, we learn this about Baird:

Baird also bristled at the decline in security and economics around him. “Crime in my county is going through the ceiling,” he said during a Jefferson town hall in Williams. “We have no police protection whatsoever between midnight and 7 a.m. because my sheriff can’t afford people.” Baird and others have indeed seen crime rates increase. In Siskiyou County, for example, the Public Policy Institute of California found that between 2015 and 2016 the overall crime rate went up 14 percent between 2015 to 2016. The county’s timber production, once an economic engine, has declined dramatically since the 1970s. The town of Montague, a small community not far from Yreka where Baird once patrolled as a deputy sheriff, was vibrant in his youth, with five gas stations and three grocery stores. “Now it is a crackhead wasteland.”

Discerning readers will have observed that Baird has linked the economic decline of the place he loves with crime.  Crime, of course, is often a "dog whistle" for race.  I note that Siskyou County's population is 84.7% white and right at 10% Hispanic or Latino of any any race.  I wonder what its racial make up was a few decades ago.

I also wonder if Wiles is intending to signal the whiteness of would-be Jefferson in a couple of ways.  First, her opening vignette mentions Civil War enactments and Kayla Brown's involvement in them, including this quote from her:

Brown, who is 27 and sprightly, with a blonde ponytail and blue eyes, was holding court on 19th century American history and the run-up to the Civil War.  A lot of Californians “actually sympathized with the Confederates,” she said.

Note also the description of Brown's Aryan features.  A gratuitous detail?  A signal?  Elsewhere Wiles writes:

The region is largely rural and white (though the Latino population has risen in recent years and there are several Native American tribes), and its politics are mostly red (only four counties went for Hillary Clinton in 2016). 

This leaves me wondering:  Is the State of Jefferson movement a racist movement?  Is the question answered by this information, which comes late in the story:

Jeffersonians say the sanctuary state concept is an affront to the rule of law. In one newsletter, they also described it as a financial threat to rural counties, which earn much-needed income renting jail space to ICE. “California continues to exuberantly boast its progressive bad policies, laws and regulations in a celebratory manner while the rest of the state feels dark, helpless and abandoned,” a Jefferson newsletter from last October said.

Is it always racist to oppose immigration?  Current political rhetoric in academia suggests that it is.

It is also interesting to know that would-be Jefferson counties are balancing their budgets by housing detained persons for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  Read more on that and related practices here and here.

This related paragraph from a NYT Magazine story about rural Oregon (also part of the would-be State of Jefferson) and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge seizure, two years on, also seems relevant to the race question:

The history of Oregon is filled with stories of violent and racist groups. Communes, cults, alternative religious communities, militias: The state has been home to nearly 300 of them since 1856, including the Christian Identity movement, Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations and the Roy Masters’ Foundation of Human Understanding. African-Americans were legally barred from residence in Oregon until 1926; the state, according to some historians, was essentially founded as a kind of white utopia.

Interestingly, the author of the NYT Magazine story, who grew up in the area when her parents moved there seeking an alternative life style, then commented:

No one in my family, three generations of Oregonians, had ever heard about that.

Not sure what to make of that comment; not sure what the author is getting at regarding the relevance of her family's lack of knowledge.  Is it exculpating or ????

This comment on an earlier Legal Ruralism post about the would-be State of Jefferson takes up the issue of racial demographics of the region: 

Your post made me think about how race is (or is not) addressed by the State of Jefferson supporters and what the racial demographics of this proposed state would be. While California as a whole currently has the largest minority population in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California), this would not be the case for Jefferson. Currently, it looks like if Jefferson managed to succeed, it would be made up of the Oregon counties of Coos (90% White), Douglas (90%) and Lake (86% White) as well as the California counties of Humboldt (82% White), Trinity (89% White), Shasta (87% White), Lassen (70% White), Mendocino (82% White), Lake (84% White), Tehama (85% White), Plumas (91% White), Glenn (78% White), Butte (83% White), Colusa (68% White), Sierra (92% White), Sutter (65% White), Yuba (69% White), Nevada (92% White), Placer (84% White)and El Dorado (87% White)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state). So, while the supporters of the State of Jefferson do not currently feel represented in the California or Oregon governments, if they were successful in succeeding, their state would likely severely underrepresent the people of color who lived there.

I look forward to hearing others' thoughts on whether this story--or more precisely the State of Jefferson movement--is fundamentally about race (and therefore racial bias?) or not.