A Dark Light in the West: Racism and Reconciliation

. . . Oregon, the only free state ever admitted to the Union with a black exclusion clause in its constitution, has a long, virulent, and occluded history of racism. Not until 1948, following a U.S. Supreme Court decision, did the state revoke its Alien Land Law, making it possible for an Asian immigrant to purchase property. Marriage between whites and nonwhites was illegal until 1951. And the state legislature, in addition to withholding its re-ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment until 1973, did not ratify the Fifteenth, protecting African Americans’ right to vote, until 1959.
        During my first few years in Oregon I noticed not only how infrequently I encountered African Americans, even on the streets of Portland, but also how often I met Native Americans in the general population. This was a different mix of cultures from the ones I'd known in California and New York, and also from the one I’d become familiar with while visiting my mother’s relatives in Alabama and Georgia.
        Today, looking back at the racial situation I encountered in Oregon at the age of twenty-three, I can see that it was consequential in determining the direction of my life.

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        The insidiousness of racism . . . resides in part with an illusion that somehow the slate can be wiped clean, the injustice purged, if the guilty are simply brought to a just trial. In the history of our country—of all the innocent men, women, and children who have suffered miserable deaths at the hands of mobs and duly appointed militias, or who were killed by bigots and psychopaths—it is hard to accept that the punishment of a culprit has ever properly made up for the crime. If any such deadly act can ever be redeemed, it will be through some kind of enlightenment that, for most of us, is still some ways off. Such an enlightenment would have to be rooted, I think, in a reexamination of ideas about exceptionalism and private property. In the end, redemption may lie only with the termination of efforts to purge one’s own society of “the foreign” and of the closely aligned urge to take possession of what rightfully belongs to others. . . .