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appalachiablue

(41,048 posts)
4. The writer found out about US 'heath care' and is now
Sat Oct 31, 2020, 10:18 PM
Oct 2020

back in London. Good thing, the Portland move was a challenging experience and a marriage stressor to day the least.

>"I decided I needed to leave over the election period. The paralysing fear of the unknown outcome became too much, in a country I can’t even vote in. I am in London now, quarantining in my old bedroom in my parents’ attic. I usually regress to teenage ways when I stay here, but this time I feel I am unfurling. We’re spending our days doing online school, and for the first time since the pandemic began, I’m able to give over enough of my brain to help my daughter learn.

Of course, the UK has its own problems, too. But I am physically and mentally relieved to be distanced from white supremacists carrying guns on the streets, the threat of pandemic-related medical debt, and the specific cruelty of the Trump administration. We have a return ticket booked; we just have to decide if we’ll use it."
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"I write all of this as a brown person and a recent transplant. Racism for black people in Portland is far more pervasive and damaging. It’s visible in housing policy, police brutality and who gets to work where. In 1859, when Oregon joined the union, it was the only state to explicitly ban all black people living there.

That legacy of racism has cast a long shadow. As recently as the 1990s, lenders in the state engaged in redlining (not giving people loans and mortgages because of where they live – which mainly affected the city’s small black population). There continues to be de facto racial segregation in schools. But, until this summer, Portland’s white population didn’t talk about it much."

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