When the train was passing through Arizona, they said Navajo Nation is larger than Vermont and Massachusetts put together. It kind of broke my brain.

I’ve found that when I try to spend more time learning about Black and Native history and culture, I get a much truer sense of the U.S. today, particularly how many of today’s problems seem to be continuations of old time racism and Civil War divisions.

Even in California, whenever someone says ‘this neighborhood is nice’ or ‘this town is safe’, I always look up redlining. Almost always, the nice, safe places are places where Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native and other people were not allowed to buy homes. This is recent history.

I am so allergic to anyone who says words like nice and safe.

Learning about redlining helps me see why

‘Safe’ is almost always a perfect match for the places where non-white people were banned from living

https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/

I’ve only been in Atlanta a day and obviously there’s a lot I need to learn about it.

But it makes me sad that the city I live in has displaced its Black population but still thinks it is liberal and open and welcoming to all.

https://law.stanford.edu/publications/disinvestment-of-san-franciscos-african-american-community-1970-2022/

(When I worked at a Silicon Valley startup, I was curious about why they picked my Asian city to expand to before they went to other U.S. cities. They said ‘we think there’s more in common between SF and Singapore in terms of demographics and income)

Anyway, just remembering that now as I have spent the last few days outside of California. I knew there was a gap in my knowledge of the U.S. (which is very SF & NYC centric) but I am starting to see it is larger than I think.

A primary thing I am noticing:

The cities I’ve spent most of my time in are West Coast cities and New York City. This means that I actually haven’t ever been in a place that’s not.. at least 10-60% East Asian? Obviously I don’t consciously think about this daily, and it’s not a ‘I need that environment’ thing. It’s more that those places have long histories of East Asian migration and strong local communities.

Albuquerque and Atlanta have been the first places I’ve visited where that’s not the case.

I don’t feel like I consciously seek out East Asian food or groceries, but they were always *around me* whereas here I guess if I lived here I would have to drive really far to go somewhere in particular.

My friends in Oakland, CA often say ‘when someone said they were made fun of for their food in school I literally have no idea what they mean’ and this is one facet of it.

Something I’ve also been thinking about (as I’ve been dealing with some Singaporean haters who keep telling me that I chose a terrible place to live)

I feel like there’s no one way of life here. That probably sounds completely normal? But for people from very small countries, there is definitely a ‘this is the way you are supposed to be / live’ (never mind that that one prescribed way in even tiny, tiny places is usually a majority group dominating others)

But I feel like it would be laughable to even think that for the U.S., for a single town or city or state.

There’s maybe something here about the lack of national coherence that makes a lot of ‘America is X and Y’ feel incomplete