Curious About Oregon

The Latin root of curiosity means “cure,” which makes me wonder if it isn’t a way to heal some of our oldest sicknesses. Like, perhaps, the “amnesia of affluence” that theologians point out in the Bible, and in our modern-day context. For myself, getting curious about the land, the actual space that I inhabit, has been the first step toward understanding where I am located in a vastly unequal economic world.

My home of Oregon remains one of the whitest states in the United States because that is how it was designed. At the beginning of their statehood, in the 1850s, Oregon outlawed…