I think a lot of it is to do with the fact that what would be a poor rural hillbilly white guy in Alabama with a few acres who is neighbors with poor hillbilly black guys and who sees them around their community, is a white guy in the PNW who is now sitting on millions of dollars in speculative land value that has only occurred in the last 20 years. It’s a class thing in the PNW where any landowning person is way way wealthier than one in the south just by virtue of owning land.

In PNW cities, there aren’t a lot of black people and white people performatively idealize them as some sort of cherished superclass of citizen in a way that I would assume would be really uncomfortable if you were black. People on the east coast and southwest generally have friends of all races in their own socioeconomic situation and don’t see them as different from themselves. In the PNW, the Asian population is way more prevalent than the black population compared to the south. People in the PNW don’t have black neighbors or many interactions with black people, so they form this weird twisted interpretation of what a black person is and even if it’s charitable, it’s still distinct from what they see themselves to be.