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You're listening to StoryHelix, intertwining
stories past, present and not yet imagined,
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in Lane County Oregon. What's up, earthlings? I'm Leah Velez and
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I'll be your host. The story
we're about to hear was recorded at Oakshire
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Brewing Company in the Whittaker neighborhood of
Eugene, Oregon, in early 2022. Let's open
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up our ear nuggets and give it
a listen. Hi, my name's Serenity,
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spelled like it sounds, S-E-R-E-N-I-T-Y.
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I'm thirty-two years old. I
am a white queer adult who's here with
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my husband, Misa. I'm Misa
spelled M-I-S-A. I am
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thirty, Um, Latino, Hispanic, White, a little bit of everything.
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Do you know any do you know
any stories about Eugene? I don't
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know much about the area. I
just like, I know, like Oregon
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as was very racist and like in
the beginning, you know, like not
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letting minorities in our own homes,
and I don't know, I guess the
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White Supremacist Haven, so to speak. (Right, after the Civil War.) So you know that like that kind
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of like it's still here, obviously, and yeah, I guess you know
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it's always in the back of my
mind being a minority. Do you think
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that's come more to light in just
the past few years living here? I mean, yeah,
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of course, like like, you
know, like the seeing the guy with
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it was the swastika at WinCo that
one time that was fun. Oh yeah, or the guy with
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the truck who had paint that had
the loud speakers on his roof and on
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his truck and have awful things coming
out. I know for me, I
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was definitely pretty oblivious for the first
few years living here. I thought,
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I thought Eugene was so woke and
so diverse and you know, I also
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came from a very religious bubble and
so I thought it was all. You
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know, now I'm learning not so
much, but that's okay. It's good
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to learn about that stuff too.
And I mean that's always been obvious for
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me, like anywhere there's white people, I just yeah, I mean sometimes
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they, you know, people forget
I'm, you know, not I am
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Hispanic and Latino, and they say
things in front of me, racist things,
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forgetting, you know, like okay, how does that make you feel?
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Does it make me feel? I
mean, I'm not good, like
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not seen. Yeah, just judged
for the way I look. As you
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know, it's not a good feeling. Yeah. Thanks for listening. You can find
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us wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you've got your own Lane County
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story to tell, we'd love to
hear it at StoryHelix Dot Wordcrafters Dot Org.
