Vermont is a dangerous place for minorities because it's 94% white?

Last year Vermont was named the safest state. If you're not white when you go out, you have to continually look over your shoulders? Fear mongering and anti-white racism from the NY Times. Just imagine saying if you're white in Detroit or Asian in San Francisco you better watch out because of all those black people there.

The brazen, unprovoked attack on three Palestinian college students, who were walking down a quiet residential street while visiting relatives here over Thanksgiving, shook the area’s tight-knit community of Muslims. On Monday, authorities charged Jason Eaton, a 48-year-old white man who lived on the street, with three counts of attempted murder. He has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail.

Vermont is also very white — nearly 94 percent, according to the 2020 census.

We had somehow missed the “Saturday Night Live” skit from 2018 in which several neo-Confederates rail against America’s racial diversity and debate founding a new homeland — somewhere with “no immigrants, no minorities,” the group’s leader declares. “An agrarian community where everyone lives in harmony, because every single person is white.”

“Yeah, I know that place,” one pipes up. “That sounds like Vermont.”

The audience laughs, but today the sketch lands chillingly.

Vermont’s overwhelming homogeneity is always apparent to people of color here, and it can create a persistent sense of insiders and outsiders, no matter how well intentioned the efforts to push past it.

As a white guy who has the luxury of not having to look over my shoulder when I’m walking down the street, I was hoping to get a better sense of what life is like for Muslims and Arab Americans in a state like this.

He still faces racism, usually of the subtle type: a customer’s seemingly stray comment about Amtul’s hijab or complimenting him on his English. The number of such incidents has gone up in recent years, he said, especially since Donald Trump’s election.

For others, the attack came as no surprise, and not because of Mr. Trump.

“Just like the U.S., Vermont likes to think it’s exceptional,” said Mia Schultz, a Black Vermonter and the president of the Rutland-area N.A.A.C.P., who is not Muslim. “Which is why when violence happens like this, people are shocked. But the thing is, people of color are not.”

I brought up the state’s enormous white population as a demographic curiosity when she stopped me.

“Why do you think that is?” she asked. “I don’t think it’s an accident. There are people who want to live here, but it becomes so incredibly suffocating. You’re met with smiles, this idea of kindness,” she said, and yet behind it there is an isolation, an insidious feeling of not being seen as equal.

“I know about people who go back to the South because, they say, ‘At least I know what I’m encountering,’” she said. “I know how to navigate people who are outright hateful.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/opinion/editorials/vermont-shooting-palestinians.html

https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/infrastructure/3704725-these-are-the-safest-states-in-the-us-research/