Here via metafandom and you mentioned West Virginia, which motivated me to comment fwiw....I have a friend who's Chinese American, in her 40s, grew up with her (newly immigrated) family in West Virginia (I'm not quite sure why the heck they ended up there....her family's all in California now).
Her memory of West Virgina race relations in the 1960s-70s is that people thought her family was some weird type of black people. She says (white) WV people seemed to assume, based on appearance, that her family couldn't be white, so they "had" to be black (the only other racial category that existed). She remembers dealing with some racial slurs in grade school from kids needling her about being black.
no subject
Her memory of West Virgina race relations in the 1960s-70s is that people thought her family was some weird type of black people. She says (white) WV people seemed to assume, based on appearance, that her family couldn't be white, so they "had" to be black (the only other racial category that existed). She remembers dealing with some racial slurs in grade school from kids needling her about being black.