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Texism in Colorado
Why do Coloradans hate Texans? Ask a Coloradan and he’ll tell you it’s because Texans are loud, arrogant slobs.
The word hate may seem too strong. After all, every region has benign rivalries. Aggie jokes season any Texas barbecue outside College Station. Ohioans call West Virginians “dumb hillbillies.” Even Coloradans find their snoots shortened in Wyoming. But send a Texan to Denver, and he’ll learn soon enough that hate might be putting it mildly.
For most people, a regional rivalry is a joke at the expense of someone else’s ability to change a light bulb. For Coloradans, Texans are dimwitted, high-voltage pain. I know because I’m a Texan who lived ten harrowing years in the Arctic state.
Texans, they say in Colorado, drive recklessly and never have enough coolant in the radiator to make it up I-70’s first big hill. Skiing Texans resemble stampeding cattle. Texans drink too much and tip too little. Texans wear big funny hats over big dumb heads. Substitute any of the other, more commonly maligned groups of people — blacks, Poles, Mexicans, or Jews — for Texan in these descriptions and such views would be immediately dismissed as racism. In Colorado, it is gospel, spread from the valleys of overpriced tourist traps to the mount of every ski resort. A Coloradan smiles pretty for Texas petrodollars, but in his heart burns a bitter resentment.
Coloradans learned about the evils of racism along with the rest of the nation — with this one exception. For that reason, I call Colorado’s fear and loathing of the citizens of this great state, “Texism.”
The original maps of Texas after the revolution show the Republic’s northernmost extent in a narrow panhandle along the Front Range of present-day Colorado. The panhandle reached the latitude of Fort Collins and included Denver and Colorado Springs (though I’m not sure these cities even existed in 1836). Today, at least 80 percent of Colorado’s population lives in this narrow strip at the Eastern edge of the Rockies. Yet the thought that the Texas flag could have flown at the intersection of Broadway and Colfax in the Mile High City is too much for any Coloradan to bear; Texism may date from Sam Houston’s dream borders, but one never dares raise this historical fact in polite…
