In the North too. Just take a look at one of those racial distribution maps based on census data. Racism has hardly been exclusive to Boston either. Or one party! More the other way actually when working-class whites were primarily Dems. Things are different now though, I’m sure.
Difficult for me to imagine. The codes are in your face constantly when you travel— when you’re booking your flights, when you get your confirmation emails and etickets, on your boarding passes, your luggage tags, and on and on. How could you possibly fly to Portland, OR without being constantly and repeatedly informed that you’re at PDX? This would take a truly bizarre level of tuning out your surroundings, not to mention you could end up in Portland, ME. 
Even in Chicago, where nobody refers to the city itself as ORD, nearly everyone refers to the airport that way. Same with New Yorkers and JFK or Angelenos and LAX. Even people who only travel occasionally know their airport codes.
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I think it depends on the crowd of people. The major ones like SFO, LAX, DFW can be used in certain contexts in the US.
I remember in my creative writing class in college, we had 2 partners that would proof read each other. In my writing style I used SFO, LAX; etc. and one girl had no idea what that meant and tried to tell me to not use it. The other guy got it and didn’t see an issue with it.
Yeah, but Newark is always Newark (and LGA LaGWAdia for that matter!) I guess EWR doesn’t really roll off the tongue.
Where people live doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s due largely to historic reasons. Vermont has the highest percentage of white people and they definitely don’t have a reputation for racism.
In many parts of the South interracial marriage is still taboo.
Absolutely, but you said “de-facto segregation”. I meant the cities, not Vermont 
Look at the maps, and if you’ve lived in a northern city you should understand this. I can’t speak about the South.
I have lived in NYC for two years. Almost every adult black person moved there from the South.
That’s why northern cities are more homogeneous.
Then you should have an idea of what I’m talking about. Gentrification, changing attitudes, and in some ways immigration are making this less pronounced (some ways not though as some groups gravitate towards quite heterogeneous neighborhoods). It clearly still exists though 
Even now in 2022/21, talk about
[Boston mayor blasted for racist jokes on St. Patrick’s Day
Boston Mayor blasted for racist jokes on St. Patrick’s Day. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu (D) is catching heat for jokes made a
(https://arada.org/21009-pNydXO/)
USA PBS TV
I’ve been to a number of smaller “large” cities in the US where they sell merchandise with the airport code. You wouldn’t see “ORD” on clothing in Chicago, since “O’hare” is not Chicago and theres the city flag and various other ways to reference Chicago without using the airport code. But Milwaukee absolutely has MKE merch and ppl use MKE as text short hand, MSP is used by people to refer to the Twin Cities. Again, text messages and merch. Same with Phoenix.
Saying TPE for Taipei is weird though, as TPE is Taoyuan. If you fly into Taipei, it’s TSA, but that’s not intuitive since TPE is Taipei minus most vowels
Not weird, really. Many cities‘ airports are outside the city proper. DFW is in neither Dallas nor Ft. Worth. Cincinnati’s airport isn’t even in the same state as the city. TPE is considered Taipei’s airport, hence the abbreviation of TPE and not TYN. You’ll notice when you book a flight in or out of there it comes up as Taipei, or maybe Taipei Taoyuan (to distinguish from Taipei Songshan).
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I meant I don’t memorize the airport codes. I’ve had layovers in more airports than I care to remember, and don’t remember most of the airport codes.
But also, I just realized all of the examples you have previously given were all smaller cities with single airports. Maybe referring to cities by the airport code is just a cultural thing in some smaller cities? 
Because there aren’t very many black people in Boston. That’s how racist it is.
And the ones who are there mostly live in a neighborhood called Dorcester which is a bit hard to get to from where the white folks are.
The racism in Boston is a general attitude, which you experience from living there and talking to the people there, not from watching the news.
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you’re fucking kidding, right?
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Which is even all the more weird that people would refer to cities by their airport codes.
When I lived in San Francisco, and saw on social media that a friend was “flying to SFO”, I wouldn’t assume they were going to San Francisco. I would just assume they meant they were landing at that airport. The airport is in Millbrae which is 30 minutes south of San Francisco, and their destination could be any city in the Bay Area. They could be going to Palo Alto, or San Jose, which are both an hour south of San Francisco.
Similarly, when I moved to Taiwan last year and posted that I was “flying to TPE” I didn’t mean I was actually going to Taipei. I landed in Taoyuan and came straight to Kaohsiung in a quarantine cab, and never even set foot in Taipei. In fact, I still haven’t been to Taipei yet.
As a former resident of Portland, Oregon, I can attest that PDX is often used to refer to the city itself, not just the airport.
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Yes, I said this already. It doesn’t seem to be common for metros with multiple major airports, for obvious reasons.
This whole argument is funny. Those of you who haven’t noticed it are being true to your experience, and those of us who see it often are doing the same. But if you don’t notice it you can’t tell us that it doesn’t happen, because it does!
Similarly, the reason why this happens is totally chicken and egg. Is it because the common abbreviation is actually copying the airport code, or is it just a coincidence, because they’re both sensible?
As for Portland and PDX, yes it is used everywhere. PDX xyz for any small business name. PDX merch all over the place. And even Portland State University’s url is pdx.edu
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If half of the Americans in this thread don’t notice it, then that means it doesn’t happen in general (which was the OP’s point). If it were a general trend, then all of us would have noticed it.
Nah, it means half haven’t been back to the US in quite awhile, or don’t travel much within the US or interact with many in different parts of the US, or don’t pay attention when they do. Failure to observe something doesn’t mean that thing doesn’t exist.
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