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Journey into the Heart of Whiteness
Journey into the Heart of Whiteness
Interview: Richard Benjamin on being the lone black guy at a white separatist retreat, and other adventures in America’s whitest places.
By Elizabeth Gettelman | Wed Dec. 23, 2009 4:00 AM PST
By the middle of this century, white Americans will no longer be in the majority. Yet even as the country grows more diverse, nearly all-white enclaves are on the rise. Richard Benjamin, a senior fellow at Demos, a think tank, spotted this trend several years ago and began venturing into these suburban and rural “Whitopias” to find out what makes them tick. His resulting book, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbably Journey to the Heart of America [1], is a lively and perceptive foray into communities that are trying to bail out of the melting pot.
Benjamin, who is African American, profiles several Whitopias—defined as rapidly growing areas at least 90 percent white—from southern Utah to Manhattan’s tony Carnegie Hill neighborhood. He embeds in gated communities where garish homes are protected from nonexistent crime by elaborate security systems. He plays a lot of golf and poker and becomes a regular at a Baptist megachurch in Georgia. He also becomes the first black journalist to attend a three-day retreat for white separatists in northern Idaho (where he’s welcomed with brisket and strawberry lemonade). “I was surprised by what a pleasant time I had,” he says. But he’s disturbed by how these bastions of whiteness are often animated by racist attitudes [2], particularly toward Latinos, and a divisive belief that we can’t all get along. “America has delightful people who are perfectly comfortable with widening segregation and yawning socioeconomic inequality that often breaks along racial lines,” he writes. “Let’s call that a problem.”
Mother Jones: What inspired you to go live in these white communities?
Richard Benjamin: I had been hearing on-the-ground buzz that white folks were moving to places like Bend, Oregon, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and St. George, Utah. That led me to discover through census data that these towns were already extremely white and they were becoming, in most cases, even whiter. Statistics could only tell me so much; in order to get to the spirit and essence of it, I had to immerse myself.
MJ: What surprised you the most?
RB: I was surprised by what a pleasant time I had. I was surprised by how forces in the community could mobilize against a community changing. There were many examples of this. In St. George, members of the Latino community proposed having a “Dixie Fiesta.” The resistance to that surprised me. One Latina woman described receiving death threats on her voicemail. I was surprised by the hostility to immigration in many of the communities, or the extent of the hostility to immigration in many of the communities.
MJ: At one point a white Idaho grandmother asks you, “Don’t you want to stick to your own kind?” What did you say to her?
RB: I said, “Absolutely not.” I don’t want to live in a monoculture of any kind. I don’t want to live in a wealthy monoculture, a black monoculture. I don’t want to live in an elitist, progressive monoculture. People would say, “You know, Rich, it’s nature. Birds of a feather flock together.” I have to point out to them that, no, that’s not the case. The reason our country looks the way it does is through social engineering that distinctly benefits suburban communities, exurban communities, and often white residents. And we are socially engineered in such a way as to, often unconsciously and unintentionally, but sometimes intentionally, perpetuate this divisive inequality.
MJ: How are Whitopias of the Deep South, where there’s such a history of racial tension, different from the Whitopias in communities where residents feel like they’re starting fresh, racially and culturally?
RB: In the pioneer West Whitopias, immigration tended to be the dominant social and racial issue. In Forsyth County, Georgia, immigration is still an issue, but because you have that complicated history of the Trail of Tears and slavery and Jim Crow, the Whitopia has a different flavor. The interesting thing about Georgia is, Atlanta is teeming with middle-class black people and black people with money—and yet there is still segregation. So you have a type of segregation that has nothing to do with class. And, of course, there isn’t really a black population in Idaho or Utah.
