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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.

MJ: Who’s mowing the lawns, working retail, and nannying the kids in these Whitopias where they complain that immigrants take away jobs?

RB: It depends. In St. George or Coeur d’Alene, I would say that the intimate manual labor—i.e. house cleaning, child care, elderly care, and medical care—is done by working-class white folks. The construction and agricultural labor and lawn service labor is done generally by Latino immigrants [3]who do not live in the county. So the county is extremely white, but you will see some Latinos doing the labor I just described.

MJ: So when people tell you, “I want to live among my own kind,” they really are talking exclusively about race?

RB: Not always. Sometimes they do mean class. The wealthier whites may not realize that the working-class whites live there. I do believe that “my own kind” really has a strong class dimension and not just a racial dimension in some cases.

MJ: You talk about the transition of acceptable racism from blacks to brown-skinned people. Could you have written this book if you were Latino?

RB: If I were an immigrant Latino not born in the US, I could not have written this book. And that is because many of the Whitopians would not have been comfortable talking about their views on immigration, talking about their views on taxes. And they wouldn’t have spilled to me the new script on race and poverty as they did.

MJ: Do you still think people were totally honest with you? Would they talk about immigration but not about black-white relations?

RB: I don’t believe so, because there were such shocking things said about black people. It didn’t feel like anyone was holding anything back. For example, one person said, “I just don’t know what to call you people this year, so when I’m in all-white company I just use the N-word.” Another person frankly shared with me his opinions on Jesse Jackson [4]and Al Sharpton [5]. Another person told me how they didn’t want public transportation because that just brings in “low-income blacks and crime” to Forsyth County, which is an hour north of Atlanta. So I got some pretty frank discussions of black-white race relations, although my focus and their focus tended to be on immigration and on brown-white.

MJ: Do you think the Whitopians would ask you to play golf and become part of their community if you were really moving there?

RB: There were several things to my hospitable treatment. One thing was genuine—there was a genuine warmth. Another thing was class. In other words, I’m perceived to be a certain class. I would forget that I had my golf cleats on and I would go on a home search or I’d go to a dinner party, and that would be an opening to a conversation. But another thing that really speaks to the spirit of your question is the question of volume. One black man is fine and will be treated very well, but what if I brought 50 of my black friends from New York City? We have the answer to this question: When well-qualified, upper middle-class blacks or Latinos or Asians move to predominantly white neighborhoods, there’s what’s called the tipping point. That tipping point is generally 15 percent; at 15 percent you begin to see white flight.

MJ: You say the majority of Whitopians are quite nice, but there is still harm in how they choose to live.

RB: Absolutely. There is tremendous long-term harm when Americans accept ethnic and class balkanization as a de facto fixture of American life. I think that impoverishes our understanding of each other. I concede that segregation can allay social tensions immediately, but it further debilitates us in the long run. By 2042, whites will no longer be the American majority. Therefore, with growing and intermixed minority populations, our democracy can not work optimally unless all people are integrated as full and equal members, and I think our collective freedom requires that.

Another problem with segregation isn’t that people can’t live in peaceful harmony singing “Kumbaya”—although that wouldn’t be bad. The problem is that many of these Whitopian communities are taking state, local, and federal resources with them.

MJ: Are we on our way to seeing more Whitopias?

RB: It remains to be seen what will happen with the economic recovery and the housing market. We’ll have to see how this plays out in the next three years. I do see pockets of Whitopia that are not affected by the downturn. For example, Louisville, Colorado, which was just voted by CNN and Money magazine as the best place to live, is a veritable Whitopia that is unaffected by the housing crisis and even the severe recession. You look at the best places to live, according to Money’s 2009 list, and 9 of the 10 are Whitopias.

MJ: Is there a future scenario where there will actually be Blacktopias and Browntopias, too?

RB: Oh goodness, I hope not. I hope we have American-topias.
Source URL: http://motherjones.com/media/2009/12/journey-heart-whiteness

Links:
[1] http://richbenjamin.com/the_book.html
[2] http://motherjones.com/mojo/2009/07/racist-outrage-day-year
[3] http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/year-without-mexican
[4] http://motherjones.com/politics/2000/03/jesse-jackson-mother-jones-interview
[5] http://motherjones.com/riff/2009/02/al-sharpton-is-wrong-about-monkey-cartoon

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The White House’s fear of challenging the tea-bag madness is typical of its cautious politics. The rest of us accept it at our peril.

Jimmy Carter is a son of the South. Not the New South of relocated corporate headquarters and (foreclosed) McMansions, but Jim Crow’s South. So we’ll all have to excuse his refusal to act like he doesn’t hear Glenn Beck’s vicious dog whistle. He knows too well the coded language of political racism because he witnessed its writing.

America abhors history. No wonder, given how many national crimes are lurking back there. But we’ve arrived at a time when a politician’s refusal to consider the past is a perverse testament to prudent leadership. And as a result, a statement as obvious as Carter’s—that the tea-baggers hate President Barack Obama because he’s black—can be passed off as controversy in 2009.

It’s self-evident that a movement that calls the president a lying, socialist, Nazi eugenicist with a fake birth certificate is about something more than deficit spending. People don’t brandish automatic weapons and pray for the president’s death because they want to keep their employer-sponsored health plans. But to name the stalking beast is more than we can bear.

Not, thankfully, for Carter. He knows the tea-baggers aren’t new, that their fear of “big government” is but the latest version of states’ rights, which was itself a pseudonym for white supremacy. And he wants us to recall this history: In the months following the 1954 Brown ruling, a Mississippi college football star and plantation manager named Robert Patterson launched a crusade to protect school children from “being taught the Communist theme of all races and mongrelization.” Patterson was angry, and proud of it. “You say this is not the time for hotheads and flag-waving,” he wrote in a public letter quoted in Gene Roberts’ and Hank Klibanoff’s must-read history of civil rights journalism. “We need those hotheads, just as we always have when our liberty has been threatened.”

Patterson channeled his anger into a lasting innovation for the white supremacy movement—give it a respectable face, strip it of explicitly racist rhetoric and use it as an invisible hand to guide mob violence. He created the Citizens’ Council, which would spawn a regional network by year’s end. Each council’s membership boasted the area’s finest white leaders in business, government and, yes, media. They directed their public anger less at integration itself than at federal incursions on local rule, but the resulting violence was no less extreme.

At the time, Carter was a Plains, Ga., peanut farmer and board of education member. He recalls in his campaign memoir, Turning Point (Random House, 1993), how the Plains Council pressured him to join. When he refused, the council sent 20 of his best customers to demand compliance. Carter again refused, this time adding, “and besides, there are a few politicians in Atlanta who are taking the dues from all over the state and putting the money in their pockets, just because folks are worried about the race issue.”

Tea-bagging elites like Fox News, Sarah Palin and Joe Wilson are the political descendants of Patterson’s councils. They’re still using coded language to orchestrate rowdy, racist mobs and they’re still pocketing the money the frenzy generates.

In the tea-bagging universe, “big government”—or, really, the social programs both Beck and Rush Limbaugh conspicuously dub “reparations”—is a stand-in villain for integration. Not the literal act of blacks and whites going to school together. Rather, bashing big government swats at the same anxiety Patterson had: a concern over who gets to make the rules. That question has haunted Dixie ever since black slaves outnumbered the South’s white residents. And it still haunts the GOP’s Southern, white base today.

Nor is it new for the movement’s media mavens to cry foul when someone dares break the code. It started, as Roberts and Klibanoff detail, as the national media covered Little Rock’s brutalities, and it intensified throughout the era. Southern newspaper editors, themselves affiliated with Citizens’ Councils, led a concerted effort to bully national outlets into what pioneering Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill called “the cult of objectivity.”

The fruits are seen in the timidity of today’s mainstream news. Demonstrable liars like Joe Wilson and Sarah Palin are given point-counterpoint coverage. A rally dominated by ugliness such as that on display in Washington on Sept. 12 is reported as legitimate political dispute. And Jimmy Carter’s willingness to speak the clear truth is debated as controversy. Decades ago, CBS correspondent Howard K. Smith predicted this outcome as he watched his network reel from complaints about his Freedom Ride coverage. Applying balance to a discussion in which there is none, he warned, was “equivalent to saying that truth is to be found somewhere between right and wrong, equidistant between good and evil.”

The White House’s fear of challenging the tea-bag madness is typical of its cautious politics. But the rest of us accept it at our peril. The absurd, plainly racist ideas that found air at Palin’s campaign rallies have dug in as meaningful parts of our daily public conversation. Carter is the most significant public figure to say that’s not OK. Rather than allow the right to shout him down, many more purported leaders must stand up with him.

Kai Wright is The Root’s senior writer.

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And also from PHR: Frank Donaghue on the Dasht-e-Leili Mass Grave in Afghanistan

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