If I were an immigrant Latino not born in the US, I could not have written Searching for Whitopia: An Improbably Journey to the Heart of America 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.

Richard Benjamin

Categorized in : Book Heart Journey

I always say that you should remake flops, not hits.

Richard Benjamin

remakes should

It's the texture of New York that people miss by filming elsewhere. There are layers and layers of character - even in the pavement - that you can't get anywhere else. And the speed that the people move. It's so different from other places.

Richard Benjamin

new-york missing-you moving

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.

Richard Benjamin

atlanta class people

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.

Richard Benjamin

oregon white moving

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.

Richard Benjamin

louisville colorado cnn

By 2042, whites will no longer be the American majority.

Richard Benjamin

majority

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.

Richard Benjamin

peaceful community people

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.

Richard Benjamin

democracy people thinking

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.

Richard Benjamin

class long thinking

I concede that segregation can allay social tensions immediately, but it further debilitates us in the long run.

Richard Benjamin

segregation running long

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.

Richard Benjamin

white class moving

Of course, there isn't really a black population in Idaho or Utah.

Richard Benjamin

idaho black utah

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.

Richard Benjamin

crow issues tears

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.

Richard Benjamin

engineering white country

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.

Richard Benjamin

together bird people

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.

Richard Benjamin

black kind want

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.

Richard Benjamin

dixie community example

I hope we have American-topias.

Richard Benjamin

All we need is a few more Zika hotspots and there will be a shortage of platelets across the country.

Richard Benjamin

company-news

That risk is always going to be there. People who donate blood within two weeks of exposure always will be missed by testing.

Richard Benjamin

health-news