43. 50 PoC Book Review

[brigdh]

43. Rich Benjamin, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America

A pop non-fiction book about what the author calls "whitopias": fast-growing, often exurban or rural, conservative, majority white (usually over 90%) communities. Such whitopias are becoming more common, he argues, and many of them are some of the fastest growing areas in the country. Against this backdrop, Rich Benjamin (a black guy) decided to try living in three such communities (St. George, Utah; Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; and Forsyth County, Georgia) and researching many more (including Carnegie Hill, in Manhattan and only a short walk from my own apartment, though that's a walk that covers a lot of change) to see what they're like, and what kind of people choose to live in them. These aren't sundown towns- obviously, since Benjamin managed to find places to rent in them- but are more like an extreme example of white flight. I picked this book up because I've been reading a lot of books about PoC communities, and I thought it would be interesting to get a black perspective on white communities.

I really enjoyed this book, perhaps because I'd read James Loewen's Sundown Towns over the summer, and Searching for Whitopia is the perfect follow-up to that (Sundown Towns is an absolutely amazing book, and I encourage everyone to read it. It is very worth its enormous length and many footnotes, though, the author being white, it will not count as one of your 50books_poc books). And Searching for Whitopia really is an update; it manages to include research from 2009 and I always think it's very impressive when someone can manage to get a book from the writing-stage to the in-bookstores-stage that quickly. And that recent information is particularly impressive because Benjamin covers a lot of topics, from Latino/a immigration, to the history of the conservative movement in American politics, to the New Urbanism city planning philosophy. Benjamin approaches his topics with a light touch, in particular giving way more of the benefit of the doubt to the people he interviews from whitopias than I would have. He even gives several pages to defining the difference between interpersonal racism and structural racism, a distinction which most people reading this community probably don't need help with. Because of that, though, I think this book would make an awesome gift to someone who's not that knowledgable about these issues; Benjamin is very careful to not offend, and there's things to interest people who wouldn't normally pick up this sort of book, including an entire chapter on golf.

So, a book which doesn't have much in-depth information, but has good, up-to-date information on a variety of topics, which is fun and easy to read: overall, pretty nice!

Crossposted to 50books_poc

Comments

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

Given familial/religious/cultural ties to Idaho and Utah, I think I definitely need to get my hands on this book. Did Benjamin get into the history of those communities much? I ask because, after experiencing the cultures of San Francisco, San Antonio, and Baltimore (none of which are bastions of racial equality or justice), it was quite the mindbender to learn that part of the resistance to the LDS church in the South was the preaching of abolition, and part of the opposition to statehood of Utah (Idaho was mentioned more as an afterthought) was that it would be a free state. Even as a white girl, it was clear to me that the dominant cultures in both states were not good in terms of race, and the "progressive" element wasn't much beyond that abolitionist mindset of "It's wrong for one person to own another, even if the other is clearly inferior, because it damages the spirituality and morality of the person doing the owning."

[dskasak.livejournal.com]

The irony of Utah being a free state, given the pre-1978 Mormon view on whether black people were worthy of salvation, is quite high.

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

Huh. This statement is based on several incorrect assumptions, and Mormon is a pejorative term to many LDS.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

The Utah chapters do have some history (though little enough that it may be information you would know already; it was new to me, but I'm not that familiar with the area), but the Idaho chapters used almost of the background space to talk about the nearby headquarters of the Aryan Nations group and some affiliated churches.

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

Still sounds worth checking out for the perspective, though, which I bet will include things I don't know (or don't know aren't commonly known, if that makes sense). Yeah, the situation's complicated, but what isn't? Thanks for the write-up!

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

This sounds fascinating, as does the other title you mention.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I definitely recommend it. Sundown Towns is amazing and shocking, but it's a massive book, and it reads like a textbook, complete with copious footnotes, so it can be off-putting. But it's really worth it. The author, James Loewen, is the same guy who wrote the justly-famous Lies My Teacher Told Me (about how American history is taught in high schools), which has just come out in a new edition that I'm pretty tempted to get, even though I already own the old one.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

That sounds really interesting indeed-- I wonder how many white families end up in these areas due to the promise of 'good schools,' which is where the structural racism would no doubt come into play. Is that part of it?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yep, very common. Also things like "I want my kids to grow up in a town like the one I grew up in" and nostalgia for a sort of imagined Mayberry-like past. He points out that the two main groups of people moving to these areas are people who are retired and people with or planning to have young children.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that makes sense. Depressing.