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For his new book, Searching for Whitopia, social commentator Rich Benjamin spent a year 
visiting “whitopias” — quiet, charming, booming towns that are receiving massive inflows of white residents — setting their explosive growth against the projection that whites will no longer be the majority in the United States by 2042. Among these bustling burgs? St. George, Utah; Forsyth County, Georgia; and Coeur d’Alene. Benjamin spent four months in a Hayden Lake cabin in 2007 — throwing dinner parties, chatting with Mayor Sandi Bloem and retired LAPD officers and attending a white separatist conference in Sandpoint. He took a few minutes this weekend to speak with us from New York/Joel Smith, Inlander. More here.
Question: Do you plan to read Richard Benjamin’s “Searching for Whitopia”?
D.F. Oliveria is a columnist and blogger for The Spokesman-Review. Huckleberries Online was judged the best 2008 Idaho newspaper blog by the Idaho Press Club. And the best 2007 news blog in the Pacific Northwest by the Society for Professional Journalist. Print Huckleberries is a past winner of the Herb Caen Memorial Column contest by the National Association of Newspaper Columnists. The Readership Institute of Northwestern University cited this blog as a good example of online community journalism.
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kamm on October 14 at 2:17 p.m.
Yes, I'm always looking for good non-fiction books. This sounds interesting. I found another really interesting book “Justice-what's the right thing to do” by Michael Sandel after watching the interview by Charlie Rose on PBS.
And, although I am a transplanted So-Cal girl, I came up in 1991 to experience what you already had.
I didn't want to bring any California with me. I changed my license plates as soon I had an apartment to call my own. Then I bought a home in an established neighborhood.
Although my daughter thought I was moving her '50 miles from the edge of the world', she fell in love with the place by the end of her 1st semester of high school and has never left the NorthWest
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spokelooneh on October 14 at 3:49 p.m.
Mr. Benjamin makes a very good point:
“The stereotype is that Idaho is racist. That’s not at all what I found. I was finding that the Californians are importing the racism. Richard Butler was not an Idahoan. Richard Butler was a Californian. And I have no way to prove this, [but] in some ways, the Californians brought their own anxiety and racial tension with them to Idaho.”
Many Californians saw their neighborhoods and schools become integrated, especially from the late 60's on, and didn't like it much. So they white-flighted. Butler came out of California , north San Diego county as I recall, a bastion of racism and white fear of the “brown hoards”.
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