Whitopia - White Flight From the Suburbs

“Refugees of Diversity” The American Prospect magazine Sept. 19, 2009 http://prospect.org/article/refugees-diversity-0 I don’t have a defined thesis topic -- I’m auditing this class with an eye on possibly returning to school for a masters in American Studies -- but I do have this amorphous interest in place, home vs. travel, suburbs vs. natural environment vs. cities, and suburbs or cities as a point of ancestral origin for people who don’t have a connection with past generations of family (where are you from if you don’t know where your family is from?). For my article, I found “Refugees of Diversity,” a 2009 The American Prospect article on “Whitopias,” which covers the recent suburban version of White Flight, where suburbs not just cities have “blight” and people are leaving for more rural communities that feel safer for families, have more affordable homes, have a sense of old-timey community values, and are less diverse than the cities and suburbs people have left behind. The article is a mix of primary and secondary sources. The author, Rich Benjamin, includes interviews with residents of such towns and experts, as well as many statistics on moving and voting to back up his points. At first I was slightly taken aback by the authoritarian, sometimes patronizing, voice (“Call these places White Meccas...or Blanched Bunker Communities. Or White Archipelagos. I call them Whitopias.”) he takes in the article, the purpose of which is to really introduce and define his term “Whitopia,” until I realized it is taken from the author’s book Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America (Hyperion, 2009). If I were to use this article for research, it would just be a stepping-off point -- I would seek out the book.