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Default Whitopia? It Used To Be Called America

Whitopia? It Used To Be Called America

By Ellison Lodge

"Occasionally, political scientists build a large thesis based on one interesting statistic. In his 2008 book The Big Sort, Bill Bishop came up with the idea of a “landslide county” where Republicans or Democrats won by over 20%. Bishop found that the number of these counties nearly doubled from 26% of the electorate in 1976 to 48% in 2004. He convincingly demonstrated that this was proof of Americans’ increased self-segregation on racial, political, and cultural lines.


Richard Benjamin, an African American fellow at the think tank Demos,
attempts to find such a knockout statistic in his book Searching For
Whitopia: An Improbable Journal To The Heart of White America. Instead
of landslide counties, he documents “Whitopias” that supposedly
indicate, well, increased self-segregation on racial, political, and
cultural lines for America.

According to Benjamin, a

“Whitopia is whiter than the nation, its respective region, and its
state. It has posted at least 6 percent population growth since 2000.
The majority of that growth, often upward of 90 percent) is from white
migrants. And a whitopia has a je ne sais quoi—an ineffable social
charisma, a pleasant look and feel.”

Well, not exactly. The appendix with a list of hundreds of “Whitopian
Counties” defines them as being “at least 85% non Hispanic White, with
total population growth of at least 7 percent after 2000, and with
more than two thirds of that growth coming from non-Hispanic whites.”

This definition both contradicts the first one. While all these
Whitopias are whiter than America as a whole, many are not whiter than
their state. Idaho is 95% white, yet all but one of the ten Whitopias
in the state were less than 95% white.

And nowhere does Benjamin establish that these counties’ growth is
actually caused by white migration—simply that their growth is 66%
white. While this number is significantly higher than the 18% white
share of nation wide population growth, it is still significantly
lower than the actual population of these Whitopias, so it could be
cause by natural increase. In fact, only one of Benjamin’s 100
“extreme” Whitopias’ white share of the population growth is greater
than the white share of the existing population. In other words,
despite his claim that Whitopias are getting whiter, almost every
single one is becoming less white—just not as quickly as the rest of
the country.

Finally, the baselines of 85% white population and seven percent
growth over the last six year is nothing to write home about. The
entire country experienced six percent growth over those the last six
years. "While immigrants are flooding into the suburbs, the non-white
population is still heavily concentrated in urban areas, making the
rest of the country much more than 66% white."

Of course, the entire country was over 85% white before the 1965
Immigration act. Combined with the high birthrates after World War II,
the whole of America probably qualified as a Whitopia.

Benjamin’s statistics merely establish is that there are some counties
in America that are not yet flooded with Third World immigrants that
managed to grow without the installation of low income housing.

I have no doubt that white flight exists, although it is complicated
because whites tend create conditions that cause them to be followed
by minorities. Benjamin just hasn’t thought carefully enough about it.

Searching for Whitopia, however, is not based solely on statistics.
Benjamin tries to weave them into a left-wing cultural travelogue.
While his statistics are important, we do not need any numbers to know
that white flight is not confined from the cities to the suburbs, but
now to exurbs and even formally rural areas. Benjamin braves areas
such as St. George, Utah; Forsyth, Georgia; and Warren County, New
Jersey to see just what makes White Americans tick.

In this respect, the book is an inferior knock-off of the 1998
bestseller Confederates in the Attic, in which Tony Horwitz [Email
him]left Bethesda, MD to travel across swaths of the unreconstructed
South exposing the backwardness and bigotry of its residents to his
cosmopolitan readers. Like Horwitz, Benjamin hails from suburban
Maryland and dares to explore to Red America and its inhabitants. Also
like Horowitz, he shows a feigned and patronizing sympathy for his
subjects, always tempered by the fact that (of course) their existence
and worldview is wrong and intolerant.

Though I strongly disagreed with Horwitz’s message, Confederates in
the Attic kept my attention. This probably because neo-Confederates
(or whatever you want to call them) are much more interesting
characters than ordinary Americans who simply want to live in an area
with nice schools, safe neighborhoods, and English-speakers. When
going native, Horwitz joined a group of hardcore Confederate re-
enactors who would go as far starving themselves to emaciation before
battles. Benjamin just learned to play golf.

As Benjamin notes, America is rapidly approaching what he calls the
“White Peoples’ Deadline” of 2042 when whites will become a minority.
Immigration into the suburbs is one of the major causes of white
flight to the exurbs.

In his chapter “The Latino Time Bomb”, Benjamin recounts an extensive
conversation with Roy Beck of Numbers USA. Before reading it, I
correctly predicted the exchange. Beck, of course, bent over backward
to explain that NumbersUSA’s opposition to immigration has nothing to
do with race. Benjamin responds by linking Beck to John Tanton, whom
he smears for publishing Camp of the Saints and Sam Francis. He also
accuses Beck of having “the worst germ fixation I have ever seen”
simply because Beck—who had a cold—did not want to shake Benjamin’s
hand.

Memo to Beck: spread disease next time.

Curiously, Benjamin did not interview American Renaissance’s Jared
Taylor, who (whatever else Benjamin no doubt think about him) has
thought long and hard about the implications of white flight and would
certainly have given Benjamin more of a fight. (Maybe that was the
problem.) VDARE.com has a barely traceable presence in Whitopia—
Benjamin quotes a very prescient 2004 Sam Francis column that
predicted that Barack Obama may represent the "moment when America
ceases to be a nation defined and characterized by the white racial
identity of its founders and historic population and is transformed
into the non-white multiracial empire symbolized and led by 'people
like Obama.'" And he lists Peter Brimelow’s book Alien Nation as one
of “spate of panicky best sellers” in the last ten years. (It was
actually published in 1995).

Most amusingly, the dust jacket describes Whitopias as a place full of
people who do “not mind a little ethnic food or a few mariachi dancers—
as long as these trends do not overwhelm a white dominant culture.”
Besides inserting “white” before “dominant culture”, this is an
unacknowledged verbatim lifting of Marcus Epstein’s quip in a
VDARE.com column that offended the New York Times’ editorial board
earlier this year.

If there is one minor insight in Searching for Whitopia, it’s that
whites don’t want to talk or acknowledge the racial basis for their
decisions—even as they make huge sacrifices to avoid the benefits of
diversity. According to Benjamin,

“Most whites are not drawn to place explicitly because it teems with
other white people. Rather, the place’s very whiteness implies other
perceived qualities. Americans associate a homogenous white
neighborhood with higher property values, friendliness, orderliness,
hospitality, cleanliness, safety, and comfort. These seemingly race-
neutral qualities are subconsciously inseparable from race and class
in many whites’ minds. Race is often used as a proxy for those
neighborhood traits. And, if a neighborhood is known to have those
traits, many whites presume—without giving it a thought—that the
neighborhood will be majority white.”

Of course, these whites presume correctly. As areas become more and
more non-white, crime increases, social cooperation goes down, and
school quality declines. After detailing his experience of an African
American youth robbing him at gunpoint in New York City, Benjamin even
reluctantly admits that whites have some justification for these
fears.

But given our insane regime of political correctness, whites also have
good reason to pretend race has nothing to do with their decisions.

Benjamin concludes by with the obvious question “Where’s the harm?”
What is wrong with whites choosing to live among their own kind?

He replies that middle class whites are forced to experience cultural
isolation, long commutes, and urban sprawl. Low-income whites, who
occupied the exurbs prior to the white flight, are sometimes priced
out. Low-income minorities lose any contact with the middle class.
Benjamin believes that “Stemming disintegration is crucial to the long-
term quality of our democracy.”

While Benjamin painfully tries to show that this segregation the
result of zoning and tax laws, it doesn’t take his Stanford PhD to
know that it’s really due to federal government’s housing, education
and above all immigration policy. whites —who until the passage of the
1965 Immigration Act would simply have been called “Americans”—are
increasingly forced to choose between living in crime-infested
neighborhoods with terrible schools or retreating to the suburbs and
now to the Whitopias at their own social and economic cost.

But unless whites—Americans— acknowledge that their decisions are in
response to our insane immigration policies and fight to change them,
they will eventually run out of new Whitopias to run to.

Benjamin concludes his book with this sentence: “I want desperately,
come 2042, for our national experiment to work.”

But America never signed up for any “national experiment” of making
whites a minority through government immigration policy.

The experiment is already failing. And unless we want the country to
become even more segregated—and possibly break up—we need to pull the
plug."


http://www.vdare.com/lodge/091012_whitopia.htm
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