Best 16 quotes of Richard Benjamin on MyQuotes

Richard Benjamin

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

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

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

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

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Richard Benjamin

    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.