Richard Benjamin Quotes

#1. 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.

Richard Benjamin

#2. 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.

Richard Benjamin

#3. 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.

Richard Benjamin

#4. 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.

Richard Benjamin

#5. 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.

Richard Benjamin

#6. 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.

Richard Benjamin

#7. 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.

Richard Benjamin

#8. 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.

Richard Benjamin

#9. I always say that you should remake flops, not hits.

Richard Benjamin

#10. I hope we have American-topias.

Richard Benjamin

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

Richard Benjamin

#12. 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.

Richard Benjamin

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

Richard Benjamin

#14. By 2042, whites will no longer be the American majority.

Richard Benjamin

#15. 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.

Richard Benjamin

#16. 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.

Richard Benjamin