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Emily Walton, "Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
This is New Books in Sociology, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Richard Osijo and I'm professor of Sociology at the City University of New York. And joining me today is Emily Walton, Associate professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College. And today we're going to talk about her recent book, Race and Exclusion in Rural New England. A study of a rural area's struggles with diversification and the experiences of well educated non white new arrivers to majority white places. Emily, thank you for this book and thank you for joining me on this podcast.
- [01:49]
C
Thanks so much. I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for the opportunity to share the findings of this book.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. So could you please start by telling us a bit about yourself and how you came to work on this topic and start this project and write this book?
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C
Yeah. So I grew up in Montana. I'm an urban Montanan, as my other Montanans that are less urban like to remind me. But the rural area that I grew up in is very, very different from the kind of New England rurality that I experienced when I came out here for the job. But I went to grad school at the University of Washington where I was very much. I was not a demographer, I wasn't trained as a demographer, but I was very much A quantitative kind of urban race scholar within the demographic tradition. During my postdoc at University of Wisconsin, I completely did a 180 and went like full on ethnography mode. And it was really fun for me to be able to kind of explore some of the, you know, like I had been looking at patterns in the data, you know, in my grad school years, but really trying to understand some of the mechanisms and how this is working, theorize about processes. And I really kind of fell in love with that qualitative tradition of asking about like, why and how is this happening? So when I started my job at Dartmouth in 2012, I did a qualitative project in Boston asking about how multi ethnic neighborhoods that had been multi ethnic for decades, how well they were doing at integration. I was seeing it as kind of like a success story of, you know, these people have been living together for so long, how are they doing it? I want to understand diversification at its best. Well, after a year or so of collecting data, I soon realized that they weren't doing it well, but that white domination was persisting even in these multi ethnic environments. And it was, was such an eye opening experience for me to understand that diversification wasn't necessarily, you know, practiced in a way that ensured equality for all of the people who lived there. And so I started thinking about the own. My own rural area by Dartmouth and thinking it is also diversifying. Much like many of the places around the country, rural areas are getting many Latino undocumented migrants to work in these kind of low income fields. And the diversification that I was seeing around me was very different. Dartmouth and an associated hospital was a big draw for the kind of highly educated people of color who were brought here to, you know, do these jobs that required this professional education. And I was really interested in what was their experience because my experience of moving here even as a white woman was very much like this culture I felt was very closed to newcomers in general. It was sort of like, we've been doing it this way for generations. Why would we change now and who are you to come in and, you know, be different in our place? And so I was really curious about, you know, just how people of color experience that differently than I did.
- [05:39]
B
Oh, thank you. So you touched on the case here, and I think it's a fantastic case. I love the case. It's this place called the Upper Valley, a region that includes New Hampshire and Vermont. And it has a number of rural towns that are not just gentrifying but, but that are experiencing a rare process of non white rural gentrification, as these, as you mentioned, highly skilled workers, many of whom are people of color, who move there for the quality jobs in industries like health and higher ed. So the meds and EDs, as it's put, and you know, like in other gentrifying places, like you just outlined a bit, there's this tension between newcomers and the existing residents who were already there, who in this case are often members of the white working class and people who are, you know, not necessarily part of this region's new economy, not necessarily part of any revitalization that's going on there. And you give a quick example of this tension in the introduction with a woman named Sanvi. So I was wondering if you could just start by telling us about her story and then outline based on that just what you're arguing here in the book.
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C
Great, thank you. So Sanvi is an Indian physician, and she had the particular kind of visa that required that she work in a rural area in order to expedite her visa process and make it so that she could stay in the United States after she finished medical school. Her husband also had a job in the Upper Valley. And so it was kind of like the perfect confluence of events for her to move here with their young son. And she was so excited about living in the Upper Valley. You know, just on paper, it sounds like an incredible place. It's very rural. It's in the mountain, you know, tucked in between the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont. And, you know, we're right on the Connecticut River. We've got hiking, we've got, you know, access to all kinds of lakes and water sports, and, you know, it's clean air, great schools in a lot of the towns in this area. So there's just so many things about this place that were so exciting for Sanvi and her husband and many other people who want to move here, which is really different from a lot of the kind of rural areas that are struggling with population loss that I can talk about later. But Sanvi, I would say a few years in, you know, working as a family practice physician, started kind of having some doubts about the way that people were treating her. Her son would come home from daycare with bites and scratches, and the. The teachers at daycare would be like, we can't really explain what happened, you know. Yeah. So she had some issues with feeling unwanted and unseen by some of her patients. And particularly, you know, she would call them to talk about medication refills or, you know, sort of the Things that she needed to communicate as a physician. And they would hang up before she even got a chance to get a few words in hearing her Indian accent. And she presumed that they thought she was a telemarketer, you know, so these kind of, like, little subtle things started to build up, and she and her husband really just questioned whether this place that they had thought would be such a wonderful home would be a place that they would want to stay and raise their son. And it was really about not being seen in the way that they saw themselves, which is valuable, complex, interesting, you know, highly educated people who could contribute to the community and really wanted to make this place their home. And this is a concept that I call misrecognition. So I think about misrecognition as not being seen in the way that you want to be seen, in the way that you see yourself. When you recognize someone, you see them as, oh, they're part of my family, or they're one of my friends. I know that person. I see them. And so to misrecognize someone is just not necessarily see their value. And this is an experience that. Her experiences were mostly subtle, the things that she described. But I talk in the book about this kind of range of types of misrecognition that people of color experienced, from explicit racism down to kind of feeling a bit of provisional acceptance in social interactions. And this overall made them feel like they couldn't make this place home, which is where the homesick title comes from. And there were mental health repercussions about feeling anxious, exhausted, insecure. These kind of just manifestations of what I call homesickness. For a lot of these people of color, even though they had moved to this place that they thought would be wonderful on paper, it turned out that it wasn't a place that they could call home.
- [10:59]
B
So tell us more about the Upper Valley and some of the towns where your participants come from. In many ways, it does seem to mirror the trajectory that a lot of rural places have followed in recent decades. But what's the sort of potted history that you could give us, and what are some of its towns like, and what drew your participants, who don't have ties to this region, to want to move there?
- [11:25]
C
Yeah. So the Upper Valley is similar in a lot of ways, and I would say some towns in the Upper Valley are following this similar trajectory that you mentioned to many rural places. However, a lot of towns, and particularly those in the core of the Upper Valley, which residents kind of describe it as the core and the periphery so the core, you know, really is the central area, and the periphery is kind of everything else north, south, east and west, spread out around the core. There is a lot of variation in terms of the fortunes, and I really do mean fortunes, the socioeconomic trajectories of the towns in the area. So, and this mirrors what is going on in rural America in general, where we have this divergence between some rural places where the white population is really on the decline. And then we have other rural areas that are lifestyle destinations, retirement destinations, places where people want to get a second home for skiing and, you know, water sports and other things. And also a lot of rural areas are being developed for fracking, you know, and other kind of extractive industries. And so there are some rural areas that are literally dying in the United States, you know, where the white population is aging. Those children of those white people are moving out for jobs in other places. So you see populations shrinking and, you know, general stores going away. They aren't able to support schools. And many towns in the Upper Valley are like that, that as well. It's really about this core and periphery again. But then you see other places in the rural United States, you know, that are thriving socioeconomically. But what they're finding in those places is this story of rural gentrification where, you know, high income, highly educated folks are moving in, perhaps purchasing second homes. And there is very much a social tension in terms of the way that they want the schools to be run and the kind of institutions that they want in their towns. You know, are we gonna have the first Friday hop in bar scene or are we gonna have, I don't know, the. The cowboy bar scene? So it's very much attention in those places, even in where their fortunes are rising. And we see that in the Upper Valley as well. But there is very much a racial component layered onto the Upper valley that we don't necessarily see in some of these other places where the rural population is thriving more. Those tend to be retirement folks or second home purchasers. So this lifestyle or amenity migration that people talk about. But in the Upper Valley, I profile a few towns to kind of give a sense of the diverging fortunes. Hanover in New Hampshire, where Dartmouth College is located, is very wealthy. You know, median family income contains many 1 percenters. Home values are high. Most people work in education or healthcare. And this is really different from a place like Claremont, which is 25 miles south along the Connecticut river in New Hampshire, whose fortunes were built up in early colonial days with using the mill and the water Power from the river to create a milling and industries built around the mill. And once we see kind of the agricultural and manufacturing sector in the United States really hollow out. By the 1960s, the. The fortunes of Claremont went the same way. And so even though we're, you know, only 25 miles away, we all call ourselves part of the Upper valley. The schools in Claremont are struggling. You know, this year there was a potential that the high school and the elementary schools were not going to be able to function because they didn't have a budget. Now they've cobbled it together and they're making it happen. But, you know, we see schools closing and Claremont is actually a city. You know, of course, I'm not sure exactly how many. I think about 15,000 people, you know, was very different from Hanover, where the public school has often been rated the number one public school in the nation. And so there's this tension between the towns in this place where Hanover and others in the core are sort of seen as uppity, as very highly educated, looking down on people from other places. And some of the towns in the periphery, like Claremont, may send people to work in Hanover and other towns in the core, but it's very much like in the service industry or working in these kind of lower level jobs in the hospital, where you have interaction between people of different social classes. But there's not that kind of feeling that we are together as one community that I think that we used to have in the face of that has been this very much a racial and ethnic demographic transition that's happened over the last couple of decades. And so I think that though it's very much a socioeconomic tension that people are feeling between the towns and even within some of the towns, it's also layered on top of it. We see this kind of like racial and ethnic minorities moving to this place are become the face of the community, changing in a way that doesn't necessarily work for all the people here.
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B
Yeah. So you, you begin chapter two with a fascinating story about a town clerk in Stratton, which is a small Vermont town, and this guy used a meme he found for the COVID of the annual report. The. The meme is basically a snarky statement warning newcomers to a place that they should adapt to their new home and don't bother trying to change it. So there was some blowback. It got criticized for being unwelcoming at best and xenophobic and racist at worst, and the guy had to apologize. Now you use this story to launch into discussing what the Upper Valley is like culturally, this New England culture and how newcomers of color experience this cultural environment. So tell us a bit about this New Englandness and what the reactions that your participants had to it were.
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C
Yeah, so I definitely experienced that cultural shift. As I said, when I moved here, I was from the West. I grew up in Montana, went to school in Seattle very much. You know, we say hi to each other on the street. When we walk by, we make eye contact, we're friendly, we talk in line at the grocery store. And moving here, I was like, wow, this place is. People keep to themselves. You know, I've learned over time that people are maybe not friendly, but they are very kind. But it's taken me a while to kind of understand that there is a lot of love and care, but it's not expressed in the same open way that I was used to being from the West. And so I kind of use this as a jumping off point to talk about the culture of northern New England, particularly rural New England, where we think about ourselves as people of the mountains. Very rugged. People that aren't from here, we call flatlanders. And there's very much a sense of like, well, you can't get there from here, you know, so you're here, you are of this place or you aren't of this place. And newcomers, even if they are second generation, even if you were born in the northern New England, you aren't necessarily from northern New England unless your parents were also born in this area. So this culture, you know, which sociologists, we understand to be like the norms, beliefs, values, things that describe the way of being in a place, the habits, behaviors, really kind of creates a barrier to integration for these newcomers who happen to be people of color coming to the Upper Valley. And I think about this in terms of three sort of main buckets. One, is this what I was describing, a culture of reserve. So this is very much, we're cool in our interactions here. People mind their own business. We have our long standing friends, and we may not necessarily kind of reach out. Some of my participants describe this as cliqueness, or we understand that by giving you space, I'm being respectful. And that's actually kind of me to not really intrude on you by waving or making eye contact when I pass you on the street. One of my participants, Ayanna, told this story. She was a black woman who had actually lived in the Upper Valley for only a year, but she had a lot of experiences. And she told me about two experiences that she had where she was walking down the street and a random black person would be like, oh my gosh, it's so good to see you. Like, let me give you my phone number. You know, if you ever want to reach out, if you ever need anything, I'm here for you. And she said she felt like she was on Survivor or something. You know, there was very much this sense of like, we need to stick together because I'm the one that's going to be friendly to you. Other people aren't. And, you know, really much it was just any very different from anything that she had ever experienced. And she was really thankful for this as well because she was from the south. And she said that, you know, when we walk out, we have this culture of like greeting each other. And she just hadn't found that here. So that was one piece of the culture, is this sense of reserve. I also describe the culture as I talk about it in the book as being very much like a white culture. So this is. We have been white in the northern New England for 250 years. So that's not necessarily, you know, our long term history in the region. But we, we don't recognize native and indigenous peoples in this area, though they are here. They aren't necessarily in the open. So these, this white culture, you know, reflects white interests and the culture of reserve preserves white status in terms of, like, I've got my friends, I don't necessarily need to make friends with you. And another, another aspect of the culture that preserves this white status is colorblindness. And this is something that we see, you know, across the United States amongst white people in general. We have an inability to understand our own racial positions. And the way that that manifests in the Upper Valley is just, you know, we don't see diversity. I don't necessarily, like, a lot of the people that I surveyed said things like, oh, my town isn't really diversifying. You know, like, I might see people at the farmer's market or there are some ethnic folks that are, you know, selling, they've brought in to fill labor shortages or things like that. But they don't necessarily see that diversification is happening. And many of the people, particularly in the more progressive areas in the, in the core of the Upper Valley, were like, well, we don't have a problem with racism here. You know, like, that's never happened here. And many of my participants talked about this over and over again. They'd be like in a meeting with 80 people, diversity training or something at their job. And people in the audience would Be like, well, but that's not a problem here, right? And another participant, Stephen, talked about how he was at a party one time and someone walked up to him and said like, aren't you just so glad that you live in Upper Valley where like, racism isn't a problem anymore and you know, it's not like the south. And Stephen was from the south. And so he took great offense to this and was very much like, well, where did you, where did you get your data? You know, can you, can you phone a friend to tell me, like, why you don't have any racism here? And he characterized it as, people here think that they have educated the racism away, which I think is a common sort of phenomenon in these sort of white woke communities of like, you know, I'm there, I don't have a problem with racism. But that was a very widespread kind of cultural phenomenon that a lot of my participants talked about is just this culture of colorblindness. And the last aspect of the culture that I think makes it hard for people of color to integrate in the Upper Valley is this expectation of assimilation. So the long standing folks that I surveyed said things like, you know, they, they should change. They're, they're moving here. Much like the Stratford town report that you mentioned or Stratton, sorry. It was like, you know, you can move here as long as you act like we do. And if you don't want to do that, then you're welcome to go back where you came from. So, you know, there's this idea that much like we've had for the last hundred years in the United States, right. So we should, any newcomers should assimilate to the current way of being. And people found that that was an expectation that did not support their ability to be an individual, to practice their own culture, that they kind of felt like they were walking on eggshells in terms of trying not to offend anyone and they, they couldn't really ever, you know. Mia Tuan talks about Asian Americans in general of like not being able to put their feet up on the table in this country. We can't be comfortable, we can't be at home. And so I think assimilation, this culture of assimilation really was the thing that made me think about, this isn't a place where I can rest, where I can finally, you know, put my feet up and feel like this is somewhere that I want to settle with my family.
- [26:40]
B
Yeah. So this leads us back to this concept of misrecognition that you introduced earlier and you lay it out in chapter Three, this argument that the idea that the people who have your study have been made to feel less valuable or less worthy in their own communities. So tell us more about this set of experiences that they have, what it looks like, and just how misrecognition works.
- [27:08]
C
Yeah, so I think about misrecognition as, you know this. It's a social process whereby we create boundaries between individuals. We say, we are us, you are them. We are reinforcing that social boundary. It's the process through which that happens. And I do it by not recognizing you as a valuable individual that I want to have as a member of my community. And I think about that, again, in terms of mechanisms, because as a sociologist, I love a good conceptual model. And so this is like, how the processes are playing out in detail. And so I think about misrecognition as explicit racism, as social distance, and as provisional acceptance. And again, Ayanna talked about, you know, she had been here a year, and so her experiences with racism. She had numerous stories about people calling her the N word, about not being paid attention to at a used car lot and driving four hours instead to get her car from. I can't remember where she got it from, Connecticut or Massachusetts or something. But it was like, that was so worth it to me for her to do that because of the way that she felt ignored, unrecognized in these instances, particularly when she was out in public, she said that she felt like. Like she's experienced racism in other places, but here it was like a faucet gushing out at you. And so that is one end of the spectrum of misrecognition. And I find that it could happen interpersonally, like it did for Ayanna, or it could happen institutionally. So there are many schools, the school that my kids go to, actually the high school, who. Where they still have native themed mascots. And in both New Hampshire and Vermont, they are perhaps not representing them with a picture, and they've changed the name slightly. But it's very much like calling back to this era when we would have a native themed mascot. There was a lot of institutional racism. One of my participants, Emma, talked about hiring discrimination. She just couldn't get a job with the skills that she was trained for, even though, you know, there were a lot of jobs with that specialty in the area. There's surveillance by the police. And she was out walking with a group of black friends and found that police were kind of tailing her to the point where she called and was like, am I not allowed to be walking on this road, you know, so very much like institutional and individual racism happening for all these folks. And I argue that this is one aspect of misrecognition. Very explicit. A little less explicit is social distance. So social distance can happen interactively. Like, I'm not interested in hanging out with you. I don't necessarily want to be your friend. It can be an affective social distance where, like, I don't feel sympathy toward you, or more of a normative social distance where, like, someone is making judgments about whether or not that person could be part of the group normatively. I had one participant, Joseph, who was a Chinese American physician, and he talked about how he tried to join this group that played hockey. And he was. He had played, you know, and he was decent, but he said there were tryouts, and he went to try out for the group, and he found that he just was not up to par. And so I saw this as an indication of, like, this is like a test, you know, that he absolutely did not pass, that he wasn't able to fit into the types of, you know, cultural practices and things that people did for enjoyment in the Upper Valley. So there was very much, like I described before, this kind of sense of cliqueness, of it's hard to break into friend groups. And very much, you know, like, a lot of people talked about, you know, I've lived here for 13 years, and I still feel isolated. So people talked about how people have, like, a shell or a wall around them that's just so hard to penetrate. And they. So they didn't feel, you know, valued as people because of that. And then the third mechanism of misrecognition is this provisional acceptance. And this is kind of like, well, I might. It's. Well, actually, Joseph's example of the hockey team is also provisional acceptance. Like, you could try out. You know, I'll let you do that, but I may or may not accept you. And so they. People felt like they were kind of like, always having to prove themselves, particularly in interactions with people that they didn't know. Like, you go into a store or something, and people. The person behind the counter is like, oh, so where are you from? You know, like, not thinking that you would actually be from here. Steven talked about that. People. Samuel, who was a Haitian man, he was in the military, and he had a veteran's license plate, and he. He actually worked at the post office, and he had a. This one client who came. Kept coming in, and he was really interested in him and kept, like, questioning him about like, so you're a veteran? And Samuel's like, yes, I'm a veteran. You know, and he, he in the, in the Navy. And the, the client was like, the Haitian Navy. And Samuel was like, no, the United States Navy. You know, he very much felt like he was not accepted as someone who could be American or could be from this place. And there were many like, tests that people felt like they had to kind of pass in daily life. Visaka, who was a South Asian immigrant, she worked as a financial planner. And she said that one time a client came in and said, well, are you legal? Do you have citizenship? And she just was like, taken aback that someone would openly ask her that question. And she felt like it was very rude, but she had to answer. And she said that, you know, often people would think that she's the assistant because she's a dark skinned, you know, South Asian woman in these settings. And so, you know, all this adds up to just kind of this. Constantly when you're away from your home, when you have to interact with people and even in with, you know, with your co workers and friends, people just kind of felt like they were always being put to a test, you know, of am I, am I worthy? And yeah, I think that that really kind of adds up to this sense of misrecognition.
- [34:11]
B
Yeah. And misrecognition and racial inequality has, has harms. And you go into what these, these effects are in chapter four, when you tell us about the title of the book Homesickness. And you, you explained a little bit earlier, but these are these negative feelings of not belonging or not being at home where you're feeling like you're, you're at home where you live and yearning to return to or to find a place of acceptance and recognition. So what, what, what, what are these feelings that homesickness produces and what are some of the, the coping strategies that your participants deployed to try to manage them?
- [34:52]
C
Yeah, many of the participants said that they didn't think that the upper valley was home. You know, I explicitly asked them about that. You know, do you see yourself living here into the future? And a majority said no, I, I don't see this is a temporary stop, you know, but that's just not the way that they had come into, you know, moving to the upper valley feeling. And so I came on. This concept of homesickness is because the sickness is really like they, they're having this emotional reaction to their inability to create a home. And so homesickness manifested in different ways. These aren't. They don't necessarily line up with kind of the sociological, you know, or the DSM 4 of, you know, like, what are the emotional manifestations of stress? But, you know, the way that my participants described it kind of fell into three buckets of the symptoms of homesickness, insecurity. So I think about that as just kind of a lack of comfort, a lack of safety, a disconnection, feeling vulnerable in the community, people having self doubt, kind of feeling on guard, you know, just like always, just like a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit insecure. Even more than that was the second symptom of homesickness, which is anxiety. So these are, you know, elevated feelings of fear, of brooding, you know, worrying about some harm coming to you. Emma, who had experience being followed when she was walking, talked about, you know, every time she would get stopped by the police, which was often, she would just, you know, start sweating her. You know, her hands were shaking. She. It was almost like ptsd, you know, just like this waves of anxiety coming over her of feeling like she really needed to talk the officer down, you know, like, I need to make him feel comfortable so that nothing happens to me in this situation, you know, so just a lot of, like, anxious feelings. She told me that before even doing the interview that day, she started feeling anxious because she knew that she was gonna have to talk about some of the feelings and experiences that she had in her daily life in the Upper Valley. So it was very serious for her. It was. It was very much this physiological body sensation that she had with anxiety. Katie was an Indonesian woman. She had an experience in a grocery store where someone had yelled at because she was in the express line, and she had more than 20 items. And someone just really started going off, like, can't you read English? You know, why are you here? What are you doing? Do you need help? And she was like, I can't go to that grocery store anymore. I don't shop there, even though it's, like, convenient for me, you know, so people are, like, changing their patterns because of the kinds of PTSD and experiences that they had there. And then the last main symptom was just feeling tired, exhaustion, you know, like, I'm just done. I give so much of myself every day, whether it's, like, trying to explain my story. You know, people are asking, like, can you tell? Can you share your story? People are tired of sharing their stories. They feel worn down where. To the point where, like, Remy, who was a South Asian woman, she said, you know, I don't want to open up any more. Relationship accounts. I'm done. Like, I don't need any friends because it's just so exhausting trying to help people understand my perspective. And, you know, many of my participants felt, whether it was insecurity, anxiety, or exhaustion. And so they engaged in these kind of coping strategies, which themselves were not necessarily healthy for their psyche, but they allowed them to kind of make it day to day. So one is forming really just an alternative community. You know, like. Like, because of the social distance, people are not necessarily. I'm not going to make it on the hockey team, so I'm going to find another community of people of color who understand where I'm coming from. These kind of experiences that I'm having where they could feel not judged, they could feel seen as complex, valuable humans. Many people kept their guard up. You know, this, like, they talked about developing a thick skin. Jocelyn, who's a Filipino American, she said that she had what she called her bus face. You know, when she went out in public, she just kind of had a mean face that, like, didn't necessarily register. Other people, you know, like, don't talk to me because I just don't have the energy for that. She said that she had developed an aggressive walk, you know, where it's like, you know, I'm fending off using that, like, armor. A lot of people talked about ignoring the misrecognition and not personalizing it, saying, well, you know, I see it. I know Samuel talked about this. You know, the Haitian man said, you're going to be tested, but the best thing you can do is just rise above it because they're. They're not going to learn. You know, I just need to just kind of, like, let it roll off my back. Fulad was a Nigerian immigrant in the Upper Valley. And she talked about, you know, I'm gonna. I'm gonna be the bigger person in this situation. And she was kind of like, propping herself up. This self talk of, I'm gonna have a good day today, and I'm not gonna let any of this penetrate. And then the last thing that people did, which isn't necessarily good, it's actually not good for the Upper Valley and for these rural communities that are losing population, is many people just decide to leave. Many of the participants had contemplated it or had done it during the time while I was conducting the interviews. More than half, actually. So they just decided that it was so culturally different that they weren't able to make it work, and they just were going to pursue their dreams elsewhere. A few of my participants Use the term expiration date. And they would be like, I'm not sure when my expiration date is, but I know that I have one.
- [41:13]
B
Yeah. So based on your findings, you conclude the book with some suggestions that different actors in a place can use for integrating and including non dominant groups in their community in ways that dominate. Don't place the burden on those groups to adapt and that consider the potential for harm that you just described to us from misrecognition. Could you share what those are with us, please?
- [41:41]
C
Yeah. So I really think it's in everyone's best interest to do it right. As I described at the beginning, these rural areas, even the ones that are thriving socioeconomically, are perhaps experiencing this gentrification, but they're also losing population. Um, and so it's in their best interest to like, encourage people, whoever they are, to move to their place, to invest, to buy homes so that they can support the schools, they can support the general stores. And it's obviously in the best interest of the people moving to those places of they want to live in this rural area. Many of my participants described, you know, it's so peaceful there. I don't have to worry about the competition, the noise, the chaos of the city. You know, like, I want to live in this place. You know, they really were fulfilling their professional dreams at the same time as their kind of lifestyle dreams. So everyone wants it. Everyone wants for this to work. So how can we do that better? I think my main argument in the conclusion is that this kind of live free or die, the live and let live don't tread on me. These kind of mottos that support this sort of libertarian ethos in northern New England. It's not going to work. We can't let people alone and assume of that diversification is just going to happen and happen well. We need to kind of manage it a little bit. And I think that we can do that in many different ways. One is for leaders, civic leaders, so like elected officials and business leaders, you know, people who have a voice in the community can think about changing the culture of the place, specifically to become more multicultural. And by that I mean, you know, the opposite of assimilation, where we expect others who move here to become like us. We're thinking that we as a community are going to change to become a new place that is nothing like what we were and may not necessarily be like what the newcomers are, but it's going to be a new thing. And so we all have, like, a place in kind of defining what that is. I think Civic leaders especially, can use their power to be the mouthpiece for these kind of messages that are welcoming and affirming of diversity and saying, you know, we need this for our schools. We need this for our. If you want to support the fire and emergency services, we need people here. So we welcome that diversity. And they, you know, many. There are examples of businesses, business alliances, you know, having these branding campaigns where we can actually, you know, communicate like, this is who we want to be. This is the community that we are now. And then I think that we, as, you know, academic, as cultural leaders, as, you know, whether we're scholars or other kind of like maybe religious leaders in the community, have a job to do about storytelling. So similar to what the public officials were doing in terms of their official messages and the campaigns, we can tell stories about what we want this community to look like. And I have a blog that I started called Humans of the Upper Valley. I'm sure you're familiar with the humans of New York, where they run into people on the streets and they just kind of ask them random questions about their life. And publishing something like this helps. It's kind of this low stakes way to get to know other people without having to have that interaction. You know, I think a lot of white people are sort of afraid of, like, what if I say the wrong thing? I learned in Emily's book that I'm not supposed to say, where are you from? So, like, what do I say, you know, in that instance? And so reading about someone's story is a really nice way to say, oh, I can empathize with that person. I had a similar experience. I learned how we are similar as humans without requiring the kind of emotional labor on the part of the person of color to tell their story over and over and over again. So I think that we, you know, cultural leaders can kind of tell these stories. We can also tell them at a larger scale. Things like the people talk about, you know, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where you are not shying away from the history in the area, as I mentioned, you know, we have a long history in this area of, of persecuting, erasing, killing, sterilizing the native and indigenous population. And we're not honest about that history, in part because Native people in this area don't want to be seen as Native because it was like a negative label. And so many don't want to tell their, you know, clean their native ancestry. But I think that we can do a better job of just sort of recognizing that there are still, still Native and Indigenous people in our midst, even though we may not recognize them as a state, at a state level of their tribes. We can talk about, you know, how this land is Abenaki land or, you know, like, what many people do in terms of the land. Acknowledgments. I think things like that can be. They can symbolically go a long way to be more inclusive of, you know, who we are as a inclusive community. Community. And then I think at an individual level, we can all demonstrate a little bit more everyday solidarity. So I tell my students this all the time. You can't have your racism removed. Like, you know, like, you have a cavity. You need to do the hygiene and, you know, keep up with understanding what's going on in the world and whether that means reading this book to, you know, to understand the experiences of people of color in our own community and in other diversifying communities like this, or, you know, just like, just doing the reading. Like, you need to do the reading if you're gonna keep up with people's experiences. And so I think it's really incumbent on white people in the community to understand where their neighbors, where their new co workers are coming from without necessarily asking them directly. And I think that you can ask, but, you know, a lot of people then as I've been discussing this book with my family and friends, they're reflecting, well, what should I say? Like, how am I going to do it? And people have told me, you know, like, I can tell if someone is approaching me with openness and curiosity, like, they really want to know where I'm from or if it's coming from a place of, like, I think you're not from here. I got to find out a little bit more about you because I'm like, slightly suspicious. And so it's really like working on where you're coming from with some of those questions. And you can still ask them, but make sure that you're at a place of trust, that you have rapport with that person. And you're not like, asking someone who comes into your shop randomly like, oh, where are you from? Yeah, and I think just really, you know, Eduardo Bonilla Silva talks about this, that the only way we're going to actually make change is if we have a social movement. So find the thing that is the cause that you can support and join it. Go to the meeting, stand on the street corner. It doesn't have to be a high stakes kind of protest that you're doing, but it could be just like, this is what I'm going to do today to kind of make a difference. And I really believe that if we have this kind of multiple angles approach, whether it's the civic leaders, the cultural leaders, or individuals, that we can change the narrative of who we are so that we can be more inclusive, especially in these rural areas that are losing population and need to make a change.
- [49:58]
B
Yeah. Well, thank you. Obviously, combating racism is going to be an enormous challenge, and I hope your book is on the reading lists of people who choose to self educate and of the social movements that rise up and put in some of this work. So you've been very generous with your time. But before we finish, and I recognize this is a bit of a mean question because you just finished a book and then the last question is, well, what next? Right. What do you, what do you. What are you working on now, if any. Anything.
- [50:32]
C
Yeah, thanks for that, actually. I mean, as you know, the book was done a year ago. The production process takes a long time. So I have had some time to think about and get started on what's next. And my next project is in the exurbs. So this is the. The outer ring suburbs is the. Is the fastest growing type of community in the United States. And so I'm in a position here in rural New Hampshire where I'm actually just two hours from Boston. So there are a lot of these exurban communities that, you know, people commute an hour, an hour and a half into the city to work, but they're choosing to live in these more rural destinations. So there's a lot of towns in southern New Hampshire that are characterized as exermen. And so I've actually started a project of surveys and interviews in multiple towns. And I'm really interested in. In the experiences of the people that are moving to the exurbs. So, like, why, why the exurbs? Is it that you're fleeing the suburbs, which are diversifying? Is this the new, you know, white flight that we're seeing now in the 2000s, or is it something about the exurbs themselves? And a lot of people talk about, you know, like, I like the privacy, I like the peace. And some theorize that these are kind of code words for whiteness, you know, for elite locations. Right. So, like, I'm leaving the, as I mentioned with my participants before, you know, they're leaving the chaos of the city. But I also think that there's something to these more elite people that are moving to and are able to move to exurban areas, that it's really about leaving something undesirable behind and being able to choose kind of this new privacy, new gated community. So there are effects on the suburban areas that they're leaving behind, but there are also effects on the rural areas that they're moving to. And this is the rural gentrification that I talked about before. I'm interested in what do the old timers think about what's happening in their communities as these communities are more and more popular? I think that this is the kind of social tensions that we're gonna have to understand. And not only social tensions, but like, what does this mean for socioeconomic and racial inequality in these places?
- [53:09]
B
Wow. Awesome. Thank you. So when that book is out, you're gonna come back on the show and we'll do another interview. So thank you for joining me, Emily. Awesome book. Congratulations, and good luck promoting it with your new book project.
- [53:22]
C
Thank you so much, Richard.