Everyone’s felt homesick at one time or another, but a new book gives it a particular definition and lens – the longing that migrants of color feel for a place where one feels accepted, safe and wanted, specifically in New Hampshire and Vermont’s Upper Valley.
In “Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England,” Dartmouth Associate Professor of Sociology Emily Walton writes about how the largely white and politically progressive area continues to exclude the non-white population and how that could change.
NHPR Morning Edition producer Jackie Harris spoke with Walton about her research and findings.
Transcript
This book is researching how people of color do or don't feel a sense of belonging or community in the Upper Valley, and you write in the book how your family has experienced this issue as Lebanon residents. Can you share that personal experience with us?
My family and I moved here in 2012 to take a job here at Dartmouth College, and right away we noticed that it was very culturally different from anywhere we had ever lived. I grew up in Montana, went to school in Seattle and my husband is from California. So we're very much from the western United States, and we found when we moved here that it was very reserved in a way that we hadn't experienced before. People were maybe not as friendly on the sidewalks or in the grocery store, striking up a conversation.
And we also experienced some racial, what we might call microaggressions. My daughter, who was in eighth grade at the time, had a student write in her yearbook, “Don't eat my dog.” She identifies as Filipino American, and so she saw that as a slur against Asian American people. My husband experienced a number of interactions with his patients at the orthopedics clinic where he works – people just making assumptions about who he was and where he came from and that he was not American. We felt that this culture of reserve, that I experienced as a white woman was heightened to a point where my family, as nonwhite people, didn't feel as welcome or that this place could be a home for them permanently.
You mention in the book how your husband, who is [Filipino-American], will sometimes note that he's the only person of color in a room. In the book, you also describe how the Upper Valley's racial demographics are changing. What are those changes and what's driving them, according to your research?
Like rural places across the country, the demographics of the Upper Valley are basically losing white population as people get older and their kids move out for opportunities in other places. At the same time, in the Upper Valley at least, that population has been replaced by people of color who come here for professional jobs at Dartmouth College or Dartmouth Health, the hospital, or a number of tech firms in the area.
So it's a rural place that is like other rural places in that it's losing white population and also gaining population of color, but it's different in that we have a lot of socioeconomic diversity in the Upper Valley. And there are jobs that can attract professional migrants in the way that many rural places that depend on manufacturing or agriculture aren't able to do.
The Upper Valley is considered a politically progressive area in general, but you argue in the book that white residents continue to maintain a racial hierarchy. How so?
I argue that there is a culture that sustains what I call racial domination – or what sociologists call racial domination. And this culture is a culture of reserve where people tend to mind their own business, they've got their long standing friend groups, and they're not necessarily open to new kinds of social interaction.
I also talk about the way that the culture and the Upper Valley sustains color blindness, so people don't necessarily see the racial change around them, and don't recognize that people of color may be having experiences with racism. This is particularly an issue because this area is noted to be progressive. People often don't see the ways that racism is happening all around them.
The other part of the culture in this area is the expectation of assimilation, and this is widespread across the United States. We have this idea that when people come here, they should want to be like we are, and that they should be sort of moving in the direction of assimilating to the dominant culture, rather than respecting the experiences and the traditions and the cultures of the people who move in.
And this cultural portrait that I paint of the Upper Valley as an unwelcoming place sustains these processes of what I call misrecognition, where people of color don't feel seen and valued and worthy of their place to join the community and make it their home.
Some people might find some of these points obvious that people of color [who] are moving to a region that is historically white, might not feel welcomed or accepted. How would you respond to that?
I think that's definitely true. It is an obvious point, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do something about it. I think that we have this idea that we're diversifying and therefore we will all become much more accepting of people over time that it's getting better over time. And the last 60 years of data since the Civil Rights Movement show that just desegregating doesn't necessarily mean that we're integrating.
Martin Luther King Jr. calls desegregation when elbows are together, but hearts are apart. And he distinguishes that from integration as being this transgressive experience where people really see each other as equals and come to appreciate others as individuals and really see them.
And so I think that by understanding the processes through which this is happening, we might be able to actively take steps toward this more transgressive form of integration rather than just kind of living next to each other, but not necessarily having our hearts together.
