The New York Times recently ran a podcast on Return to the Land, a membership club for straight, white people. It operates like a Manhattan co-op, with members buying shares that entitle them to a piece of real estate, the main difference being that, instead of being on a tiny island, home to some of the most expensive apartments in the world, this club is located on 160 acres of unused land in a remote part of Arkansas, where the closest grocery store is 30 minutes away.
The reporters covering the story, Rachel Abrams and Debra Kamin, couldn’t have been more shocked if they’d uncovered a lynching. They interviewed a woman who is suing RTL for discrimination after her application for membership was rejected.
Not that it matters to the legality of the community, but the woman, Michelle Walker, seems to be pulling our leg. The fact that Abrams and Kamin pretend to believe her makes me question their perceptiveness as reporters.
Walker is a Jewish woman married to a black man, born and bred in Missouri, whose entire real estate business is in St. Louis; the name of her brokerage is STL Buy & Sell, REALTORS. But she claims she had her heart set on buying into an Arkansas community that both she and the reporters describe as a bunch of “white supremacists.”
The Times ladies insist that Walker looked at joining RTL only in terms of hard dollars and cents, and didn’t mind at all that they are white supremacists.
As Walker explained, “A good investment is a good investment.” Noting that it’s “the perfect five hours as a great little weekend getaway,” her dream was to “maybe build an A-frame on it, do Airbnb with it.” She was excited at the prospect of “other white supremacists that want to vacation there, and on my land.” Vacation with white supremacists!
I haven’t checked RTL’s charter, but I’m almost certain it does not allow Airbnbs. (Nor do New York City co-ops.)
Maybe I’m completely off-base, but I think Walker’s interest in RTL is less about acquiring an investment property and more about annoying a group of white, straight Christians.
Unlike Walker, the reporters don’t hide how stricken they are by such a community. They said the discrimination was “blatant.” (Whereas Manhattan co-op boards are subtle.) They said the Arkansas club was a “blueprint for modern-day segregation.” Hardly. Colleges wrote the blueprint for modern-day segregation eons ago with “affinity dorms” for black, immigrant, Muslim, Jewish, or gay students—pretty much any affinity except white.
Given her abhorrence of segregation, it’s odd that Kamin lives in Tel Aviv, a city that enthusiastically practices both de jure and de facto segregation and is wildly undiverse. In fact, there is no city in America as white as Tel Aviv is Jewish—not Dubuque, Iowa; Burlington, Vermont; or Livonia, Michigan (once called “the whitest city in America”).
CORRECTION: The places where people like Times reporters summer are as white as Tel Aviv is Jewish. Well-heeled New Yorkers would have to drive pretty far from their homes in East and South Hampton, Rhinebeck, and Chatham, New York, to find Our Greatest Strength. (This might be another topic for Abrams and Kamin to investigate someday.)
Kamin mocks the founders of RTL for saying they want to “quote unquote, ‘preserve their culture.’” But aren’t the Hamptons’ (and Tel Aviv’s) impressive lack of diversity also an attempt to, as Kamin puts it, “quote unquote, ‘preserve their culture’”?
While we’re at it, do Times reporters send their kids to public schools so multicultural that they have to pass through magnetometers to enter? Are their local Whole Foods and Zabar’s patronized by a multitude of classes and ethnicities?
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There’s always been a direct conflict between freedom of association and anti-discrimination laws. But the current practice is to prohibit discrimination against everyone except white people.
Yet and still, if a private community for straight, white Christian homesteaders in the backwoods of Arkansas that’s bothering no one is keeping liberals up at night, they have become the walking embodiment of H. L. Mencken’s joke about Puritans: They live with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be residing in an all-white community. (Other than them.)
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