LEBANON — In the introduction to her recent book, “Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England,” Emily Walton relates the story of Saanvi (not her real name), one of the Upper Valley residents of color whom Walton interviewed during her research.
A family medicine physician in Vermont, Saanvi loves aspects of life in a rural corner of the world far from India, where she’s originally from. Her child goes to a good public school, life is orderly and she has meaningful, gainful work in a beautiful place.
But at the same time, even after seven years here, she doesn’t feel at home. In some ways quite the opposite. She’s had frustrated patients shout at her to “Go back to your country!” and in general she feels as if there’s a well-constructed barrier between her and her adopted homeland.
“Saanvi appeared disappointed, frustrated, and worn down by these repeated exclusions, which she described as evidence that other people in her community didn’t see her as valuable in the same ways she saw herself,” Walton writes. “Still, she remained because of a lukewarm sense of hope for a better future. ‘Maybe it will change. I don’t know. We feel like we are living in limbo.’ “
The Upper Valley acts as if it doesn’t have any problems with race. It’s common to hear white people say that they’re colorblind, that they don’t see race.
But there are still overt acts of racism here, and Walton’s book makes plain that there’s something more pernicious going on. The way this area carries itself makes it unwelcoming to people of color. The flinty independence for which rural New England is known can be both a set of virtues and a barrier.
“I see the positives of the way that people leave space here,” Walton said in an interview. But “when people are integrating, it isn’t set up for that. … It creates the conditions that make it hard” for new residents of color to feel at home.
The polarized background of American politics has made this subject hard to discuss, but the stakes are higher now than they were even a decade ago. Most Upper Valley towns have lost white population as longtime residents pass or move away, and much of the population growth comes from people of color.
It’s this last detail of population change that Walton’s book illuminates most starkly. A table in “Homesick” shows that while most Upper Valley towns have lost white residents, most have seen double-digit gains in the percentage growth of residents of color. In many towns, the rising number of newcomers of color isn’t enough to offset the overall decline in population.
The core question of “Homesick,” which came out in November, is what can the Upper Valley do to make itself more welcoming to people of color, and what lessons could then spread to other rural, largely white American places?
The source of the answer is pretty clear, too: This is a job for the dominant culture, the overwhelmingly white Upper Valley, to take up.
Questions of belonging
Walton, an associate professor of sociology at Dartmouth College, grew up in what she called “urban Montana,” the city of Helena, population 35,000. She majored in biology and studied whales, but realized it wasn’t what she was meant to do. She joined the Peace Corps and served in Mozambique, in East Africa.
She had never taken a sociology course until she went to graduate school for it. She had been active in social justice causes, including working at a shelter for women in Portland, Ore., while her husband was in school.
“Sociology is kind of a natural fit,” she said. A tenure-track professor at age 50, she tells students the story of her long journey to her chosen field. “I just kind of liked the idea of studying all the time, thinking, reading books, so it became sociology,” she said.
In particular, she studies “how people interact in communities across racial differences and how that affects health outcomes,” she said.
She and her husband, Joel Dizon, a physician’s assistant, came to the Upper Valley in 2012. The first sentence of “Homesick” is “I came for the job.” They live in Lebanon with the younger of their two children.
Initially, she studied race in the Boston area, but wanted a project closer to home. Dizon and their two children identify as Filipino American, and their experiences as people of color were part of what led Walton to the research that became “Homesick,” her first book.
Though they “have found our life here generally quite welcoming and satisfying, my family members have also faced numerous instances that have made them question whether they actually belonged in the community we had looked forward to making our home,” Walton writes in the opening pages.
Here, in the progressive confines of the Upper Valley’s core towns, someone laughingly joked at how someone had referred to Dizon as a “Chinaman.” That’s just one encounter with the dominant culture’s puzzlement over how to talk to and about people who aren’t white.
Misrecognition
The research for “Homesick,” conducted from 2018 to 2024, consists of 58 in-depth interviews with people of color from around the Upper Valley, and a survey of white residents of Claremont, Hanover and Hartford, which brought in 147 responses. She chose those communities for the survey for their size and varied demographics, she wrote. The survey asked white people whether they had observed the growing population of people of color, whether the changes had an influence and whether they felt newcomers should adapt to local customs or feel free to practice their own.
What Walton discovered was a pervasive feeling that the broader Upper Valley holds new residents of color at arm’s length. New England, famous for a reserve that borders on coldness, isn’t well suited to welcoming new people, particularly people of color, and uses its brusqueness as a bit of a shield.
“I feel like there is a New England sensibility to give boundaries, to give people space,” a middle-aged Black woman who’d lived in her town for 11 years when Walton interviewed her said. “I think this is actually a courtesy in some ways, but it could feel isolating to somebody who doesn’t already have a community built in.”
How this manifests itself is as a kind of willful ignorance about race. Even self-described progressives deny that racism exists or is a problem. As one interviewee put it, “With white people, it’s always defensive.”
“Overall,” Walton writes, “the picture painted by the survey and interview responses is one of a climate in which a lack of understanding about racial change and the reality and impact of racism is not merely practiced by a few isolated individuals but a cultural norm that saturates the Upper Valley community.”
What this leads to is a key term in the book: Misrecognition, which Walton defines as “a failure or unwillingness to see people of color as legitimate, welcome, and valuable members of the community, as ‘one of us.’ “
How this manifests itself runs the gamut from overt racism to the maintenance of social distance to the provisional acceptance of people of color, Walton writes. Black, Asian and Latino residents are still subjected to racial slurs here, but also are left to wonder why they are sometimes treated poorly in commercial settings such as restaurants or car dealerships.
The consequences of misrecognition can be profound, taking a toll on the emotional and physical well-being of people on the receiving end of it. It creates feelings of insecurity, anxiety and exhaustion, Walton writes.
This is the homesickness of the book’s title. It’s not a longing for someplace else, but “for a place in which one can feel safe, wanted, and accepted for who one truly is,” Walton writes.
There is relatively little research into the health outcomes of people of color in rural areas, in part because the sample sizes are so small, Alice Ely, a public health researcher and executive director of the Public Health Council of the Upper Valley.
More broadly, though, “the research is pretty clear that being a person of color in America creates chronic stress,” Ely said. The buildup of stress hormones leads to a range of physical illnesses. “I have no reason to believe that this is not true for people in the Upper Valley,” Ely said.
Misrecognition can also influence how people of color receive health care services, Ely said. “Once you have one bad experience or uncomfortable experience with a health care provider, folks won’t go back to that same place,” she said.
The added pain of these experiences comes from living in a place that is otherwise cozy and that professes to be progressive on matters of race. Most of the people Walton interviewed came to the Upper Valley to take professional jobs, and many were recruited. It’s doubly odd to feel sought-after for one’s professional skills, yet unwelcome for one’s skin color.
The current political atmosphere, in which overt racism has become more acceptable in a segment of the population, doesn’t help, interviewees told Walton.
Necessary discussions
Upper Valley residents of color hold some hope that “Homesick” will foster a productive conversation about racial difference in the Upper Valley.
“I think it is generally a sign of progress,” Angela Zhang, a founder and co-chair of Upper Valley Equity and Anti-Racism, said in an phone interview. She’s read “Homesick” and said she thinks it could help white Upper Valley residents understand the ways in which they could be more welcoming.
The prevailing attitude is “we don’t have that here,” Zhang, who has lived in the Upper Valley since 2008, said. “We’re too enlightened or educated.”
Zhang grew up in southern Virginia and there was an active Ku Klux Klan chapter nearby. Racism here is less visible, more subtle, but still present, she said.
“I think there is a long-term discussion that we need to have,” Zhang said.
Whether that conversation can break through the defensiveness that often thwarts conversations about race is unclear.
One of Walton’s interviewees, a Korean American woman, pointed out that “‘The culture has norms about respectful equals not creating conflict, which means that you’ll never have a substantive conversation about race. Ever.'”
“I think that’s a particularly American phenomenon,” Walton said. “We have this binary; you’re either a good person or a bad person, a racist or not a racist.”
White people are taught to be colorblind because it allows them to proceed as if they have no power. “If we don’t understand our own power, then we’re not responsible for it,” Walton said.
The still relatively small numbers of people of color in the area make it easy to declare that racism isn’t a big problem, Zhang noted.
With a housing crisis that’s making it hard for lower-income residents to maintain a foothold in the area, it would help to have a broad conversation about what would make everyone who’s in a fragile state feel better accommodated, Zhang said.
“We need to figure out affordability for everybody,” she said.
Fostering change
What seems clear to people of color who have encountered “Homesick” is that the book isn’t meant for them, and that it describes only one aspect of racial difference in the Upper Valley, that of the newcomer who has memories of life someplace with greater diversity.
“Because I grew up here, it seems like a lot of these stories are people who used to exist in a place where there’s a substantial population of people who look like them,” said Cori Hirai, who grew up in West Lebanon. Her father is Japanese and her mother is white.
She went away to Ohio for college, then lived in Chicago before moving back to the Upper Valley in 2016. It wasn’t until later in life that she learned how she had tried to compensate in her youth for the feeling that she was on the outside looking in. The homesickness Walton describes doesn’t always lean on memory of other places, but often it does.
Bise Wood Saint Eugene, a member of Lebanon’s DEI Commission and, like Zhang, a social worker, took issue with the notion of homesickness. African Americans have always struggled for a sense of home ground in this country, he said. And refugees, asylum seekers and other immigrants often don’t have a home to go back to, he said.
Though he thinks Walton’s research is valuable, he wishes she had pressed further. “We risk minimizing experiences that are about survival and trauma and permanent displacement and not temporary longing for a home,” Saint Eugene, a native of Haiti who has been in the Upper Valley since 2014, said in a phone interview.
Such residents are experiencing loss without the possibility of return and are “surviving in systems that demand their labor without appreciating their humanity,” he said.
“Homesick,” ultimately is for the people who have created those systems, the dominant white culture, Saint Eugene said.
“I think people should be willing to try the hard things and confront what is not right,” he said. “I think the lack of courage to do that consistently is putting people at greater risk, those who need protection.”
That’s the kind of change that Walton hopes to foster. In addition to writing “Homesick,” she started “Humans of the Upper Valley,” a website hosted by Dartmouth that shows the area’s growing diversity.
The final chapter of “Homesick” contains some prescriptions that are less about public policy and more about public manners. Civic leaders can help by welcoming diversity and cultural leaders can help by telling stories that feature a wide range of people. And everyday people can express solidarity with their neighbors of color.
It boils down to a simple value: “I think the Upper Valley is great, and a lot of people do. We should share that,” Walton said.
Hirai, who has lived in the area for most of her 40 years, said she feels optimistic about the influence “Homesick” could have.
“If enough people in the right positions take this to heart and put effort into correcting some of these subconscious behaviors, then I do think it could make a difference.”
But it’s clear to her who needs to do that work: “Racism is a thing in the Upper Valley,” she said. “It affects people and it’s up to white people to get their shit together and make it less of a burden.”