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.

I hope we have American-topias.

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.

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.

If I were an immigrant Latino not born in the US, I could not have written Searching for Whitopia: An Improbably Journey to the Heart of America book. And that is because many of the Whitopians would not have been comfortable talking about their views on immigration, talking about their views on taxes. And they wouldn't have spilled to me the new script on race and poverty as they did.

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

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.