The Founders of This New Development Say You Must Be White to Live There

By Debra Kamin, The New York Times

Housing rights experts say a community restricted to white residents is illegal, but the creators believe they could win a potential challenge in court in the current political climate.

In the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, nearly an hour from the closest city, a small group of homesteaders is building an exclusive community from scratch
Applicants to the community are screened with an in-person interview, a criminal-background check, a questionnaire about ancestral heritage and sometimes even photographs of their relatives.

The community’s two architects — a classically trained French horn player who has livestreamed his own sex videos, and a former jazz pianist arrested but not charged for attempted murder in Ecuador — say they must personally confirm that applicants are white before they can be welcomed in.

“Seeing someone who doesn’t present as white might lead us to, among other things, not admit that person,” said one founder, Eric Orwoll, who moonlights as a Platonic scholar on YouTube but is now focused on developing 160 acres in Ravenden, Ark., into a community strictly for white, heterosexual people called Return to the Land.

The far right is surging in the United States, driven in part by white nationalists exploiting economic anxieties and a populace increasingly frustrated with the political status quo. Now, as the Trump administration rolls back diversity, equity and inclusion policies, cracks down on immigration and offers pardons to white supremacists, some see an opening. In creating their community, the founders of Return to the Land are testing anti-discrimination housing laws that have been in place for 57 years.

[…]

Tim Griffin, the Arkansas attorney general, opened an investigation into potential legal violations by Return to the Land after reports on the community were published earlier in the summer in The Forward and on Sky News. 

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