The Upper Valley has a reputation as a stronghold of progressive ideals. So why do newcomers—particularly racial and ethnic minorities—often struggle to feel connected and wanted in their communities, years after moving here?
Dartmouth sociology professor Emily Walton spent seven years investigating this question, analyzing data, gathering stories from more than 200 residents, and steeping herself in the historical context of the region she calls home. The result is her first book, Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England, published this fall.
At the heart of Walton's research is a phenomenon she calls “misrecognition”—the inability to see another person’s full humanity, which at its extreme leaves them feeling like they don’t matter in the community. In a recent study, she and her colleagues deconstructed the “chilly” culture that people of color sometimes encounter in northern New England, revealing how seemingly progressive communities can still leave certain residents feeling invisible.
Walton isn’t just documenting the problem—she’s working to change it: in 2021, she launched Humans of the Upper Valley with Dartmouth students, offering snapshots of local residents’ stories. The project creates space where neighbors can truly see and hear one another—a counterpoint to the isolation her research documents.
In this Q&A, Walton explains what it's like to examine your own community, how misrecognition works, and why a philosophy of “live and let live” isn't enough.
You write about an “us vs. outsiders” mentality in the Upper Valley. How does that cultural history connect to the racial exclusion you studied?
The culture of the area is very strong and goes back to colonial times, when this became “our land”—white people’s land, specifically. That culture of northern New England is one of reserve, this sense that we’re hardy, we're of the land. That’s where the “flatlanders” idea comes from: You’re different from us, you’re not from here, you can’t handle this rugged place. People here still identify with that historical narrative. And it’s quite strong here because it goes back to colonization.
In general, white people don't think of themselves as having a racial identity. We just happen to be the cultural norm, and we expect other people to adjust to us—the culture of assimilation that I talk about in the book. There’s a lot of blindness with that. We’re blind to the ways we exert power or don't understand racial and ethnic differences and how that can exclude people.
That’s why “being respectful, giving people space, living and letting live” actually preserves this white normativity and white blindness to the harms we're doing. It doesn’t mean we're bad people, just that we have learning to do about how we act, what we say, and how it affects other people’s experience.
How do you explain “misrecognition”?
I borrow this term from philosophy and psychology. It’s based on the idea that our identity comes from how others see us. In sociology we call this the “looking glass self”—you see yourself through other people’s eyes, and that shapes who you think you are.
If you see yourself as someone worthy of being a member of this society, but when your image is reflected back in the mirror you realize that’s not what other people see, you feel misrecognized. This happens a lot with people of color in particular because white people don’t know how to see them—because of inexperience, perhaps, or lack of education about the way other people are, because we’ve had such isolation up here in northern New England for so many centuries.
To truly recognize someone means you see them as part of your group, part of “us.” When you misrecognize someone, you still see they’re a person, but you see them as fundamentally different—as part of “them,” not “us.” That’s what makes misrecognition so apt for describing this subtle process of exclusion.
You identify “reserve,” “colorblindness,” and “assimilation” as key cultural features of the Upper Valley that create a fertile ground for misrecognition. What don’t white people in the community understand about how this affects their neighbors?
We need to change what whiteness means so that we are no longer ignorant about the experience of racial and ethnic minorities in our midst.
This is especially urgent in rural places facing depopulation. These communities are literally dying. It’s in our best interest as white people to expand our definition of who belongs here if we want these places to survive and thrive. We’re all part of one community, and we all do better when we—particularly white people—examine ourselves more critically and openly.
I’m curious about the role of place itself. Could the geography and climate here—the way communities are separated by hills and valleys, the months of cold weather—reinforce this culture of reserve?
I think there's something to that with colder climates. We tend to keep to ourselves more because we literally have to during those winter months. You can see how that culture changes as you move from north to south.
The hills and valleys create physical barriers, too. But I think there's also a broader shift happening—maybe American, maybe worldwide—away from community as the center of social life. We have so much more surveillance and privacy now: doorbell cameras, gated communities, long driveways. All of that makes it harder to get together with other people. We've lost a lot of the common spaces we used to have.
What do you hope readers take away from Homesick?
The “live and let live” mentality in northern New England doesn’t work to welcome newcomers into our communities. We need to put active effort into integrating well. Because the reality is that we are integrating—as a nation, in cities, in neighborhoods, and now in rural areas. We can’t just let that process happen on its own. If we do, we’re going to reproduce white dominance over time, and that's not good for the new people moving into these communities.
There are things we can do to rewrite the narrative of who we are. We should be actively thinking about that as our communities change. That’s the lesson I hope people take away.