a "white sanctuary" in Arkansas rejects queer people and black people. A chilling experiment that shows where fear of difference leads
From time to time in the United States, a project comes along that seems so absurd that you want to think it's a fake. But in Arkansas, it's not fiction. In the woods there, a private town is actually springing up, where no one who does not fit the well-defined template of a "white American" is allowed to enter. No LGBT people, no transgender people, no black people, no anyone who would disrupt their idea of a world that doesn't change.
And it is this community, calling itself "Return to the Land," that Seznam Zprav editor Eduard Freisler has written about. His text draws the reader into a reality that is neither distant nor bizarre - it's just dangerously honest. Freisler describes how he set out to find these modern-day "settlers," how he questioned the journey of locals who knew about the community but had never spoken to it, and how he reached people who say without hesitation that only whites can live here. And that queer people or people of color are not welcome.
A subtle ordinariness that chills
The enclave in Arkansas is not an extremist camp. No one marches there with torches, no one holds ritual bonfires. Instead, men in overalls live there, their children chase chickens around the backyard, and on the surface it is a community that could exist anywhere in rural America.
But then come the sentences that take one out of one's composure: LGBT people don't live here because they are "morally corrupt." Black people aren't here because they supposedly "don't have a work ethic." No one who doesn't fit the narrow norm is allowed in.
The ease with which the locals say this is even more threatening than the words themselves. For in Arkansas, it is not just a community defined by skin color and identity that is emerging. What is emerging is a world in which discrimination is becoming a very normal part of life.
Fear as the fundamental architect
Watching their arguments, one quickly realizes that the entire community is not built on a love of nature, but on a deep anxiety. The town's founder repeats that America is changing, that multicultural society is failing, and that the only way is to live among "our own."
But that fear is not caused by migration, LGBT people, or the "urbanization of values." It is caused by the fact that the world is no longer divided into easy-to-read categories. That identity is plural and that the future always brings diversity.
The community is thus trying to build a fortress against reality. They believe that if they draw a fence around themselves, inside they will be left with a world that stopped evolving sometime in 1950. And that their children will be "safe" because they won't see otherness around them. But that's not how protection works. Isolation is not an automatic guarantee of safety.
Modern segregation in the civilian version
The biggest problem with the Arkansas community is neither its size nor its location. It is its legitimizing potential. For once we admit that there are places "just for certain people," we legitimize the idea that society can be trimmed to suit the wishes of those who fear a reality other than their own.
And this idea is contagious. It comes quietly, under the guise of "freedom of association." Today, they ban LGBT people and black people from their communities. Tomorrow they could easily ban anyone - people from the cities, people with different views, people who don't work manually, or even people who listen to different music. The moment we relate rights to skin color or gender identity, we begin to dismantle the very construction of equality.
A sanatorium instead of a community
The "Return to the Land" project presents itself as a return to traditional America. But instead of a return, it creates an illusion - a world where people don't have to encounter anyone different because reality has been carefully filtered.
This is not a return to values, but to illusion. And illusions cannot create communities. Community arises from contact, from dialogue, from that slight friction between different experiences that makes us think and grow.
But the enclave in Arkansas does not want to grow. It wants to stagnate. It wants to be a museum of certainty at a time when certainty - the real certainty - lies in openness.
Why we need to care about this in Europe
It may seem like an American oddity. That here in this country we would not be concerned with such things. But we are already hearing the same arguments about 'protecting children', 'changing too quickly' and 'having to live among our own' in Europe, in the Czech Republic, in political and social debates.
Isolation is always presented as a defence. And discrimination always starts as "free choice". That is why it is important not to let these ideas take root.
A city without a rainbow is a city without a future
A city that builds its identity on who is not allowed there is not a city. It is an empty construct that exists only because of the fear of its founders. And fear has never been a good architect.
Freisler's report reminded us of a reality that may seem distant. But its principles are dangerously familiar. And that is why we must speak out: a society that fears diversity is not the society of the future.
The future belongs to places where no one has to stand at the fence and ask who is allowed to live next to it.
