Rich Benjamin spent two years traveling through white America and discovered a country filled with kind and endearing white individuals. In his book "Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America," published by Hyperion in October, Benjamin reveals that he also found something else: a legacy of racial segregation and division resulting from habits, policies, and institutions that don't explicitly discriminate. In the following contribution, Benjamin, a senior fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan think tank, describes the nature of structural racism.

GUEST BLOGGER: Rich Benjamin

When those pop-up lists beckon you from your Web browser (America's 25 Best Places to Live!), or those snappy guidebooks flirt with you from the bookstore shelves (Retire in Style: 10 Hotspots), ever notice how white they are?

I know a little about such places. Between 2007 and 2009, I embarked on a 26,909-mile journey through the heart of white America -- some of the fastest-growing and whitest locales in our nation. I call these communities Whitopia (pronounced Why-Toh-pia).

A fascinating conundrum dogs Whitopia.

Day-to-day interaction in some of the whitest parts of America, I discovered, is quite pleasant. The majority of whites in predominantly white communities across our heartland are endearing and kind. Direct interpersonal racism is no longer acceptable.

Still, against this backdrop of improved attitudes and interpersonal interaction among the races, residential segregation is on the upswing.

Whites may not move to a place simply because it teems with other white people. Rather, a place's whiteness implies other desirable traits: comfort, cleanliness, perceived safety, and neighborliness. These seemingly race-neutral qualities are subconsciously inseparable from race and class in many whites' minds. Race is often used as a proxy for those neighborhood traits. And, if a neighborhood has those traits, many whites presume -- without giving it a thought -- that the neighborhood will be majority white.

Despite Obama's historic election, America remains a highly segregated society in which whites, Latinos, and blacks inhabit different neighborhoods and attend different schools of vastly different quality

Through most of the 20th century, racial discrimination was deliberate and intentional. Today, racial segregation and division often result from habits, policies, and institutions that are not explicitly designed to discriminate. Contrary to popular belief, discrimination or segregation do not require animus. They thrive even in the absence of any person's prejudice or ill will.

It's common to have racism without racists.

Interpersonal racism exists between people. Structural racism exists across institutions, public policy, and other important domains (education, the judiciary, real estate, etc.). The former has sharply declined. The latter has not.

Structural racism is baked into our national psyche and behavior. Nationwide, municipal governments enact suburban land-use and zoning policies to promote larger lot development, to sustain private property values, to restrict suburban rental housing, all of which limit the influx of black and Latino households.

On my long journey throughout Whitopia, examples of structural racism surfaced over and over, including how towns and neighborhoods are zoned. How chambers of commerce favor or discourage certain newcomers and businesses. How communities block public transportation from reaching their doorstep. And how political and business establishments resolve social conflict -- often in favor of powerful individuals and business interests.

Public investment over the next decade -- including the 2009 $787 billion economic stimulus package -- must not further racial inequality and segregation the way that Eisenhower's post-war housing policies and highway programs spawned segregated suburbs for decades. Eisenhower was not terribly concerned about the long-term racial impact of his domestic agenda. Obama must avoid that fate: Taxpayers should not again subsidize federal projects that perpetuate segregation and inequity.

Awash in its racial conundrum, America has delightful people who are perfectly comfortable with widening segregation and yawning socioeconomic inequality.

I want America to be a post-racial union. Truly. But we still have massive gaps in public schooling, college access, earnings, savings, homeownership -- all the benchmarks of upward mobility -- which shake out along racial lines.

As America rebuilds its economy and infrastructure -- including neighborhoods, roads, bridges, broadband access -- if now is not the time to take a fresh look at race and opportunity, then when?

This is the moment when finally we need to get it right.

A security guard hides his face from a photographer outside the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Bushehr, Iran, last February. (Sajad Safari/Bloomberg News)

In his book "Dying for Heaven: Holy Pleasure and Suicide Bombers -- Why the Best Qualities of Religion Are Also Its Most Dangerous" author Ariel Glucklich argues against the misconception that religious terrorists fight their enemies out of hatred. Rather, it is the positive aspects of religion that inspire the most heinous actions, he says. We asked Glucklich, a professor at Georgetown University and member of the steering committee of the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, to apply his theory to Iran.

GUEST BLOGGER: Ariel Glucklich

It is clear that Iran is headed in the direction of arming itself with nuclear weapons. It will soon join Pakistan as the second Muslim country in the exclusive nuclear-arms club. The Israeli and American governments (Saudis, too) have taken this threat very seriously long before Ahmedinejad began his anti-Semitic rants in 2005.

Is Iran more dangerous than Pakistan (where the military controls the nuclear arsenal) or the Soviets during the cold war? After Nagasaki, no one has launched a nuclear attack, why should the Iranians?

Once Iran is fully armed, Will religion become an unpredictable factor? Is there any reason to believe that Iran will no longer act as a rational player, properly weighing costs and benefits to know when to back down from escalating a local flare-up into a major nuclear standoff -- or worse?

Well, has religion ever driven anyone to irrational, counter-productive and self-destructive behavior?

If that last question sends a chill through your spine, then you recognize that we need to understand precisely and reliably how religion in general and Shi'ite Islam specifically can lead to counter-productive miscalculations by a nuclear-armed nation. This is uncharted terrain; the standard answers do not apply.

First, we need to do away with the misconceptions that Islam favors jihadist aggression, that Muslims hate Jews so intensely they are willing to die killing them, that the virgins of paradise make suicide an attractive option and that life until the messianic Imam arrives is not worth living.

Also useless are the theories of recent writers such as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens who argue that religion is intrinsically irrational and destructive; if that were true, religion would not have survived or promoted cultural evolution over the last 20,000 years, nor would it continue to prosper today.

I claim that Iran is dangerous not because Shi'ite Islam, or for that matter religion in general, is hate-filled or irrational (that is, that it favors self-destruction). On the contrary, a nuclear Iran can be more frightening because religion is based on love, honor, altruism and, not least, self-sacrifice.

The most powerful religious rituals and symbols in Iran revolve around the themes of Husayn's martyrdom in Karbala in 680 CE, and that tragic event plays out to feelings of sadness, contrition and penance. The Ashoura is not a festival of rage and revenge but love, devotion and regret.

The Shi'ites, as a community, bond together through the power of martyrological symbols, not unlike the Christians who place the crucifixion and resurrection at the heart of the Christian community.

For the Shi'ites, martyrdom is not an abstract and ancient institution. It is a living force that defines what it means to be a community, to have legitimate authority and to submit your personal interests to something greater than yourself.

This symbol holds for the nation as a whole but it also trickles down to local bureaucracies, educational institutions, police and military units. It looks a bit like this: Martyrdom is devotion (that is, love) and obedience to authority is how the individual can play his or her role in a nation ruled by the flag of martyrdom.

To put this in stark terms, the lesson of Karbala, where Husayn died, is that defense of the righteous community, of those who follow the true path of Islam, may require acts that emulate Husayn's decision to die when he was cornered. This is not only just; it is also beautiful and satisfying religious theater.

Personally I do not think the Iranian government will threaten to use its atomic weapons, and I believe that it is as susceptible to deterrence as the Soviets were during the cold war. That's because the community perceives its group interest and seeks pleasure and happiness as social values. Knowing that your enemy wants to promote his interests and wants to be happy is highly reassuring in a nuclear world.

In "Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel," Kristiaan Versluys explores fictional portrayals of 9/11. Among the works he probes are Don DeLillo's "Falling Man," Art Spiegelman's "In the Shadow of No Towers," Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Frederic Beigbeder's "Windows on the World," and John Updike's "Terrorist." We asked Versluys, a professor of American literature and culture at Ghent University in Belgium, how he -- as a foreign academic -- approached the analysis of an American tragedy.

GUEST BLOGGER: Kristiaan Versluys

How do authors manage to say the unsayable? How can this be done without reductionism, without cheapening the occasion through sentimentalism or easy patriotic bluster? Most of all, who is entitled to talk about such traumatic events and who can talk authentically without exploiting the grief of the victims or the victims' relatives?

In writing about these questions, I found myself in a peculiar position. As a Belgian academic, I was at least twice removed from the events at Ground Zero. The physical distance (more than three thousand miles as the crow flies) is at the same time a mental one.

I visited the city briefly three weeks after September 11, when the ruins of the towers were still smoldering. The streets were bustling as usual, but people were less brisk. There was a certain tentativeness to their movements, a newly discovered vulnerability made manifest. I was just long enough in the city to realize that something had happened to the mind of New Yorkers that no outsider could feel in exactly the same way.

Many years later (in 2008) I taught a summer seminar on the literature of 9/11 to Columbia undergraduates. I have taught regularly at Columbia, mostly courses about the literature of New York. I have always been amazed at the fact that students accept without questioning that one comes all the way from Belgium to instruct them about their own literature, their own country, their own city. Such open-mindedness and intellectual curiosity are the unique strengths of America - without parallel in Europe.

But not this time. Not when touching upon 9/11. I felt the students claimed ownership over the events and while in the past my authority as a specialist in American literature had never been challenged, this time around I had to prove myself each inch of the way. It would be dishonest to suggest that the students were hostile or unwelcoming. But implicitly they were questioning my right to talk about an event that belonged to them in a way it did not belong to me. I have never taught a more difficult course. I have never profited more from a course taught at Columbia either.

In a second, even more fundamental way, 9/11 presents a challenge for the academic observer (European or otherwise). The feelings of New Yorkers are beyond the grasp of the outsider -- what to say about the suffering of the victims and their families. I have written a book in which I avoid technical jargon as much as possible. The study is respectful (at least I hope so) of the literature it deals with. I assume the position which I deem appropriate for a literary critic: that of a servant to the text, whose task it is above all to demonstrate the relevance of the material dealt with.

My method is to read in the grain rather than against it. The author knows best and I am trying to get the message and to communicate it. If not an empathic reader than at least I try to be a sympathetic one, the author's sidekick, his loyal interpreter. I have been doing this for some thirty-five years. I know how to handle this - more or less.

But to be faithful to unsayable grief, that is another matter. If I hold my authors to one standard, it is the following: Are their novels marked by what Theodor Adorno called "mimetic approximation?" That is to say, Do they deal with grief tenderly yet unflinchingly?

There is no way one can wrap one's mind around what happened on that Tuesday morning, what it means to find oneself trapped in a burning building, to feel a desperation so strong one has no choice but to jump to a certain death.

Some authors have argued that in the face of such unspeakable grief, silence is the only dignified response. I admire those who dared to break the silence and managed to come as close as possible to an authentic (recognizably worthy) representation of the events.

But how do I fare when held to the same standard? Is academic parlance at all (no matter how purged from the worst excesses of jargon-mongering and obfuscation) capable of saying something meaningful about pain? Necessarily - given the nature of the task I imposed upon myself - I deal with 9/11 as a semiotic event - something that takes place in language, a form of discourse.

Yet during the four years I worked on the book, I kept telling myself: the towers really did come down; people really died; to this very day, husbands and wives, parents and children have to live with an irreparable loss. I can only hope that, in spite of physical, mental and intellectual distance, somehow my study resonates with this attempt to see trauma in its full human dimensions.

As Congress struggles to bring about health care reform, those suffering from mental illness can only hope some improvement comes to the nation's mental health services. Author Timothy A. Kelly has a prescription for reform in his book "Healing the Broken Mind: Transforming America's Failed Mental Health System" published in August by New York University Press. Kelly, former commissioner of Virginia's Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation, and Substance Abuse Services, is director of the DePree Public Policy Institute and associate professor of psychology at the Fuller Graduate School of Psychology in Pasadena, Calif.

GUEST BLOGGER: Timothy A. Kelly.

"For too many Americans with mental illness, the mental health services they need remain fragmented, disconnected and often inadequate, frustrating the opportunity for recovery.... [and adding] to the burden of mental illnesses for individuals, their families, and our communities." Those were the words of the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (2003), which went on to recommend "a fundamental transformation of the nation's approach to mental health care."

That transformation has not yet occurred. As a former mental health commissioner and practicing psychologist, I have seen too many heart-breaking examples of people with mental illness who long to recover, but spend a lifetime seeking effective care. There are many good mental health providers across America, but not enough. Furthermore, the system (e.g., reimbursement structures and vested interests) fights against anything that challenges the status quo.

What to do? In my book, I present a five-fold vision for reform that would create a mental health system that is home-and-community-based, innovative, outcome-oriented, and patient-focused. Such care is designed to lead to recovery for people with serious mental illness - not healing but providing the ability to lead a successful life in the home community. This means having a real home, a fulfilling job, and deep relationships. It means being able to come home.

Health care reform is caught in the political maelstrom of the moment. It is not yet clear what mental health care will look like, but two improvements are likely - increased coverage (equality, or parity, with medical care), and seamless inclusion of mental health services in medical centers (the integration of care). Unfortunately, this addresses only one of the five areas needed in order to create a recovery-oriented system of mental health care, as follows:

1. We must embrace evidence-based practices both in health care and in mental health care. This means offering only treatments that are scientifically proven to help people recover quickly. It also means embracing an outcome-oriented system of care that measures how effective we are in the lives of people who come for services. Quality of care necessarily improves when we can see what's working well and what isn't.

2. We must break the states' monopoly on public sector psychiatric services, which is the system that eventually cares for most people with serious mental illness (even those with insurance, once it runs out). We need to open the public sector mental health system to genuine competitive practices to increase choice, lower costs, and raise quality of care.

3. We must have equal coverage (parity) for people with mental illness - meaning they should get the same amount of coverage as those with medical-surgical needs. A federal parity law was passed last year. But the devil is in the details -- effective implementation is going to be a challenge.

4. We must develop a truly patient-focused (consumer-focused) system, where those who are being treated are invited to collaborate with caregivers and policymakers. In both health care and mental health care, the provider should sit down with the patient to discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of various treatment options. Since no doctor is perfect, the best care is delivered when treatment is a joint decision.

5. We must overcome the status quo's resistance to change. A lot of people are calling for mental health reform, yet the status quo prevails. The reason is that there is a system in place that spends about a hundred billion dollars a year on mental health care, and generates a good deal of vested interests. What's needed is visionary leadership, economic imperative, and public outcry -the perfect storm for lasting change to occur.

The good news is that with health care reform underway change is in the air. Now is the time, therefore, to work hard so that these five recommendations are incorporated in today's health care legislation and thus a new mental health system of care is created. The result? Our family members, friends and neighbors who struggle with mental illness will finally be able to come home.