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Why Identitarians Erase “Black Flight”, or “White Flight” Wasn’t Just White
“The flight of middle-class blacks from ghettos has left a disastrously isolated underclass — one formed less by welfare or a lack of jobs than by its rural-South heritage” —Nicholas Lemann, “The Origins of the Underclass”, the Atlantic, June 1986
“Between 1960- 2000, the number of African Americans living in suburbs grew by approximately 9 million, representing a migration as large as the exodus of African Americans from the rural South in the mid-twentieth century.” —Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century
In the mythical history of race reductionists, white people fled the cities toward the end of the civil rights era to escape black people instead of seeking better homes and schools in the suburbs. In reality, middle-class people of all hues moved to suburbs that had become more accessible thanks to the interstate system. In some places, the first black suburbanites were met by militant white racists, but the integrationists won. The price of their victory was the abandonment of the black poor.
In “The Origins of the Underclass”, Nicholas Lemann draws some conclusions that reveal the prejudices of the 1980s, but his data is useful if you want to understand why so many black people no longer think black…
