Short answers, pulled from the story.
White flight refers to the large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnically diverse to more homogenous suburban or exurban regions. The term became widely popular in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, though earlier versions such as "white exodus" appear in print as far back as an 1870 issue of The Nation.
In 1969, Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling published "Models of Segregation", demonstrating through a checkerboard model and mathematical analysis that even when every individual prefers a mixed-race neighborhood, nearly complete segregation emerges from the accumulation of individual decisions. His complementary tipping model showed that departures accelerate in a domino effect once the most segregation-sensitive residents cross their personal tolerance threshold.
Federally guaranteed mortgages through the Veterans Administration, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Home Owners Loan Corporation were available only to white buyers of new suburban homes, while redlining blocked black buyers from the same opportunities. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 further enabled suburban expansion, and in some Southern cities local governments deliberately routed highways through majority-black neighborhoods, destroying communities and dispersing residents.
White Rhodesians peaked at 278,000 in 1975 and began departing rapidly as the Bush War intensified. Between 1980 and 1982 alone, 53,000 whites emigrated following the establishment of the Republic of Zimbabwe. Between 1982 and 2000, Zimbabwe registered a net loss of 100,000 whites, averaging 5,000 departures per year, with a second wave following President Robert Mugabe's land reform programme after 2000.
Following the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, many white families removed their children from public schools. In Baltimore, Clifton Park Junior High went from 2,023 white students and 34 black students in 1957 to just twelve white students and 2,037 black students ten years later. By 2004, Pasadena had 63 private schools educating roughly 33 percent of all schoolchildren, while white students had fallen to only 16 percent of the public school population.
In Sweden, researcher Emma Neuman at Linnaeus University found that the phenomenon begins when the share of non-European immigrants in a neighborhood reaches 3-4 percent, with high earners and the highly educated moving out first. In Denmark, a study of school choice in Copenhagen found that an immigrant proportion below 35 percent in local schools did not affect Danish parents' decisions, but above that level parents were far more likely to choose other schools.