White flight
The term white flight describes a sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse to more racially homogenous suburban or exurban regions. This movement has also been applied to other migrations by whites from older, inner suburbs to rural areas, as well as from the American Northeast and Midwest to the milder climate in the South and West. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular, especially in the United States. The phrase has recently been used for large-scale post-colonial emigration of whites from Africa, driven by levels of violent crime and anti-colonial or anti-white state policies. Migration of middle-class white populations was observed during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s out of cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City and Oakland. Racial segregation of public schools had ended there long before the Supreme Court of the United States' decision Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In the 1970s, attempts to achieve effective desegregation by means of busing led to more families moving out of former areas. Some historians suggest that white flight occurred in response to population pressures from the Great Migration and waves of new immigrants from around the world. Other historians have challenged the phrase white flight as a misnomer whose use should be reconsidered. Historian Amanda Seligman argues that the phrase misleadingly suggests that whites immediately departed when blacks moved into the neighborhood. In fact, many whites defended their space with violence, intimidation, or legal tactics. Leah Boustan, Professor of Economics at Princeton, attributes white flight both to racism and economic reasons. Urban decay and crime have also been cited as one of the reasons.
In 1870, The Nation covered the large-scale migrations of white Americans. The report of the Emigration Commissioners of Louisiana estimated the white exodus from the Southern Atlantic States, Alabama, and Mississippi, to the trans-Mississippi regions, at scores of thousands. By 1888, Walter Thomas Mills's The Statesman publication predicted: Social and political equality and the political supremacy of the negro element in any southern state must lead to one of three things: A white exodus, a war of races, or the destruction of representative institutions. An 1894 biography of William Lloyd Garrison reveals the abolitionist's perception of the pre-Civil War tension and how the shadows of the impending civil disruption had brought about a white exodus of Northerners to Southern states such as Georgia. In the years leading up to World War I, the newspapers in the Union of South Africa were reporting on the spectre of white flight. This was due to Afrikaners travelling to the Port of Durban in search of ships for Britain and Australia. In 1958, political scientist Morton Grodzins identified that once the proportion of non-whites exceeds the limits of the neighborhood's tolerance for interracial living, whites move out. Grodzins termed this phenomenon the tipping point in the study of white flight. The terms became popular starting in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the United States.
In 1969, Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling published Models of Segregation, a paper demonstrating through a checkerboard model and mathematical analysis that even when every agent prefers to live in a mixed-race neighborhood, almost complete segregation emerges as individual decisions accumulate. In his tipping model, he showed that members of an ethnic group do not move out of a neighborhood as long as the proportion of other ethnic groups is relatively low. If a critical level of other ethnicities is exceeded, the original residents may make rapid decisions and take action to leave. This tipping point is viewed as simply the end-result of a domino effect originating when the threshold of the majority ethnicity members with the highest sensitivity to sameness is exceeded. If these people leave and are either not replaced or replaced by other ethnicities, then this raises the level of mixing of neighbors, exceeding the departure threshold for additional people. Studies in the 1980s and 1990s found that blacks said they were willing to live in neighborhoods with 50/50 ethnic composition. Whites were also willing to live in integrated neighborhoods, but preferred proportions of more whites. Despite this willingness to live in integrated neighborhoods, the majority still live in largely segregated neighborhoods, which have continued to form.
In the United States during the 1940s, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, low-cost mortgages through the G.I. Bill, and residential redlining enabled white families to abandon inner cities in favor of suburban living. The result was severe urban decay that, by the 1960s, resulted in crumbling ghettos. Prior to national data available in the 1950 US census, a migration pattern of disproportionate numbers of whites moving from cities to suburban communities was easily dismissed as merely anecdotal. It was rigorous reprocessing of the same raw data on a UNIVAC I, led by Donald J. Bogue of the Scripps Foundation and Emerson Seim of the University of Chicago, that scientifically established the reality of white flight. During the later 20th century, industrial restructuring led to major losses of jobs, leaving formerly middle-class working populations suffering poverty. Real estate prices often fall in areas of economic erosion, allowing persons with lower income to establish homes in such areas. Since the 1960s and changed immigration laws, the United States has received immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America, Asia, and Africa. Immigration has changed the demographics of both cities and suburbs. In 2006, the increased number of Latinos had made whites a minority group in some western cities. White flight in North America started to reverse in the 1990s, when the rich suburbanites returned to cities, gentrifying the decayed urban neighborhoods.
About 800,000 out of an earlier total population of 5.2 million whites left post-apartheid South Africa after 1995, according to a 2009 report in Newsweek. The country has suffered a high rate of violent crime, a primary stated reason for emigration. Other causes cited include attacks against white farmers, concern about being harmed by affirmative action programs, political instability, and worries about corruption. Many of those who leave are highly educated, resulting in skills shortages. Until 1980, the unrecognised Republic of Rhodesia held a well-publicised image as one of two nations in sub-Saharan Africa where a white minority held political, economic, and social control over a preponderantly black African majority. In 1969, only 41% of Rhodesia's white community were natural-born citizens, or 93,600 people. During the Rhodesian Bush War, almost the entire white male population between eighteen and fifty-eight was affected by various military commitments. Individuals spent up to five or six months of the year on combat duty away from their normal occupations. These long periods of service led to an increased emigration of men of military age. White emigration peaked between 1980 and 1982 at 53,000 persons, with the breakdown of law and order, an increase in crime in the rural areas, and the provocative attitude of Zimbabwean officials being cited as the main causes. A second wave of white emigration was sparked by President Robert Mugabe's violent land reform programme after 2000.
A study of school choice in Copenhagen found that an immigrant proportion of below 35% in local schools did not affect parental choice of schools. If the percentage of immigrant children rose above this level, Danes are far more likely to choose other schools. In Finland, white flight has been observed in districts where the share of non-Finnish population is 20% or above. In Greater Helsinki region, there are more than 30 such districts including Kallahti in Helsinki, Suvela in Espoo, and Länsimäki in Vantaa. A 2007 government report stated that immigration in Dublin has caused dramatic white flight from elementary schools in a studied area. The report stated that Dublin was risking creating immigrant-dominated banlieues similar to such areas in France. White flight in Norway has increased since the 1970s, with the immigration of non-Scandinavians from Poland, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Vietnam, Iran, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, the former Yugoslavia, Thailand, Afghanistan, and Lithuania. In January 2010, a news feature from Dagsrevyen on the public Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation said: Oslo has become a racially divided city. In some city districts the racial segregation starts already in kindergarten. Reporters said: In the last years the brown schools have become browner, and the white schools whiter.
In Sydney, Australian-born minority people in Fairfield and Canterbury fell by three percentage points, six percentage points in Auburn, and three percentage points in Strathfield between 1991 and 1996. Only in Liverpool did both the Australia-born and overseas-born male population increase over the 1991-1996 period. However, the rate of growth of the overseas-born was far greater than that of the Australia-born. The Australia-born movers from the south-western suburbs relocated to Penrith in the northwest and Gosford and Wyong in the northeast. Public schools in New South Wales have experienced white flight to private and Catholic schools wherever there is a large presence of Aboriginal and Middle Eastern students. White flight has been observed in low socioeconomic decile schools in New Zealand. Data from the Ministry of Education found that 60,000 New Zealand European students attended low-decile schools in 2000, and had fallen to half that number in 2010. In one specific case, white flight significantly affected Sunset Junior High School in a suburb of the city of Rotorua. The total number of students reduced from 700 to 70 in the early 1980s. All but one of the 70 students are Maori.
Continue Browsing
Common questions
What is the definition of white flight?
White flight describes a sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse to more racially homogenous suburban or exurban regions. This movement has also been applied to other migrations by whites from older, inner suburbs to rural areas, as well as from the American Northeast and Midwest to the milder climate in the South and West.
When did the term white flight become popular in the United States?
The terms became popular starting in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the United States. Migration of middle-class white populations was observed during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s out of cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City and Oakland.
Who identified the tipping point theory regarding white flight?
Political scientist Morton Grodzins identified that once the proportion of non-whites exceeds the limits of the neighborhood's tolerance for interracial living, whites move out. Grodzins termed this phenomenon the tipping point in the study of white flight.
How many white people left post-apartheid South Africa after 1995?
About 800,000 out of an earlier total population of 5.2 million whites left post-apartheid South Africa after 1995, according to a 2009 report in Newsweek. The country has suffered a high rate of violent crime, a primary stated reason for emigration.
What percentage of immigrant children triggers white flight in Danish schools?
A study of school choice in Copenhagen found that if the percentage of immigrant children rose above 35%, Danes are far more likely to choose other schools. If the percentage of immigrant children rises above this level, parental choice of schools is significantly affected.