White flight
White flight, also known as white exodus, refers to the 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. The term has more recently 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. The term 'white flight' has also been used for large-scale post-colonial emigration of whites from Africa, or parts of that continent, driven by levels of violent crime and anti-colonial or anti-white state policies. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular, 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, although 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 in some areas led to more families' moving out of former areas. More generally, some historians suggest that white flight occurred in response to population pressures, both from the large migration of blacks from the rural Southern United States to urban cities of the Northeastern United States, Midwestern United States and the Western United States in the Great Migration and the waves of new immigrants from around the world.
Other historians have challenged the phrase "white flight" as a misnomer whose use should be reconsidered. In her study of West Side in Chicago during the post-war era, historian Amanda Seligman argues that the phrase misleadingly suggests that whites immediately departed when blacks moved into the neighborhood, when 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.
The business practices of redlining, mortgage discrimination, and racially restrictive covenants contributed to the overcrowding and physical deterioration of areas with large minority populations. Such conditions are considered to have contributed to the emigration of other populations. The limited facilities for banking and insurance, due to a perceived lack of profitability, and other social services, and extra fees meant to hedge against perceived profit issues, increased their cost to residents in predominantly non-white suburbs and city neighborhoods. According to the environmental geographer Laura Pulido, the historical processes of suburbanization and urban decentralization contribute to contemporary environmental racism.
History
In 1870, The Nation covered the large-scale migrations of white Americans; "The report of the Emigration Commissioners of Louisiana, for the past year, estimates the white exodus from the Southern Atlantic States, Alabama, and Mississippi, to the trans-Mississippi regions, at scores of thousands". By 1888, with rhetoric typical of the time, 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, as in the District of Columbia.
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", in particular due to Afrikaners travelling to the Port of Durban in search of ships for Britain and Australia.
Academic research
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.In 2004, a study of UK census figures at the London School of Economics demonstrated evidence of white flight, resulting in ethnic minorities in inner-city areas becoming increasingly isolated from the ethnic White British population. The study, which examined the white population in London, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, and Greater Manchester between 1991 and 2001, also concluded that white population losses were largest in areas with the highest ethnic minority populations.
In 2018, research at Indiana University showed that between 2000 and 2010 in the US, of a sample size of 27,891 Census tracts, 3,252 experienced "white flight". The examined areas had "an average magnitude loss of 40 percent of the original white population." Published in Social Science Research, the study found "relative to poorer neighborhoods, white flight becomes systematically more likely in middle-class neighborhoods at higher thresholds of black, Hispanic, and Asian population presence."
Checkerboard and tipping models
In studies in the 1980s and 1990s, 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 1969, Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling published "Models of Segregation", a paper in which he demonstrated through a "checkerboard model" and mathematical analysis that even when every agent prefers to live in a mixed-race neighborhood, almost complete segregation of neighborhoods 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, but 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 in turn raises the level of mixing of neighbors, exceeding the departure threshold for additional people.
Africa
South Africa
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 in the Newsweek report 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. Some observers fear the long-term consequences, as South Africa's labour policies make it difficult to attract skilled immigrants. In the global economy, some professionals and skilled people have been attracted to work in the U.S. and European nations.Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)
Until 1980, the unrecognised Republic of Rhodesia held a well-publicised image as being one of two nations in sub-Saharan Africa where a white minority of European descent and culture held political, economic, and social control over a preponderantly black African majority. Nevertheless, unlike white South Africans, a significant percentage of white Rhodesians represented recent immigrants from Europe. After World War II, there was a substantial influx of Europeans migrating into the region, including former residents of India, Pakistan, and other parts of Africa. Also represented were working-class emigrants responding to economic opportunities. In 1969, only 41% of Rhodesia's white community were natural-born citizens, or 93,600 people. The remainder were naturalised European and South African citizens or expatriates, with many holding dual citizenship.During the Rhodesian Bush War, almost the entire white male population between eighteen and fifty-eight was affected by various military commitments, and individuals spent up to five or six months of the year on combat duty away from their normal occupations in the civil service, commerce, industry, or agriculture. These long periods of service in the field led to an increased emigration of men of military age. In November 1963, state media cited the chief reasons for emigration as uncertainty about the future, economic decline due to embargo and war, and the heavy commitments of national service, which was described as "the overriding factor causing people to leave". Of the male emigrants in 1976 about half fell into the 15 to 39 age bracket. Between 1960 and 1976 160,182 whites immigrated, while 157,724 departed. This dynamic turnover rate led to depressions in the property market, a slump in the construction industry, and a decline in retail sales. The number of white Rhodesians peaked in 1975 at 278,000, and rapidly declined as the bush war intensified. In 1976, around 14,000 whites left the country, marking the first year since Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 that more whites had left the country than arrived, with most leaving for South Africa. This became known as the 'chicken run', the earliest use of which was recorded the following year, often by Rhodesians who remained to contemptuously describe those who had left. Other phrases such as 'taking the gap' or 'gapping it' were also used. As the outward flow increased, the phrase 'owl run' also came into use, as leaving the country was deemed by many to be a wise choice. Disfavour with the biracial Zimbabwe Rhodesia administration in 1979 also contributed to a mass exodus.
The establishment of the Republic of Zimbabwe in 1980 sounded the death knell for white political power, and ushered in a new era of black majority rule. 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. Political conditions typically had a greater impact on the decision to migrate among white than black professionals. Between 1982 and 2000 Zimbabwe registered a net loss of 100,000 whites, or an average of 5,000 departures per year. A second wave of white emigration was sparked by President Robert Mugabe's violent land reform programme after 2000. Popular destinations included South Africa and Australia, which emigrants perceived to be geographically, culturally, or sociopolitically similar to their home country.
From a strictly economic point of view, the departure figures were not as significant as the loss of the skills of those leaving. A disproportionate number of white Zimbabwean emigrants were well educated and highly skilled. Among those living in the United States, for example, 53.7% had a bachelor's degree, while only 2% had not completed secondary school. Most had occupied technical or supervisory positions of critical importance to the modern sector of the economy. Inasmuch as black workers did not begin making large inroads into apprenticeships and other training programs until the 1970s, few were in a position to replace their white colleagues in the 1980s.