White Flight/Black Flight: The Dynamics of Racial Change in an American Neighborhood

by Rachael A. Woldoff

Urban residential integration is often fleeting―a brief snapshot that belies a complex process of racial turnover in many U.S. cities. White Flight/Black Flight takes readers inside a neighborhood that has shifted rapidly and dramatically in race composition over the last two decades. The book presents a portrait of a working-class neighborhood in the aftermath of white flight, illustrating cultural clashes that accompany racial change as well as common values that transcend race, from the perspectives of three groups: white stayers, black pioneers, and "second-wave" blacks.

Rachael A. Woldoff offers a fresh look at race and neighborhoods by documenting a two-stage process of neighborhood transition and focusing on the perspectives of two understudied groups: newly arriving black residents and whites who have stayed in the neighborhood. Woldoff describes the period of transition when white residents still remain, though in diminishing numbers, and a second, less discussed stage of racial change: black flight. She reveals what happens after white flight is complete: "Pioneer" blacks flee to other neighborhoods or else adjust to their new segregated residential environment by coping with the loss of relationships with their longer-term white neighbors, signs of community decline, and conflicts with the incoming second wave of black neighbors. Readers will find several surprising and compelling twists to the white flight story related to positive relations between elderly stayers and the striving pioneers, conflict among black residents, and differences in cultural understandings of what constitutes crime and disorder.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Race, American History, Social Justice

264 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 2011

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's been lots of books written about white suburbs, revitalizing majority-white urban neighborhoods, and about underclass black neighborhoods. This book is about a neighborhood (which the author gives the fictional name of "Parkmont") that doesn't quite fit into any of these pigeonholes, a neighborhood at the edge of a northern city divided into aging white "stayers", lower-middle-class black "pioneers" (who moved into the area from poorer black neighborhoods in the 1980s and early 1990s) and a "second wave" of working-class blacks who moved in more recently.

First the book focuses on the stayers - why do they stay when most whites have left? They were happy with the neighborhood before it integrated, and the neighborhood's social problems are not so overwhelming as to force them out (despite peer pressure from children and other whites to leave). However, the stayers are gradually either dying off or being forced to leave by age: there are no retirement homes in the neighborhood, and the houses are full of steps and thus not useful for eightysomethings.

Then the book moves on to the pioneers, who get along quite well with the stayers, viewing them as "allies in their aspiration to maintain the status of the neighborhood as a safe and calm place." The pioneers are much more displeased with the neighborhood than the stayers and the second wave, perhaps because as potential permanent residents they are more alert to (and thus more easily displeased by) signs of disorder. However, they may be stuck in Parkmont, since many of them work for a city that has residency requirements (and thus cannot move to suburbia even if they could afford to) and cannot afford better neighborhoods in the city.

In particular, the pioneers are not at all pleased with the "second wave" of black migrants from poorer neighborhoods, who moved in after white flight created a housing glut. The "second wave" is not the stereotypical underclass of welfare-dependent drug addicts; second wavers mostly have jobs and if anything are too overloaded with work and financial difficulties to supervise their children as much as the pioneers would like. The pioneers think that the second wave reduces neighborhood quality of life in all kinds of little ways: their teenagers are loud, profane, and are not averse to occasional drug dealing, second wavers are allegedly careless about litter and feel too overloaded to maintain their house, car and lawn properly. From their own perspective, the second wavers are just happy to be out of the ghetto, and are satisfied with their quality of life as long as they don't hear gunfire in the streets.

[Sarede Switzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall very informative. Demonstrated the ill effects of forced integration via the school busing programs as well as the government enforced housing policies of the 90s including artificially low mortgage rates and other incentives for first time home buyers.

It was interesting to me that her conclusion is to suggest more intervention and programs, not less, which is the exact opposite conclusion I came to in reviewing her research and the narratives of the individuals she interviewed and seeing the very clear cause and effect relationship between these programs and the subsequent neighborhood and racial relationship (both inter and intra) declines.

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book. Learn about stayers, pioneers and second-wavers as an American neighborhood experiences a multi-generational makeover from white to mixed to a different type of mix.