It’s no secret people have been fleeing America’s cities for the past three years. According to the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization, more than two million people left our cities between July 2020 and July 2022. In the year since, the exodus seems to have slowed but continues.
However reluctantly, the media have acknowledged the flight. What they have not acknowledged is its “whiteness.” Yet, “white” it has overwhelmingly been. August Benzow of EIG makes this point — without judgment — in a July 2022 analysis headlined, “Working Age White Americans Exited Large Cities in Far Higher Numbers Than Any Other Group in 2021.” (Italics added.)
Frey cites New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston, but he shies from asking what these cities have in common.
Sixty or so years ago, the media showed no such restraint. Writ large, they were eager to define that first great urban diaspora with the pejorative “white flight.” Professional “antiracists” like the very white Tim Wise have been eager to keep that libel in play. Writes Wise of white flight in his sanctimonious bestseller, Dear White America, “It began as soon as communities and schools came to have even small numbers of people of color in them.”
Wise is too young to have any lived experience with the urban exodus of the 1960s and 1970s. One reason he and his fellow travelers can smear less righteous whites so casually is that they know little, if anything, about the people who fled. Princeton professor Leah Boustan made this truth comically clear in a 2017 New York Times op-ed titled, “The Culprits Behind White Flight.”
Boustan, it should be noted, is something of an authority on the subject. If proof were needed, her opus, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets, won her a share of the 2018 Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award given each year to the “outstanding book in social science history.”
Writing soon after the trauma of the 2016 election, Boustan began her op-ed by imagining a scenario in which Democratic strategists ask themselves the question, “Was Donald Trump’s surprise victory due to his voters’ racism or their economic anxiety?”
Boustan’s own research led her to ask a similar question about white flight: racism or economics? Boustan confesses, however, to being unsure of the answer. The problem, she explains, is that “few of [those who fled] left personal accounts, and they may not have been able to articulate exactly why they moved.”
I confess to laughing out loud when I read this. If classism were as taboo at Princeton as racism, Boustan would have been busted down to TA. Every one of the fifty or so people I interviewed for my book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, knew precisely why he or she left.
To my surprise, many of the Times readers reacted to this op-ed much as I did. Said one, “I suppose I should be used to it by now, but I still find it kind of astonishing to read an analysis of white flight which doesn’t even mention the word ‘crime.’”
At least twenty respondents shared their own personal stories of flight. These people were able “to articulate exactly why they moved” — brother beaten, sister’s hair set on fire, neighbor shot, grandmother threatened, kids bused and bullied. The imagery is precise, and it comes from experience, an experience about which Boustan, like Wise, seems oblivious.
“I see that the author studied/worked at Princeton, Harvard & UCLA, all located in exclusive areas that are primarily white,” observed one reader. “So if she is claiming to be an expert on white flight, I wonder … has she actually LIVED somewhere deeply impacted by white flight?”
For Boustan, and for other great minds of the genus “antiracist,” the answer is almost surely “no.” That first great wave of “white flight” is likely something they read about in Sociology 101. They don’t know the neighborhoods involved or the people affected and, more to the point, they don’t care to know.
Now the second wave, the ongoing one, that’s a different story. The fugitives are their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and maybe even themselves. In the 1960s and 1970s, blue-collar workers were the ones forced to move, usually with great reluctance. In the 2020s, blue-collar workers were the ones forced to stay. Plumbers and pipe fitters and policemen cannot do their work “remotely.”
A constant in the discussion of white flight, then and now, is the disingenuousness of the chroniclers. In his analysis of the phenomenon for the liberal Brookings Institution, William Frey concedes that the cities suffering the greatest numeric losses “aside from Chicago … tend to be coastal or near coastal cities.”
Frey cites New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston, but he shies from asking what these cities have in common. Yes, Virginia, they are among America’s most proudly blue.
True, COVID-19 was the primary driver of population loss, but it was not the disease itself that caused people to leave. Nor was it the density of a given city’s population. People fled Los Angeles just as readily as they fled New York City. On the COVID front, what drove people from these leftist strongholds were two related phenomena: the hysteria generated by the liberal media and the draconian response to that hysteria by local authorities. Those who can flee oppression, flee. Even the woke.
To anyone paying attention, which excludes most of the major media, crime was also a driving factor. With the police in blue cities handcuffed during and after the George Floyd summer of 2020, murder rates shot up at a pace not seen since the 1960s. For the woke to protest crime, however, was to sound altogether too MAGA. Better to just add a wing to that summer cottage and call it home.
Despite the evidence, analysts such as Frey and Benzow and journalists of all stripes have buried the natural lead — the progressive response to crime and COVID is what caused white flight 2.0. Tampa and St. Petersburg are coastal cities, but they gained population each of the last three years.
In a textbook case of willful blindness, the reporters responsible for a February 2022 New York Times article refused to notice the elephant poking through its very subhead: “Although some of the fastest growing regions in the country continued to grow, the gains were nearly erased by stark losses in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.”
As is obvious, of course, these were their own people hightailing it out of Dodge. Given their affinity with the fugitives, the Times reporters can only extend their sympathy. They decline to use the term “white flight,” let alone “racist” or “racism,” and, in a shocking turn of events, fail even to remind us that women and minorities must surely have suffered most.
The reasons for the flight are self-evident. A friend from San Francisco sent me the following all too typical post on the local Nextdoor.com. The subject was the closing of the Old Navy on Market Street due to excess shoplifting. Attracted by the close-out sale, a female shopper dared to make the trip.
“Lower Market — homeless person standing in the street — screaming and cursing,” she writes. “Four cars blew a red light at Third and Market.… Security guards chasing a shoplifter down Market.… Another homeless person dropped his pants to urinate in the middle of Market.” A more poetic neighbor described the scene as “a grand guignol of misery.”
If nothing else comes from their self-inflicted misery, young progressives should gain a better understanding of the proverbial crazy uncles, the ones who famously haunt their Thanksgiving dinners. Maybe, just maybe, they weren’t such racists after all.
Jack Cashill’s Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities is available for pre-order in all formats.
