Your book challenges the conventional “white flight” narrative. In brief, what were whites fleeing, if not black Americans moving into their neighborhoods?
I got the book’s title from a childhood friend, the last guy to leave our block. When I asked him why he left, he said, after a moment’s reflection, the neighborhood had become untenable. When I asked what “untenable” meant. He said, “When your widowed mother gets mugged for the second time, that’s untenable. When your home gets invaded for the second time, that’s untenable, too.”
Newark had become untenable for people of all races. Cissy Houston, Whitney’s mother, writes “Our home no longer resembled the safe haven we had envisioned for our children. After the riots, John [Houston] and I started thinking about leaving Newark.” Three years later, they left.
[The flight from cities in the 1970s was a class flight, not an ethnic flight. Those who had the resources to leave the cities did so; those who didn’t got stuck. The latter were disproportionally minorities, but that itself was an economic reality. And guess what? The flight from cities and high-crime states today is *also* a class flight, for largely the same reasons. — Ed]
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