White flight
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 Southeast and Southwest.
[6][7][8] The term 'white flight' has also been used for large-scale post-colonial emigration of whites from Africa, or parts of that continent,[9][10][11][12][13] driven by levels of violent crime and anti-colonial or anti-white state policies.
[20] The business practices of redlining, mortgage discrimination, and racially restrictive covenants contributed to the overcrowding and physical deterioration of areas with large minority populations.
[25]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.
[26] 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.
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.
[36] Other causes cited in the Newsweek report include attacks against white farmers, concern about being excluded by affirmative action programmes, political instability and worries about corruption.
[37] After World War II, there was a substantial influx of Europeans migrating into the region (formerly known as Southern Rhodesia), including former residents of India, Pakistan, and other parts of Africa.
[37] 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.
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".
[37] 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.
[53] White flight in Norway has increased since the 1970s, with the immigration of non-Scandinavians from (in numerical order, starting with the largest): Poland, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Vietnam, Iran, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, the former Yugoslavia, Thailand, Afghanistan, and Lithuania.
[72]In 2018, The Guardian covered the white flight that had occurred in Brampton, and how the suburban city had been nicknamed "Bramladesh" and "Browntown", due to its "73% visible minority, with its largest ethnic group Indian".
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.
[75] It was not simply a more powerful calculating instrument that placed the reality of white flight beyond a high hurdle of proof seemingly required for policy makers to consider taking action.
Also instrumental were new statistical methods developed by Emerson Seim for disentangling deceptive counter-effects that had resulted when numerous cities reacted to departures of a wealthier tax base by annexation.
[76] During the later 20th century, industrial restructuring led to major losses of jobs, leaving formerly middle-class working populations suffering poverty, with some unable to move away and seek employment elsewhere.
[82] After World War II, aided by the construction of the Interstate Highway System, many white Americans began leaving industrial cities for new housing in suburbs.
[83] In some cases, such as in the Southern United States, local governments used highway road constructions to deliberately divide and isolate black neighborhoods from goods and services, often within industrial corridors.
Constructing interstate highways through majority-black neighborhoods eventually reduced the populations to the poorest proportion of people financially unable to leave their destroyed community.
The remaining white inhabitants (alarmed by real estate agents and the local news media),[85] fearing devalued residential property, would quickly sell, usually at a loss.
Its characteristics are depopulation, economic restructuring, abandoned buildings, high local unemployment (and thus poverty),[87] fragmented families, political disenfranchisement, crime, and a desolate, inhospitable city landscape.
In that time, major structural changes in global economies, transportation, and government policy created the economic, then social, conditions resulting in urban decay.
The federal government contributed to white flight and the early decay of non-white city neighborhoods by withholding maintenance capital mortgages, thus making it difficult for the communities to either retain or attract middle-class residents.
For instance, Milwaukee, Wisconsin partially annexed towns such as Granville; the (then) mayor, Frank P. Zeidler, complained about the socially destructive "Iron Ring" of new municipalities incorporated in the post–World War II decade.
[20][99] Samuel Kye (2018) cites several studies that identified "factors such as crime and neighborhood deterioration, rather than racial prejudice, as more robust determinants of white flight".
[103] In 2018, NSW Labor Opposition leader Luke Foley talked about White flight in Fairfield, where he stated that Iraqi and Syrian refugees are replacing the Anglo-Australians in the suburb, although he later apologised for the comments.
[107] The Ministry claimed demographic changes were behind the shifts, but teacher and principal associations have attributed white flight to racial and class stigmas of low-decile schools, which commonly have majority Maori and Pacific Islander rolls.
[108] In one specific case, white flight has significantly affected Sunset Junior High School in a suburb of the city of Rotorua, with the total number of students reduced from 700 to 70 in the early 1980s.
