[philwelch]

It’s not entirely clear that racial animus was the primary motivating factor. Once civil rights legislation was passed to stop housing discrimination, for instance, there was also black flight, when middle-class black families also moved to the suburbs.

It’s also not clear how one is supposed to reverse the effects of white flight; when middle-class whites move into a majority-nonwhite urban area, this is usually condemned as “gentrification”.

[dkural]

My issue is the article doesn't once mention this as factor at all. I also object that one needs racial animus to have racist policies. "I've got no animus towards blacks, I just don't want to share large chunks of civic life with them" is racist. Blacks wanted to move to the suburbs due to lack of city & civic infrastructure in black neighborhoods - as the whites fled; so did polling stations, hospitals, banks, stores, and good quality drinking water. Lending policies for mortgages were explicitly racist; and many neighborhoods tried (successfully!) to prevent black people from moving in and "ruining the suburbs too!".

Also, rewinding only a couple of decades from civil rights legislation; denying blacks the vote, school entrance and outright lynchings in the hundreds qualifies as pretty strong racial animus. It's naive to argue that the same society & people "had no racial animus in mind" when choosing where and how to live.

I've always thought of gentrification as more of an economic class issue (which so often corresponds to minority status). In Boston, a lot of poor and middle class white neighborhoods get gentrified as well - nonetheless I take your wider point that gentrification is often a positive force for urban renewal; and I agree. One counter-example: Hudson Yards is the 1% being gentrified with the 0.1%, hard to argue helps the urban fabric with its non-human scale.

[philwelch]

I guess the racial theory is still incomplete because it doesn’t explain why the socially dominant group (whites) were the ones to move. If you take the perfectly reasonable assumption that whites had the most power in society, the obvious question is: why did they flee to the suburbs themselves rather than just forcing the black population to move out into the suburbs? The answer must be that the whites perceived the suburbs to be a more desirable place to live. From that perspective, the racial injustice wasn’t white flight, it was denying black people the freedom to move to the suburbs themselves—which is exactly what they ultimately did when given the opportunity.

I’m not trying to dismiss racism as a causative factor. I guess I’m just saying it’s like living in a sawmill, and racism is the sawdust. The sawdust causes lots of problems by itself, but it also gets all over everything else. Suburbanization was something mid-century Americans of all races desired; it just happened in a racist way.

[bluGill]

You are partially correct. Only partially because it only takes a small number of actual racist to make a difference. Even if 90% of a suburb doesn't care about race, that 10% can still make a difference by making the unwanted feel unwelcome.

I don't know how to solve this.

[Kaiyou]

Why would not wanting to share your life with them be racist? Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another. It has nothing to do with who you want and don't want to have in your neighborhood. And people should be allowed to choose whom to associate with.

[asdff]

Banks would send black children to the homes of white people with pamphlets saying things like "you know who is moving in," warning about an imminent decline in property values due to black people moving in. Banks would come in after the pamphlets with agents who would low ball these white-owned houses, then flip them for profit by charging black people huge prices for the very same homes. It was entirely rooted in racism, no way about it.

[dkural]

Imagine not wanting to have someone in your neighborhood only because that person is black, without you needing to know anything else. That sole fact of their skin color makes up your mind that you don't want them in your neighborhood, without asking if they're a good person, an honest person, a friendly person.. they're simply disqualified without you asking any additional question.

You can imagine if someone doesn't want black people in their neighborhood how they might feel about their children marrying one.

I don't know how to read people's minds, so I tend to gravitate towards a functional definition of racism which measures it based on someone's action - i.e. if someone being treated in an unfair manner based on their skin color.

[Kaiyou]

I don't see anything wrong with that. If I move out to a place without blacks, because it's a place without blacks and I am the one that moved, why should I have to accept them following me? That's not racism. That's wanting to be left alone. It's also not unfair. Forcing someone to move is unfair. Moving out on your own and preventing people you don't like from moving in isn't unfair.

[philwelch]

There's also a game-theoretic stalemate that you have to break with active policy change.

To the typical mid-century white homeowner, "a black family moved into the neighborhood" wasn't the beginning and end of it. There were only two equilibria: either you live in a segregated white neighborhood or you live in a predominantly black neighborhood. (I openly admit there's nothing wrong with living in a predominantly black neighborhood, but this was probably not the most common opinion among mid-century white homeowners.)

Why? Fundamentally because there was a structural shortage of good housing for black people. If most neighborhoods don't allow black residents, having a neighborhood that does allow them causes a surge of demand. Even if you're not racist enough to move out just because a single black family moved into your neighborhood, some of your neighbors are, and many of their homes will be bought by black families, which will trigger your slightly-less racist neighbors to move out, and so forth. This was deliberately encouraged by "blockbusters", who would buy homes from white families at a discount and then price-gouge the black families who ended up moving in for a massive profit. But blockbusting only works if you have the pre-existing shortage of unsegregated housing in the first place.

You end up in a feedback loop:

(a) Moderately racist white homeowners want to keep their neighborhoods segregated because otherwise they'll live in black neighborhoods. This causes:

(b) Most neighborhoods are segregated white neighborhoods, causing a housing shortage for black families. This causes:

(c) Overwhelming surges in black demand to move into any individual neighborhood that desegregates. This causes (a).

The "solution" was to immediately, globally, across-the-board, outlaw housing discrimination so the pent up housing demand can disperse. I put "solution" in quotes because most American metro areas are still extremely segregated. They might be statistically segregated by 90/10 ratios instead of the 100/0 ratios that existed before, but people have to go significantly out of their way to completely reverse it, unless there's some other economic incentive. For example, gentrification has "desegregated" lots of majority-nonwhite urban neighborhoods through the sheer force of white hipsters wanting to move into them.

[philwelch]

“Racism” is an overloaded term. The idea you’re describing (racial separatism) is definitely in the general category of racism.

In fact, most racism gets expressed as racial separatism. Segregation was literally racial separatism.

One problem is that this literally turns into a question of ethnic territorialism, and can easily be extended from neighborhoods to entire states (Oregon was founded as a whites-only state) to entire countries (eg the notion of sending freed slaves back to Africa, which is how Liberia was founded).

It’s also just not that hard to express even the worst racism in mere separatist terms. In fact, that’s where most racism starts.

[beat]

I recommend reading Ta-Nehisi Coates on this subject. He's done terrific work on the history of redlining, and also talks about the impact of educated, successful families moving out of historically black neighborhoods.

[philwelch]

I'll have to check that out.

> also talks about the impact of educated, successful families moving out of historically black neighborhoods

Yeah, from what else I've read, that is one of the saddest parts of the story. Economic diversity is a hugely important part of a healthy community, and it's pretty uncommon in America.

[Tharkun]

I thought the race to suburbia was a deliberate attempt to spread out the population in case of Soviet nukes?

Though I guess there is likely more than one cause.

[philipkglass]

That's interesting. I hadn't heard of this before. The evidence is pretty well set out in Kathleen Tobin's "The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defence."

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnera...

The vast majority of proposals are from before 1956 -- i.e. before the Soviets demonstrated their own high-yield thermonuclear weapons. The degree of decentralization required to mitigate against the multi-megaton bombs of the later 1950s would have been truly staggering.