“White flight” is one of those terms that drips with resentment and feeds on self-hatred.
As a label for the mass movement of white Americans out of cities during the 20th century, it’s no friendlier than “gentrification,” used to define the reverse movement over recent decades. But many white people, such as “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo, adopt and promote such self-abasing language. Why would any group make sense of themselves in such overtly hostile terms? How did it come about?
Correcting the Record
As with anything involving race in today’s America, one side of any “national conversation” on white flight is artificially amplified. The other is mostly unspoken or suppressed.When Hollywood shows that other side, it’s through the perspective of antiheroes. Think the ultra-bigoted Walt Kowalski in “Gran Torino” or, a few generations earlier, Archie Bunker in “All in the Family.”
The conventional white-flight narrative flattens a diverse group of whites, from Southern farmers to Lithuanian factory workers to Irish cops, into a singular, homogenous force of hate, presumably doomed to lose to love. The “villains” in this quasi-Christian narrative assume the dimensions of metaphysical evil. The “heroes” are likewise flattened into martyrs or saviors and thus never permitted to be human.
That’s no basis for a dialogue or “national conversation.” It’s the basis for a never-ending sermon. The central lesson: You cannot expiate your blood guilt, no matter how hard you try, because forgiveness is forever out of reach.
The Fate of Newark
Mr. Cashill focuses on his hometown, Newark, New Jersey. Over just a decade or two, the Gateway City swung from majority white to majority black. He came of age during the rocky transition, including the 1967 riots that tore the city apart.A dialogue needn’t stop at two people, let alone the half-abstract monoliths of “black” and “white.” “Untenable” weaves together multiple perspectives, some more sympathetically than others.
Sharing space are radical black activist Amiri Baraka, black conservative commentator Jesse Lee Peterson, Italian-American activist Anthony Imperiale, and even a very young Joe Rogan.
Mr. Cashill doesn’t ignore other factors. New welfare policies destabilized the black family, remarkably strong after slavery and segregation. Left-wing radicals, both black and white, whipped up anger and violence, even against the city’s firefighters. The mainstream media maintained its steady drumbeat of hate, vilifying local leaders like Imperiale, and communities like Roseville.
Yet, day-to-day violence remains an inescapable “root cause” of white flight, and the inspiration for his book’s title: One of the author’s childhood friends, “a loyal Democrat,” called repeated muggings and break-ins the “untenable” drivers of his family’s departure from Newark.
“In my conversations with Newark refugees, I was struck by how many made a point of exempting their black friends and neighbors from any responsibility for the riots. Unlike their suburban peers, however, they did not exempt the bad guys. As one friend tells me, ‘I had the guilt beaten out of me a long time ago.’”
“Untenable” challenges other conventional narratives about white flight. Historians and Newarkers are better placed than I am to accept or contest some claims. For example, that the cabbie whose apprehension triggered the ‘67 riots was mostly lying, or that there are no well-attributed accounts of blockbusters paying black women to push baby carriages through white neighborhoods.
Ethnos and Civilization
Mr. Cashill is also blunt about which white groups stuck it out the longest.“The Italians did not cut and run from Newark. The Jews did,” he writes in a critique of anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s account of Weequahic High School, once a stronghold of that community.
He chalks this up to Jewish Newarkers’ reliance on Weequahic and the city’s other public schools, where they unsurprisingly excelled. “For reasons both cultural and genetic, Jews long ago proved the futility of pursuing educational ‘equity,’” Mr. Cashill observes.
Italians, by contrast, had Catholic schools.
“Homicide had been an Irish enclave, although recently the Italians had made their way into it … The Irish were stone courageous. Even when it was insane not to, they never stepped back.”
Elite appreciation for stone courageous Irish cops, and whites more generally, reached a low ebb in 2020. In Newark, as elsewhere, a monument to explorer Christopher Columbus was torn down to make way for an icon of the new America. Goodbye, Columbus. Hello, George Floyd.
Could the dislocation of millions from Newark and communities like it be one root cause? If the answer makes too many people uncomfortable, any “national conversation” will be shut down. But the questions won’t go away.
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