By Bonang Mohale
White flight is the large-scale migration of white people from areas (churches, schools, sports, clubs, etc.) that are becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse, a phenomenon witnessed globally.
Since the 1990s, there has been a significant emigration of white people from South Africa. Between 1995 and 2005, more than a million South Africans emigrated, citing violence as the main reason, as well as the lack of employment opportunities for whites.
Between 2016 and 2021, net immigration was highest among the African (894 400) and Asian (49 900) populations but offset by a net emigration of nearly 91 000 white residents.
Many white South Africans have emigrated to Western countries over the past two decades, mainly to English-speaking countries such as the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
Though many had cited economic, safety and security reasons for leaving, the rejection of integration is still witnessed in the land.
For example, black people cannot live and work in Orania, a small Northern Cape town created in 1991 for only white people.
Set among lush pecan nut orchards in the otherwise arid Karoo, it was set up as an Afrikaner-only hamlet true to the aspirations of apartheid chief architect Hendrik Verwoerd’.
While there are no rules prohibiting black people from visiting, common sense dictates that people of a darker hue stay well clear.
In American suburbia, the majority population was white after black people were blocked from acquiring or building homes, had their existing homes burnt to the ground, or were simply driven out.
Sociologist Dr Samuel Kye, then a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at the
Indiana University published a paper, “The persistence of white flight in middle-class suburbia”, in the journal Social Science Research.
The study uses census data from 1990, 2000 and 2010 to examine the changing racial makeup of suburbs in the 150 largest American metropolitan areas.
It defines white flight as what happens when an area loses at least 100 white residents and at least 255 of its white population over 10 years.
If you study the trend, once the black residents become 20% to 25% of the population of an area, that is when it flips.
Whites are willing to tolerate a certain level of diversity, but once it crosses a threshold, white flight becomes likelier to occur. White flight has long been identified as producing racially segregated communities.
Some scholars have argued that the behaviour is motivated not by racism but by a desire to live in more stable and prosperous neighbourhoods.
Examining population trends in racially mixed suburbs, Dr. Kye finds that white flight occurs when black residents move in, regardless of socioeconomic factors.
White flight is an example of race-based discrimination against African Americans and other minorities.
Though white flight occurred throughout many cities in America, the most noticeable examples occurred in the Midwest and, to a lesser extent, the Northeast and the West Coast.
White flight is most commonly associated with the 1970s, an era of high racial tension.
White flight contributed to the draining of cities’ tax bases when middle-class people left. Abandoned properties attracted criminals and street gangs, contributing to crime.
In areas where white flight happened, the property values dropped because the only people who wanted to move in had less money than those who left.
With a downward market, neighbourhoods rapidly shifted from middle- to lower-income families.
Both white flight and gentrification change the economic make-up of the neighbourhood, making it harder for the black people living in the neighbourhood.
Speaking at an October 2019 Obama Foundation Summit, former US first lady Michelle Obama reminisced about growing up in South Shore, a Chicago lakefront neighbourhood. Some of her memories were bitter.
Born in 1964, Obama lamented living through white flight.
“As upstanding families like ours, who were doing everything we were supposed to do … moved in,” she said, “white folks moved out.”
In her telling, the white people who abandoned South Shore had motives as obvious as they were ugly, choosing to relocate because “they were afraid of what our families represented.”.
They voted with their actions to reject families like hers because of “the colour of our skin” and “the texture of our hair,” those “artificial things that don’t even touch on the values that people bring to life.”.
“And so, yeah, I [felt] a sense of injustice.” Worse, the whites who fled did more than wound feelings. As one by one, they packed their bags and they ran from us,” they “left communities in shambles.” They disinvested.
In her 2018 memoir Becoming Mrs. Obama, the former first lady recalls that the “tilt was clearly beginning” in the South Shore of her youth, with “the neighbourhood businesses closing one by one, the blight setting.”.
Beyond the loss of economic capital, disinvestment entailed the withdrawal of social capital.
In its factual basics, Obama’s account is accurate. South Shore’s population was 96% white in 1950 and 96% black in 1980.
The big change took place in the 1960s, when the neighbourhood went from 89.6% white at the start of the decade to 70% black by the end of it.
As of 2015, South Shore was 93.5% black and 2.2% white, nor was this location an outlier locally, nationally or globally.
• Professor Mohale is the chancellor of the University of the Free State, former president of Business Unity South Africa, professor of practice in the Johannesburg Business School in the faculty of business and economics, and chair of the Bidvest Group and ArcelorMittal, as well as Swiss Re Corporate Solutions Africa and SBV Services.
