Does racism explain white flight? Here is an interview with Jack Cashill. Excerpts:
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.
[. . .]
Is there any truth to the conventional narrative that racial unease drove the exodus?
I did not address the South, but in the Northeast and north-central U.S., attachment to neighborhood was a more powerful determinant than racial unease. The unease rarely caused flight until it became tangibly associated with crime and school disorder. Homicides in Newark increased sixfold from 1950 to 1972. That is a hard indicator to dispute or overlook.
[. . .]
What did you think of the depiction of the 1967 riots in David Chase’s Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark?
Glad you asked. As a major fan of the series, I was stunned by the clumsiness of the film. Chase grew up liberal deep in the Newark suburbs and rooted for the rioters. The George Floyd mania apparently revived his inner wokeness. In 1967, even Alabama police did not behave the way that he accused Newark cops of behaving. As the son, nephew, and cousin three times over of Newark police officers—one of whom gave me a two-day tour of the city for this book—I register a hearty protest.
Here is a review of Jack Cashill, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Fight from America's Cities. Excerpt follows. Note the references to James Burnham and Simone Weil.
What about racism, though? Surely, some taint of it must have been there, but what role did it play, exactly? We’ll never know because no one ever inquired into the motives of the only people who could answer: Bill and Sandy, Artie and Mario, Hannah and Jack.
All the social experiments instituted for our benefit by our betters—forced busing, urban renewal, public housing, interstate highways—cascaded together in Newark in just a few mind-boggling years. They were ginned up in Washington and sold on the basis of social science. But when you attempt to explain, predict, or alter human conduct on the basis of numbers, you make mathematics into metaphor.
When you’ve finished crunching numbers, you move on to crunching people. Little Italy is flattened and replaced by a housing project that’s just a slum in the making; an elevated superhighway is plunged through the heart of Roseville; and more drugs circulate through the schoolyards than in Bogotá. When, at long last, people find all these conditions “untenable,” they leave. The exodus is then labeled “white flight,” and the people leaving get labeled “racists.” But what label should we affix to the geniuses in Washington who conceived and executed the whole cock-up? We call them “experts.”
The experts never pause to talk to Bill and Sandy, Artie and Mario, Hannah and Jack. Why would they? The experts aren’t really there to protect the interests of the purported beneficiaries of their projects. In The Managerial Revolution, James Burnham wrote that all large organizations eventually come to serve the interests of their permanent staffs. Ronald Reagan said that the most frightening words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Here to help themselves, says Burnham. They look on the working stiff not as the object of the beneficent program but as an obstacle to it.
Worse than the selfishness of the administrator is his solipsism. The federal agency hardly notices that Bill and Sandy, Artie and Mario, Hannah and Jack actually exist. Before the managerial revolution arrived, back in 1934, Simone Weil, then a Marxist, wrote an article saying that Marx had failed to foresee one form of oppression: bureaucrats could crush working people at least as badly as the most exploitative capitalist. As Weil wrote elsewhere, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist.” Members of the expert class seldom notice.
