Nov 24, 2005
by Thomas Sowell
"The New White Flight" was the title of an eye-opening article in the November 20th issue of the Wall Street Journal. It was about a high school in Cupertino, California, where a growing Asian American student population is causing rising academic standards -- and causing many white parents to withdraw their children from the school and some to move out of the community.
The school has some of the highest test scores in the state. But, although everybody is in favor of high academic standards in the abstract, not everyone is in favor of having to struggle to meet those standards.
One white mother who was taking her son to an after-school soccer game noticed all the Asian American parents arriving to take their children to an after-school study program. A few years of her son playing soccer while the Asian kids were hitting the books would be bound to create academic disparities.
The phrase "white flight" is completely misleading. All over the world and throughout history, groups have collected together with people like themselves, whether by race, income, education, religion, or any number of other characteristics. There is nothing unique when white people do it.
A century or so ago, when Polish immigrants began moving into various Detroit neighborhoods, blacks began moving out. The research of pioneering black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier showed long ago that Harlem and other black communities were internally divided, with people of different income, education, and behavior patterns living in distinctly different zones.
When Eastern European Jewish immigrants began arriving in the United States and some began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods in Chicago, the German Jews began moving out. Similar patterns have been found among all sorts of groups.
When blacks move into a neighborhood and whites move out, that is something visible to the naked eye but there is nothing unique about such "white flight." The phrase is misleading for the same reason that saying white people have toenails would be misleading. It is true in itself but suggests something unique that is in fact common to human beings of all sorts.
It is not just in residential patterns that people sort themselves out in many ways. People tend to marry other people with similar IQs, even when they don't know what those IQs are. They just tend to gravitate toward people whose levels of understanding are similar to their own.
Cliques form in all kinds of places for all kinds of reasons. Chess players, jazz fans, and gamblers tend to hang out with others who share their interests.
The fact that people sort themselves out in many ways is not usually a big problem -- except to those people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. Government programs to unsort people who have sorted themselves out have produced one social disaster after another.
The decades-long attempts to mix black and white school children through school busing produced no real educational benefits but much racial polarization and ill will. The same thing continues to be done in colleges in the name of "diversity" -- and with the same bad results.
Among the most unconscionable attempts to unsort people who have sorted themselves out by behavior are government programs to relocate people into neighborhoods where they could not afford to live without subsidies. Often the people in those neighborhoods have sacrificed for years in order to be able to live where they could raise their children in decent surroundings and not have to live in fear of hoodlums -- only to have the government import the bad neighbors and hoodlums they have tried so hard to escape.
Both kinds of people may be of the same race but that does not make the consequences any less painful or the resentments any less bitter. Blacks as well as whites have objected to having problem people thrust into their midst through housing subsidies or government housing projects being built in their neighborhoods.
Almost never do the social experimenters relocate dysfunctional and dangerous people into their own elite neighborhoods. They unsort other people's neighborhoods and embitter other people's lives.
Thoughts?
I live in one of the most ethnically-diverse cities in the world, and have never in my entire life heard the phrase "white flight", nor have I heard of white people moving out of neighbourhoods to get away from ethnic newcomers.
Consider yourself lucky, Cycle, as the "white flight" issue is a big one. The article totally ignores the issue of steering though so I just shrug.
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Consider yourself lucky, Cycle, as the "white flight" issue is a big one. The article totally ignores the issue of steering though so I just shrug.
Care to elaborate (about steering, I mean)?
This is bull.
Not only the fact that there are people who are willing to work hard and raise the status quo and the lazy ones up and leave instead of pull up their socks, but that someone actually referred to this as a new phenomenon centered on whites.
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Care to elaborate (about steering, I mean)?
Steering (as it would make sense in this article) is the practice of sending people who are attempting to buy a home to places where their ethnic/racial group dominates. The problem with steering is it automatically assumes people want to be with their ethnic/racial group--which isn't always true & usually causes lawsuits when it happens once the proof is gathered. Of course, the biggest problem with what I call the "voluntary" steering is that it basically assumes that the creation of these neighborhoods occurred after legal segregation was outlawed and not before. Most of these "special" ethnic/racial areas were the direct result of the policies that caused Whites to look down on Blacks, Asians; Christians to look down on Jews; English-speaking Whites to look down on the Russian/German/Greek/etc.-speaking Whites; among other ethnic/racial separations. For the most part, the only people who stay in these neighborhoods are usually those "new" to an area, "new" to the U.S., or have strong finanical/emotional ties.
The article also seems to make what I consider to be a very dubious claim that race/ethnic relations are worse now than they were in the past as a result of mixing, which I consider to be ridiculous. I believe that race/ethnic relations can be better, but there's been so much improvement on the diversity trend that to ignore it makes me just shrug.
The article also continues to practice of demonizing those who are poor or in poverty, but semi-acknowledges that the practice of the demonizing is not limited to any particular race/ethnic group--which I figure is the best part of it. ^_^
Thank God I live in Singapore. It's a multiracial city, where racism is illegal. Inciting anger between any races is strictly forbidden, and punishable by law. ^^
That said, I've got some cool (all by races) Indian, Eurasian and Malay friends, though the number of Chinese I know outnumber them. However, the ones I know are some of my better friends.
Personally, I find that race issues are stupid. Why can't people live without prejudice against a particular race? Why is a race "superior" because of something? *sighs*
And indeed, I agree that having them work hard to raise the academic standards would be far better than to let them laze around counter-productively. I know several Chinese (as in people born in China) whom I'd rather not describe with my own words, as it's above the board rating. Let's just say there are some who are arrogant and condescending - even towards their own race.
Hehe, think the jails are full over here now? Try illegalizing racism and we'll need to buy Australia.
~Rico
One interesting note a lecturer I had last year has made in our student newspaper recently on the topic of diversity:
"... the promotion of diversity is usually construed as a right to diversity, which generally leads to demands of equality on the part of 'the diverse'. Here, we have a contradiction in terms for if diversity is the antithesis of the same, how could the diverse be equal?"
Seems somewhat relevant to the issue...
That is only a contradiction if you believe that equal means "the same." Things being equal doesn't mean things are identical.
For example, I look just as cute in blue shirts as I do in green shirts. However that does not mean that green and blue are the same.
The moral of the story is that I am cute. <3
Hehe, think the jails are full over here now? Try illegalizing racism and we'll need to buy Australia.
That's OUR prison colony and we're keeping it, so they can come home and run our pubs! You keep your Canada, we keep our Australia! Kapeesh?!
I believe that a fairly recent (as in mostly 20th Century) issue in the USA was built around the discovery that treating people in a way that was "separate, but equal" did not work out particularly equally...
Certainly within logic and mathematics, equal, equivalent and same are interchangeable. Considering I was quoting an article written by a philosopher, they may well have considered the terms to be equivalent, and so believed that the contradiction is still there. While in comparative terms, two non-identical things could be considered to have a near-enough same value (as in VCP's (dubious) example), I don't believe non-identical things (or terms relating to non-identical things) could be considered the same. Also, how do you distinguish between "equal" and "same" in what I presume are political understandings of the terms?
Still, if you want to read the whole article, it can be found at palatinate.dsu.org.uk/Com...tions/547/
Hah, Craig you listen here mister we took over your rebel colony's and we'll take that little prison colony too. That'll teach ya to march around in bright red coats.
~Rico
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That's OUR prison colony and we're keeping it, so they can come home and run our pubs! You keep your Mexico, we keep our Australia! Kapeesh?!
A more accurate statement. 
That's OUR prison colony and we're keeping it, so they can come home and run our pubs! You keep your Canada, we keep our Australia! Kapeesh?!
Sorry, what? I can't have read that correctly. For a second there I thought you'd gone retarded.
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Also, how do you distinguish between "equal" and "same" in what I presume are political understandings of the terms?
In the context of the situation, equal refers to opportunities being available for all regardless of background. It does not mean people will act/do/think the same given the opportunity. In many areas, there is an inherent advantage to having those who are trusted that do/view things differently. Considering everyone is different anyway (two people of any classification can do/view things completely differently), it's not possible to believe that people are truly interchangeable.
I don't have time to read the full article--I will later but I'm rushing now--so I don't know for certain if I just have a mistaken impression of the point being made. ;p
Equal opportunity certainly seems fine - but this means everyone has the same opportunities, so in that sense "equal" and "same" mean the same. But you're right that equal opportunity does not mean everyone will act the same, and so in that sense remain diverse. I think the article was more concerned about the problem of treating everyone as equal - as in the same fundamental "person" - rather than respecting diversity. After all, there's a lot of anger about PC terms, which is one way towards treating everyone equally - just equally insulting (eg. Happy Holidays being promoted instead of any religious overtones for Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukah/other festive greeting).
Yeah, I had a mistaken impression of the article. It's referring more toward the fact that society has a tendency not to address the root problem and cover it up with political correctness. It is a good one. Thanks for sharing ^_^
No prob. Just should think a bit more about how soundbites will be read by others in future 
