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Whites who say they’d flee: Who are they, and why would they leave?

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Demography

For a neighborhood, it is not a problem how many blacks come into it. The problem is how many whites go out. respondent in the Detroit Area Study

Abstract

Questions have been raised about whether white flight—one factor contributing to U.S. residential segregation—is driven by racial, race-associated, or neutral ethnocentric concerns. I use closed- and open-ended survey data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality to explore who says they would leave and their reasons for doing so. Thirty-eight percent of white respondents said they would leave one of the integrated neighborhoods, with Detroiters and those endorsing negative racial stereotypes especially likely to do so. When asked why they might leave, whites focused on the negative features of integrated neighborhoods. Expressions of racial prejudice were also common, but neutral ethnocentrism rare. The results of an experiment asking about integration with Asians and Latinos are also discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology (m/c 312), University of Illinois at Chicago, 1007 W. Harrison Street, 60607, Chicago, Illinois

    Maria Krysan

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  1. Maria Krysan
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Additional information

This research was supported by grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation (SES 96-18700 and SES 00-95658), and the Ford Foundation. The author gratefully acknowledges the Russell Sage Foundation because much of the work for this article was completed while she was a visiting scholar at the foundation. Nakesha Faison and Kelly Harr Shomo provided invaluable research assistance, and Kyle Crowder, William P. Bridges, and Howard Schuman gave many insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

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Krysan, M. Whites who say they’d flee: Who are they, and why would they leave?. Demography 39, 675–696 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.2002.0037

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