White Flight/Black Flight: The Dynamics of Racial Change in an American Neighborhood By Rachael A. Woldoff Cornell University Press. 2011. 240 pages. $22.95 paper

Abstract

The field of segregation and neighborhood racial and ethnic change is almost completely dominated by abstraction, generalization and the statistical analysis of local variation across wide regions. In that context, this book is unusual and refreshing in that it offers thick description of a single neighborhood's change trajectory, based on Dr. Woldoff's extensive (and impressive) qualitative investigation. In White Flight/Black Flight, she traces the arc of transition in a neighborhood she codenames “Parkmont”: a post-World War II, central city, blue-collar neighborhood in a northeastern city that was originally heavily Jewish but that undergoes a (fairly late) transition to overwhelmingly African American between 1990 and 2010. The key finding, as reflected in the title, is that this transition can perhaps be more accurately characterized as two transitions: an integrating phase, during which the arriving blacks (whom she dubs pioneers) tend strongly to be steadily employed, often by the city, and as a rule have relatively intact families and middle-class attitudes toward lawn care, the aesthetics of home maintenance, etc. Imperceptibly, however, this rapid integration tips over into rapid re-segregation by (Woldoff argues) a very different group of African American in-mover who might perhaps be characterized as typically more underclass than middle class. During this stage of transition, not only does the dwindling white population continue to shrink due to attrition and the deterrence of potential in-movers, but many of the earlier black in-migrants themselves begin to leave the neighborhood they perceive as deteriorating aesthetically, behaviorally, commercially and, consequently, in terms of home values.