On White Flight

This is social history at its best. Kruse here pushes back against historians and commentators that claim that segregationists are best understood for their opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. Instead, he argues that it’s necessary to understand them (regardless of how reprehensible their ideals are). Rather than seeing themselves as bearers of anti-rights ideologies, segregationists often saw themselves as people fighting for the “right” to choose their neighbors, the “right” to fight against federal intrusion in local affairs, and the “right” to avoid African Americans. In doing so, they produced the ideological framework for the New Right, which continues to dominate the Republican Party.

While segregationist commentators advocated for “massive resistance” against segregation, Kruse argues that this tactic was effectively useless. What did work as a segregationist tactic was to leave the cities and construct de facto (in place of de jure) segregation. By pairing the two together, Kruse offers and outstanding analysis of white flight and the New Right.

This book is best paired with one about suburbanization and conservatism in broader terms, perhaps Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. I see a lot here that I recognize in my own family, which was a product (or perhaps instigator) of white flight in Chicago. As much as Kruse tries to emphasize the differences between the Sun Belt and the Rust Belt in terms of white flight (largely due to the political power of African Americans in the South), I see far more similarities.