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White Flight Hasn't Gone Anywhere

White flight gets described as a symptom of the racism of the mid- to late-20th century, but a new study finds evidence that it's still rampant and suggests that it's a sign of contemporary prejudice.

1 minute read

March 8, 2018, 8:00 AM PST

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


Worker101 / Flickr

new study that examines residential segregation in America's suburbs concludes that white flight is still very much a fact of life.

"Whites continue to leave neighborhoods with significant levels of non-white residential growth," writes Indiana University sociologist Samuel Kye in the study, published in the Social Science Research journal. 

Tom Jacobs shares news of the new study in an article for Pacific Standard, describing the study's findings as follows:

Of the 27,891 Census tracts he looked at, 3,252 experienced "white flight," which [Kye] defines as a neighborhood losing at least 25 percent of its white population between 2000 and 2010. These tracts experienced "an average magnitude loss of 40 percent of the original white population."

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