Black segregation rose from white avoidance, not black housing preferences

Evidence

As these studies demonstrate, the concept of a “white community” was anything but a simple matter in struggles over race and residence. The working-class whites who lived in transition areas assumed that they and their neighbors shared not only the common traits of race and class but also common interests in preserving segregation in their neighborhood and the status quo in local politics. During the course of residential desegregation, however, they discovered that their supposed common ground on these issues and identities was ultimately less important for them and their neighbors than each one’s self-interest. As long as individual home-owners felt that their individual needs—protecting property values and maintaining a stable home—could be met by working with their neighbors, they did so. Invariably, though, when some whites decided that their needs and the neighborhood’s diverged, they resolved to act on their own and in their own self-interest, regardless of the repercussions. The reality of individuality, these whites quickly realized, would always trump the rhetoric of community. And so, during the course of residential desegregation, as more and more working-class white Atlantans made this discovery, they thought of themselves less and less as participants in a larger society, with the attendant rights and responsibilities. For them, connections to other whites, on the same street, in the same neighborhood, or in the city at large, had been proved pointless. Instead of thinking in terms of their supposed community, these working-class whites now started to think of themselves as individuals, set apart from and, indeed, set against the rest of Atlanta. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 191 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Black behavior—not the wrenching housing and economic discrimination—was blamed for these impoverished Black enclaves. As early as 1793, a White minister protested that “a Negro hut” had depreciated property values in Salem. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 451 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racially patterned residential preferences reproduce segregation without overt racism — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1783; Pool desegregation appeared peaceful only because whites fled rather than accepted it — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 289; Segregation was deliberately engineered through planning policy, not emergent preference. — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 21 (+17 more)

Broader Connections

• White racial egalitarianism rose while residential segregation simultaneously hardened #corroborates (0.92)
• Residential desegregation fractured white working-class solidarity into defensive individualism #complicates (0.74) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 191
• Black poverty was blamed on Black behavior rather than housing discrimination #complicates (0.73) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 451