Desegregation taught working-class whites that self-interest trumps community loyalty
Evidence
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. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 191
Categorization
- SEED: The mechanism for how defeat in residential defense converts collective racial solidarities into individualistic homeowners’ ideology — a direct causal chain worth isolating.
- XREF: connects to: Desegregation of public spaces drove working-class whites to reject civic community and city progress — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 252; Atlanta civil rights histories overlooked working-class and middle-class whites’ central role — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 629; Desegregation pressure forced segregationists to reinvent themselves as respectable homeowners — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 106 (+6 more)
Broader Connections
- De jure segregation served to unite white populations facing internal conflict
#contradicts(0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1751