There is an old saying, "I know when I'm not wanted" that Black Americans should honestly consider where it pertains to empowering ourselves on every front. Below is information documenting, decade after decade, the fact that whites do not want to live near or among Blacks. Not to mention work, learn or do business with us. When will we wake up!

When a city grows laterally, new homes are built, transport projects are undertaken, and property values often are higher in the new areas of the metropolitan area. In addition, many households in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia --- especially middle and upper class families--have shown preferences for the suburban lifestyle. Reasons cited include a preference towards lower-density development (since it often features lower ambient noise and increased privacy), better schools, and lower crime rates.

Suburbs are in large part to blame for the vast homogeneity of society and culture, leading to sprawling suburban developments of people with similar race, background and SES (socioeconomic status). Segregated and stratified development was institutionalized in the early 1950s and 60s with the financial industries' illegal process of redlining neighborhoods to prevent certain people from entering and residing in a district.

Redlining
Redlining is the practice of denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking or insurance, to residents of certain areas. In the United States, the practice is illegal when the criteria are based on race, religion, or ethnic origin. The US Government has imposed regulations that require all banks to provide a map to anyone who asks showing the locations of home loans they have made (so that individuals can help ensure that redlining is not taking place). The term "redlining" comes from the practice of actually marking red lines on a map, which banks would do in order to delineate areas they did not want to lend to.

Redlining is often referred to as a form of institutionalized racism, and was endemic to the occurring ("White Flight") of the urban cities. While certainly not as forthright today, the similar price characteristics for many developments in suburbs automatically limit those who would choose to live there to only a certain segment of society. The lack of cultural diversity (not the manufactured diversity driven by the media and marketers) is, in large part, a symptom of the spread of suburbia. The current price discriminatory housing trend of sprawl has been argued by some, such as former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, to have ramifications on public schools as finances are pulled out of the core city to the wealthier sister suburbs.

White flight in the United States
Due to the economic boom and growth of suburbia in the years after World War II, whites-many of whom were the children and grandchildren of immigrants-began to move away from inner core cities and to newer suburban communities in order to escape the increasing crime and racial tension that plagued inner cities throughout the country. Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, due to racist real-estate covenants and other discriminatory practices, non-white people were often not afforded the same opportunities to move away from the cities, even when they may have been economically able to do so.

As wealthier white residents abandoned the inner city neighborhoods, they ultimately left behind increasingly poor ethnic populations whose neighborhoods rapidly deteriorated, beginning in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s. Jobs and businesses disintegrated along with the neighborhoods and ultimately turned the increasingly poverty-stricken areas into crime-ridden slums with failing and dilapidated public schools.

White flight since the 1980s
White flight continues in some areas to the present day but has taken on a new trend as some of the older suburbs have been experiencing urban decay similar to their parent cities, such as in some of the southern and western suburbs of Chicago adjacent to the city. East St. Louis and many of the neighboring communities on the Illinois side of the St. Louis metropolitan area have also long suffered from urban decay with the decline of the manufacturing industries that had once powered the economies of the region.

In general, the only whites who tend to remain in cities and suburbs affected by white flight are low-income whites (though many low-income whites in East Coast cities have moved to close-in, working-class suburbs or other, more heavily white neighborhoods within the same city) and senior citizens (especially "empty nesters"), who have often lived in a particular community for a very long time. Usually, when these seniors die or move to retirement communities, the process of white flight is complete.

White flight around the world
In addition to the United States, many cities in the United Kingdom, including parts of London, have also been affected by white flight, especially after South Asian, West Indian, and African immigrants first began arriving in that country in significant numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. The phenomenon is also to be found in South African cities, most notably Johannesburg and Durban, which saw a mass influx of African people into the inner cities during the final years of apartheid, and from which white people fled in great numbers to the suburbs (or out of the country).

In the United States, the ethnic groups that follow Whites are African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.

The development of suburbs, the practice of redlining and the act of "White Flight" are not only testimonials to separitist practices by whites against Black Americans, but are in fact opportunites for Black America to take the initiative to develop and build on our "forty acres," in the urban cities.

Instead of percieving these acts of racism as bad, and lobbying politicians to make things equal and more accessible for Blacks, we should take these practices as signs that first of all, we are not wanted, and second, we can do it all ourselves.

Source From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

Posted 2005 by Afromerica