#white flights

[judgingbooksbycovers]

White Flights

By Jess Row.

Design by Oliver Munday.

[wilsonltaylor]

Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination (2019)

The term “white flight,” when used by demographers and political scientists, refers to the abandonment by whites of a downtown area, an urban core, for surrounding communities—garden suburbs, inner-ring postwar suburbs, planned and gated subdivisions, formerly rural “exurbs.” To me it has at least three crucial additional meanings. It describes my father’s effort to escape the violent and explicitly racist atmosphere of his childhood and both my parents’ responses to the riots of the late sixties—which is to say the effort of a generation of white Americans to escape scenes and situations of racialized violence, whether on Native American land, in the South, in cities like Washington and Detroit and Baltimore and Newark. It implies the abandonment of the ideals of integration, coexistence, brotherhood, racila harmony that my parents’ generation cherished in their early adulthood. But it also represents a flight toward a kind of perverse ideal, represented by the world in which I grew up: an overwhelmingly white world that tried to become colorblind, somehow innocent, but ultimately dissolved and sublimated and assimilated racial self-consciousness and culpability until it was no longer recognizable as itself. 

[bigtickhk]

Reading the Hidden Racial Life of American Fiction

In “White Flights,” a new collection of essays, the novelist Jess Row plumbs the implicit whiteness of some of our most influential literature.

White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination by Jess Row https://amzn.to/31nBT2g

[white-history-month]

Thank you very much for your help it really help me get a better understand on property value and how it correlates with racism.

Happy to help in any way I can.