white flight

noun

: the departure of whites from places (such as urban neighborhoods or schools) increasingly or predominantly populated by minorities

Examples of white flight in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

But as disinvestment and white flight took hold in Philadelphia's working class-neighborhoods, many Jewish people moved out of the city and into suburban towns. —Phaedra Trethan, USA TODAY, 5 Feb. 2024

Rankin County’s majority-white suburbs have been a destination for white flight out of the capital, Jackson, which is home to one of the highest percentages of Black residents of any major U.S. city. —Michael Goldberg, Chicago Tribune, 14 Aug. 2023

Late 20th-century white flight turned this 19th-century suburban getaway into a predominantly West Indian lower-middle-class neighborhood. —Lotoya Francis, Rolling Stone, 19 Feb. 2024

That began to change when white flight reached the capital city of Jackson in the 1960s and Rankin’s fields gave way to subdivisions and strip malls. —Nate Rosenfield Rory Doyle For The New York Times, New York Times, 30 Nov. 2023

But there are vast distinctions between the two sides, the residue of disinvestment and white flight by families like Johnson’s. —Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Washington Post, 29 Oct. 2023

Local officials supported these demands, since universities served as economic-development engines for cities struggling with white flight to suburbia. —Brandi Kellam, ProPublica, 5 Sep. 2023

But the auto industry’s slow decline in the ’60s and ’70s as well as the shameful history of racial divide, white flight, inequity, and lack of public investment, left Michigan Central Station — and the city as a whole — a shadow of its former self. —Andrew J. Hawkins, The Verge, 26 Oct. 2023

The arrival of the elevated roadway sparked white flight and decimated business for the theater, which eventually opened to Black patrons. —Holly Haber, Dallas News, 18 Sep. 2023

Word History

First Known Use

1956, in the meaning defined above