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How 911 calls on blacks are a new twist on something old: white flight
By John Blake, CNN
Updated 8:05 AM ET, Fri August 10, 2018
(CNN) It's getting hard to keep up with the latest hashtags devoted to 911 calls on black people.
There's #SittingInStarbucksWhileBlack, #BarbecuingWhileBlack, #GolfingWhileBlack, #EatingSubwayWhileBlack, and even #WearingSocksWhileBlack. Those are just some of the infractions committed by black people that caused white callers to dial 911.
As stories of these encounters ricochet across the media, it looks at times as if some mysterious new contagion -- a quickly mutating form of racial profiling -- is taking hold of the collective psyche of White America.
But this behavior isn't a symptom of anything new. It's a modern twist on something old, say some historians and those who've lived through it. This aggressive patrolling of public space bears an eerie resemblance to another race-induced contagion in America decades ago.
When the courts outlawed overt segregation in the 1950s and '60s, many whites reacted by trying to "privatize" public spaces. They wanted to carve out melanin-free zones in parks, pools and sidewalks to avoid what some folks called "interracial intimacy."
That battle led to "white flight," a mass migration to the suburbs of whites who no longer wanted to share their public schools and sidewalks with people of color. What's happening now is White Flight 2.0. Whites are standing their ground. Consciously or unconsciously, they are reasserting their belief that public spaces belong to them alone, says Kevin M. Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University.
"What we see now is the same underlying dynamic -- the feeling that these public spaces cannot be shared," says Kruse, author of "White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism." "But rather than white flight, it's fight.
"In the generation before, whites angry that these spaces are being shared or taken over by African-Americans packed up and left. Now they're digging in and fighting."
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/10/us/white-flight-911-calls/index.html
Updated 8:05 AM ET, Fri August 10, 2018
(CNN) It's getting hard to keep up with the latest hashtags devoted to 911 calls on black people.
There's #SittingInStarbucksWhileBlack, #BarbecuingWhileBlack, #GolfingWhileBlack, #EatingSubwayWhileBlack, and even #WearingSocksWhileBlack. Those are just some of the infractions committed by black people that caused white callers to dial 911.
As stories of these encounters ricochet across the media, it looks at times as if some mysterious new contagion -- a quickly mutating form of racial profiling -- is taking hold of the collective psyche of White America.
But this behavior isn't a symptom of anything new. It's a modern twist on something old, say some historians and those who've lived through it. This aggressive patrolling of public space bears an eerie resemblance to another race-induced contagion in America decades ago.
When the courts outlawed overt segregation in the 1950s and '60s, many whites reacted by trying to "privatize" public spaces. They wanted to carve out melanin-free zones in parks, pools and sidewalks to avoid what some folks called "interracial intimacy."
That battle led to "white flight," a mass migration to the suburbs of whites who no longer wanted to share their public schools and sidewalks with people of color. What's happening now is White Flight 2.0. Whites are standing their ground. Consciously or unconsciously, they are reasserting their belief that public spaces belong to them alone, says Kevin M. Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University.
"What we see now is the same underlying dynamic -- the feeling that these public spaces cannot be shared," says Kruse, author of "White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism." "But rather than white flight, it's fight.
"In the generation before, whites angry that these spaces are being shared or taken over by African-Americans packed up and left. Now they're digging in and fighting."
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/10/us/white-flight-911-calls/index.html
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