- "The New White Flight" was the title of an
eye-opening article in the November 20th issue of the Wall Street Journal.
It was about a high school in Cupertino, California, where a growing Asian
American student population is causing rising academic standards -- and
causing many white parents to withdraw their children from the school
and some to move out of the community.
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- The school has some of the highest test scores in the
state. But, although everybody is in favor of high academic standards in
the abstract, not everyone is in favor of having to struggle to meet those
standards.
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- One white mother who was taking her son to an after-school
soccer game noticed all the Asian American parents arriving to take their
children to an after-school study program. A few years of her son playing
soccer while the Asian kids were hitting the books would be bound to create
academic disparities.
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- The phrase "white flight" is completely misleading.
All over the world and throughout history, groups have collected together
with people like themselves, whether by race, income, education, religion,
or any number of other characteristics. There is nothing unique when white
people do it.
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- A century or so ago, when Polish immigrants began moving
into various Detroit neighborhoods, blacks began moving out. The research
of pioneering black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier showed long ago that
Harlem and other black communities were internally divided, with people
of different income, education, and behavior patterns living in distinctly
different zones.
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- When Eastern European Jewish immigrants began arriving
in the United States and some began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods
in Chicago, the German Jews began moving out. Similar patterns have been
found among all sorts of groups.
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- When blacks move into a neighborhood and whites move
out, that is something visible to the naked eye but there is nothing unique
about such "white flight." The phrase is misleading for the
same reason that saying white people have toenails would be misleading.
It is true in itself but suggests something unique that is in fact common
to human beings of all sorts.
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- It is not just in residential patterns that people sort
themselves out in many ways. People tend to marry other people with similar
IQs, even when they don't know what those IQs are. They just tend to gravitate
toward people whose levels of understanding are similar to their own.
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- Cliques form in all kinds of places for all kinds of
reasons. Chess players, jazz fans, and gamblers tend to hang out with others
who share their interests.
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- The fact that people sort themselves out in many ways
is not usually a big problem -- except to those people who cannot feel
fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. Government programs
to unsort people who have sorted themselves out have produced one social
disaster after another.
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- The decades-long attempts to mix black and white school
children through school busing produced no real educational benefits but
much racial polarization and ill will. The same thing continues to be done
in colleges in the name of "diversity" -- and with the same bad
results.
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- Among the most unconscionable attempts to unsort people
who have sorted themselves out by behavior are government programs to
relocate people into neighborhoods where they could not afford to live
without subsidies. Often the people in those neighborhoods have sacrificed
for years in order to be able to live where they could raise their children
in decent surroundings and not have to live in fear of hoodlums -- only
to have the government import the bad neighbors and hoodlums they have
tried so hard to escape.
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- Both kinds of people may be of the same race but that
does not make the consequences any less painful or the resentments any
less bitter. Blacks as well as whites have objected to having problem
people thrust into their midst through housing subsidies or government
housing projects being built in their neighborhoods.
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- Almost never do the social experimenters relocate dysfunctional
and dangerous people into their own elite neighborhoods. They unsort other
people's neighborhoods and embitter other people's lives.
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- http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomas
sowell/2005/11/24/ 176688.html
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