Rising East Online

Eastward Ho!

White flight, black attitude

— Phil Cohen

In this article I am going to present a brief history of the term white flight and its deployment, and revisit some material from a study carried out on the Isle Dogs in the 1990s to see if this throws any light on the subject. Along the way, I suggest a few pointers in developing a more adequate theory of population movement and locational choice, especially as these bear on patterns of residential segregation linked to reputational neighbourhoods.

Eric Avila in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight suggests that:

‘Typically white flight describes a structural process by which post-war suburbanisation helped the racial re-segregation of the USA, dividing presumably white suburbs from concentrations of racialised – largely black and Chicano – poverty.’

This is the academic version of the term – and note already it’s strong made-in-the- USA branding. In the USA , and to a lesser extent in the UK, ‘white flight’ is a term bandied about in the popular press to describe-cum-explain the movement of white residents out of neighbourhoods which have begun to experience the immigration of substantial numbers of non-white people. The assumption behind the term is that these moves, however rationalised by the movers themselves (in terms of personal or family betterment ) are primarily motivated by race; that they are driven by racially motivated competition over scarce resources, like housing or public amenity; and finally there is the notion that the presence of non-white neighbours will inevitably entail a series of negative local effects, for example rising crime and violence, or falling property values, that would not otherwise occur. These racialised fears are held to be responsible for the decision to move to another area which is predominantly white and where these 'problems' will not arise.

Early Studies

Despite its prevalence in common sense accounts of ‘race relations’ over the last 30 years, the term has a very chequered history in academic social science. It seems to have originated in a series of studies carried out by American sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s into what was then called the urban ecology of ethno-demographic change. Almost all these studies focussed on long established white ethnic neighbourhoods, often Jewish, but sometimes Irish, Polish or Italian, in the inner city, many of them with relatively poor and ageing populations. The studies looked at what happened when African Americans from adjacent areas began to move in to these neighbourhoods in order to escape the overcrowding and other pressures of 'ghetto life', and at what followed when white residents responded to these changes by moving further out into the suburbs. Many of these studies highlighted the role of realtors (i.e. estate agents) in brokering this process, by steering black house buyers into these areas and also by encouraging white householders to sell up.

One crucial local variable identified in these studies is what realtors called the tipping point – the demographic point at which white residents feel that the neighbourhood is 'going black'. In some cases this might be when a single black family moves into the street (‘one is one too many’), or perhaps when some kind of critical mass is reached, though there is little clarity on what notion of density is implied (demographic density and network density are simply assumed to be the same), for reasons which I will return to. In any event the term is used to describe a locally variable numbers game. Another variable highlighted is the relative stability (which again tends to be confused with density) of social networks and/or civil institutions (especially churches) within the 'host' neighbourhood and the role they might play in either mobilising against, or accommodating, to the black presence.

Some of the later studies attempt to complicate this picture by introducing a greater range of variables, for example the state of the local housing and labour markets and the extent to which these made it possible for people to move to the suburbs or not. Some studies argued that the Jewish exodus was more due to generational factors linked to upward mobility; it was the more affluent families with young children who tended to move, not the poor and elderly. Others continued to argue that it was push rather than pull factors that counted, whilst suggesting that non- racial factors such as deteriorating school facilities in the inner city played a major role in the decision to move.

Within this paradigm there is also disagreement between those who think that the decision to move or stay put, can be understood primarily as a rational choice taken by individual households (who thus become the unit of analysis), and those whose see it as influenced primarily by collective fears or aspirations, governed by non- rational (aka ideological) factors.

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Problems of Naturalisation

All these accounts were heavily influenced by the Chicago school and in particular by its model of 'invasion/succession/ dominance' which is used to characterise patterns of social and demographic change in zones of transition. As is well known, this model is drawn from early ecological studies of plant and animal population change; less noted is that Chicago ecology theory also draws heavily on models of fight or flight developed by ethologists and later taken up by socio-biologists to explain similarities between animal and human behaviour . For example many of the studies explain accelerated out-migration not in relation to moral panics around race, but as a flip-over from fight to flight on the part of white communities whose attempts to stop the ‘ black invasion ‘ have failed.

In general processes of conflict or competition in and between cultures are explained ‘ecologically’ as quasi-natural processes. As applied by the Chicago school, the model holds the implication - which is rarely made explicit - that there is something like a natural cycle of racial conflict, as well as a natural history of urban development and decay, related to a quasi-Darwinian struggle over scarce resources ( housing and employment) leading to the survival of the population best adapted to the terrain of urban modernity . Another, related idea is that certain types of urban ecology might promote a natural balance - an ideal racial mix - to achieve both demographic and social equilibrium, whereas other ecologies promote conflict. The confusion between different notions of density – the number of faces on the street, and the strength of the social bonds between them – is typical of this ecological model.

It is important to contextualise these studies in terms of the political conjuncture in which they took place, especially since so little of this macro-historical dimension is allowed to leak into the analyses themselves. Most obviously these studies are rooted in public concerns in the USA about a pattern of racial segregation and inequality with roots in slavery and its long historical aftermath. More immediately these studies have to be read against the background of the rise of the civil rights movement and the riots in Watts, Atlanta, and other conurbations during the 1960s and 1970s. Then there is the great migration of African Americans from the rural south to the northern industrial and urban centres which took off in the 1940s and accelerated in the post war period. Finally, looming in the background is the great fear of ghetto formation born out of the Jewish experience of religious and racial persecution in Europe, culminating in the Shoah. Louis Wirth's classic account, was published in the 1920s but continued to exert a profound influence in the post war period . There is no doubt that the way the 'black ghetto' was described and understood in American social science has been very strongly overdetermined by this factor. Equally the urban race issue in America has until recently been looked at through the lens of Black/Jewish relations, and in particular of Black encroachment into the Jewish urban village or shtetl. The extent to which this pattern is being reproduced or is changing in other inter-ethnic situations, such as the more recent arrival of Latino and Asian populations in zones of transition, then become the focus of further research. In addition to the problematic ‘naturalising’ of racial conflict in these studies, there is also a pervasive assumption that Black (or Latino etc) in migration is the problem to which white out-migration is the attempted solution.

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British Exceptionalism

For all these reasons the notion of 'white flight' has tended to be viewed with some suspicion by British academics. An early attempt to import it into the UK urban context was made by John Rex, who used it to explain the movement out of the inner city by both the middle and working classes – a phenomenon they called ‘urban leapfrog’. But in general white flight, like black ghetto doesn’t seem to map very well to the experience of British cities. The very different history of migration and settlement in British cities, linked both to external and internal colonialism means that forms of popular cosmopolitanism – and racism – took root in a way that militated against ghetto formation on the US scale. The so called Whitechapel shtetl, for example, was never exclusively Jewish; the area contained large numbers of Irish and English working class families even when, according to the Chicago model demographic succession and dominance had taken place. Another difference is that public housing policies and other government interventions in the UK had a much larger role in shaping urban race relations than in the USA, and, at least until very recently, estate agents have played only a minor role.

Even where there are similarities, differences emerge. For example, the fact that many Jewish people moved out of Whitechapel to North or East London suburbs (Golders Green or Redbridge) at a time when Bangladeshi people were arriving into the area in increasing numbers, seems to follow the US pattern, but on closer inspection it turns out that the key factor here was the shift from contest to sponsored mobility as a strategy of advancement on the part of second generation Jews, a shift that actually occurred prior to the arrival of the Bangladeshi community.

It is hardly surprising, then, that if you type 'White Flight' into the British Library search engine you get three entries: one is the title of a book about the Wright Brothers making the first crossing of the Atlantic in an airplane; the other two are the titles of children’s books about rabbits. If however you type race, migration and city into the same search engine you get over 80 entries. Yet on further inspection most of these turn out to be studies of ‘race relations’ in inner city areas which focus on the immediate pattern of interaction between New Commonwealth immigrants and white working class residents. These studies have no little or no longitudinal scope, most are little more than snapshots and in that respect they reflect the dominant paradigms of urban research.

British urban sociologists have, on the whole, been happier focusing on class rather than race in mapping processes of change. The emphasis on gentrification - on middle class families invading traditional working class areas in the inner city - has certainly tended to sideline issues of race. Where it does arise, the multicultural character of these neighbourhoods is treated as a positive pull - as adding a little local colour without seriously affecting the quality of life. In contrast with the Chicago studies, British gentrification research shows very little interest in following up where the displaced populations go to. Those studies that do focus on the working class on the move, emphasise the nostalgic theme of ‘loss of community’ attendant on adopting more individualistic life styles, or problems of social adjustment to suburban living, but do not really consider the dynamics of change as a whole, or relate them to wider structural processes as these unfold over long duration. The extent to which certain forms of gentrification become racialised is also a matter of neglect in this research literature.

The gentrification and flight literatures share a great deal of common ground, not least in their convergence on the rent gap theory of locational choice, in which particular areas are seen to be readied for either middle class and black ‘invasion’ as result of a period of disinvestment and devaluation attendant on the exodus of long established communities. Another shared feature is that those who remain in situ are in some way disabled from participating in historical progress: they are either seen to be making a defiant last stand against inevitable change , or to be too old, too poor, too ill, too dysfunctional, to ‘go with the flow’. As a result the positive attachment to place either as topical focus of identity work or locus of material resource tends to be patholgised or overlooked. Equally the assumption of a one-way, or once-and-for-all move goes unchallenged and consequently the existence of a whole field of tactical, time-delimited, lifecourse-specific, reversible, locational choices remains largely unexplored .

So much for what academic social scientists have made of the term. But how far does the term gloss the common sense ideas about population movement and change, which East Enders themselves are likely to hold?

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All white on the night

In the early 1990s I carried out a study related to the formation of a ‘Rights for Whites’ group on the Isle of Dogs. The group’s aim was ostensibly to support the retention of a sons and daughters policy introduced by the Lib Dems when they controlled the council , which gave priority in housing allocation to the children of existing tenants. The incoming Labour group set out to abolish the policy on the grounds that it did not address the real housing needs of the area, in particular those of the Bangladeshi, black and Vietnamese-Chinese communities, but privileged the position of longer-established, white residents. Most of the people I interviewed in this group were aged 40 plus (referred to as ‘older group’) .The second part of the research was with groups of young people attending George Green School in the late 1990s (referred to as ‘younger group’).

The study set out to trace the genealogy of a peculiarly intense form of insularity that characterised the sense of place and community. This is best illustrated by some quotes about experiences which occurred in the immediate post war period.

The Providential Island Home

When Elisabeth Riley moved onto 'The Island' in 1948 she was allocated a council house which locals had decreed as belonging to a neighbour’s daughter who was an 'Island' native. Elisabeth described the reaction of her neighbours:

'I used to go into shops and people would be talking. They'd stop as I walked in and wait until I left. They couldn’t understand my next door neighbour’s sister having the house before us and Mrs Bailey's daughter not getting it, because she was an Islander’.

(Elisabeth’s two children were the only ones in the neighbourhood not invited to the street party for the Coronation.)

The reputational neighbourhood

‘There were often fights when our own gang turned on those from neighbouring streets and told them to get back to where they belonged.’

Matrilocal or matrilineal ?

‘The other Islanders treated Jim alright although he didn’t really feel one of them at first. He was treated all right but not really accepted. It took a long time for him to be accepted. He was always someone that married Nellie Kohler. When he went round to Farmer’s shop Frank Farmer said 'Hallo, Jimmy Kohler what do you want? My name’s not Kohler it’s Prist, said Jim. We used to give all the boys the girls’ name when they got married if they came from outside the Island.’

Eastward Ho!

‘Southend was only thirty miles away from where we lived but it was like going to an outpost of Empire for us. We knew the natives were hostile but there was always enough of us so we didn’t really have to mix with them. I preferred hop picking in Kent to Southend . The natives were just as hostile but there were less of them.’

Underlying many of these statements is a model of space, place and identity which yield a tale of two very different reputational neighbourhoods, namely, Cubitt Town and Millwall. Historically, Cubitt town was the where the stevedores (higher paid, skilled dock workers) and their families lived, most of them Irish Catholics. Millwall was more industrialised, more 'Protestant', and regarded as an altogether rougher area. As one informant put it :

‘The two sides of the island were quite different and where anyone talked about Cubitt Town to people living here in this part of the Island, they were as remote as talking about people in Hackney. The Cubitt Town people looked upon the people of Millwall as belonging to another world . We didn't know much about Cubitt Town....’

That distinction is carried over and reworked so that Cubbitt Town is now regarded as the core of the Islanders community. The distinction, however, is no longer one of religion or relative socio-economic status but of race. Thus:

‘I know the area and I've always lived round here. I used to know everybody on the Island when I was on a milk round during the war. But it’s altered tremendously. This part of the Island around Cubitt Town is the only part that's not really altered’.

Cubitt Town is seen as an area which is safe for whites:

‘It’s safe because you've got the police station nearby, the Docklands settlement which is always open, you've got George Green school which has always got a caretaker that you can got to if you're in trouble- they'll always let you pop in and use the loo or whatever, its a very well lit area, you've got the takeaway shops which are always open, the area is used mainly by whites and yuppies. My aunt lives there too’.

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Islander, Cockney, British

On many of the mental maps drawn by the sample, the association between space and race is very close .In one interview one of our informants let this slip when she was asked about how she felt about her immediate neighbourhood she replied ‘it’s all white, I mean it’s all right down our way’.

So the model here is of a basically safe (because white ) space, punctuated with a few dangerous – because black – places. Let’s call this the all white on the night model.

But there was another mental map – the opposite of this, which drew a picture of a basically dangerous – because black dominated – space, interspersed by a few safe, because white, bolt-holes .Let’s call it the Custer’s last stand model. And in many accounts there was a narrative of the transition from first mental map to the second:

‘I always used to feel safe round here (Cubitt Town) but not any longer. There's a lot of racial nastiness about. I don't feel easy with my children walking down the street. Last year my youngest daughter(17) was walking down the street by George Green and a lot of Asians spat at her. I mean luckily she had this Asian boy friend for a time, he was there so she was safe. But it does make you wonder'.

The notion that an Asian boy has to give her daughter safe conduct, does not signify for the speaker the benefits of a multiracial friendship, but only underlines the sense that this area has been taken over by an alien presence. And this idea was often linked to the notion of cluster and critical mass:

‘If you've got someone that’s the same religion and same colour and same background you'll stick together. But that's what's causing the problem not only on the Island but in a lot of places in the East End. If they hadn’t moved them in a mass, and they hadn’t tried to take over the area, they'd have integrated a lot better because local people at first were inclined to accept anybody that turned up regardless of colour and religion.’

Now although the point at which first mental map tips over and reverses into the second is here correlated with notional numbers, the actual tipping point in this imagined demographics can, I think, be linked much more to site specific events

Events which serve to articulate – racialise – the relation between space, place and identity. In this case, the two crucial events which mobilised the Rights for Whites campaign were the allocation of new housing at Masthouse terrace to predominantly Bangladeshi families, and the planning application for the construction of a mosque next door to a Church of England church in Cubitt Town:

‘Masthouse – it’s the last straw as far as we are concerned. It’s gone too far. Enough is enough. There is no more room for them. There is no more room for us. We are being driven under. We are becoming extinct. At this rate we'll all end up on Canvey Island.’

So there seems to be quite strong corroboration here for at least one element of the white flight scenario: the sense of being invaded, outnumbered, swamped, and driven out. But when it came to correlating such a position with actual locational choices, things turned out to be not quite so simple.

We asked the ‘rights for whites’ group whether they identified with being an East Ender, or an Islander, a Cockney or some other descriptor, and what they associated with these terms. The sample was virtually unanimous in associating the term Islander exclusively with white people living on the Isle of Dogs, and more especially in Cubitt Town. The older generation were proud to call themselves Islanders; they associated it with long-term residence in the area and keeping up traditional values. They also thought that Islanders were the true East Enders, a term which for most of them was also synonymous with Cockney. And the Cockney in turn was seen to be quintessentially English in character, and as such the very backbone of the British nation. So as you moved up and down the scale from neighbourhood to nation and back again, each site fitting tightly within the one below it, and contained by the one above – a scalar geography which generated a seamless web of positional identifications, a series of nested descriptions which placed people in a wider social structure, and ascribed certain moral characteristics to them

This model was almost completely missing from the George Green youth group. Although quite a few of them strongly identified with being Islanders, they used the term simply as a racial synonym – a condensed statement of whiteness. In fact some of them took great trouble to uncouple or dissociate the term Islander from that of East Ender or Cockney. These latter terms had in their eyes been appropriated by young Bangladeshis and hence had become racially contaminated or hybridised. Now that, of course, was a cue for a few of their peers to adopt these very descriptors in order to take their distance from the racist connotations of Islander. So whereas for their parents and grandparents to proclaim oneself a Cockney was to sign up to little Englander position, for some of their offspring it was the nearest thing they could get to black attitude: it meant to be cool, street wise, and in your face.

The real surprise came when we asked what they felt about the area and whether they intended to stay put or to move. You would expect the self-proclaimed ‘Islanders’ to have voiced the fiercest prides of place, and to have made the most vehement statements about staying put. We certainly did get this from one Right for Whites campaigner:

‘Well there a lot who would like us Islanders to just pack up and go, but we’re not going to be run out of the area by a bunch of people who have no real roots here but are walking around as if they own it. No way, No chance. Hitler couldn’t get us out and this lot aren’t going to do it either.’

But this kind of Custer’s last stand racism was actually a minority report. Amongst the older generation of Islanders, i.e. those who embedded that term in a wider set of identifications, we had a much more ambivalent response. They were often very defensive about the area’s public reputation, even if they dismissed such reports, especially those emanating from the national press or TV which they held to be ill informed and prejudiced. But they were very anxious that their own views might be misconstrued as racist, and might give a wrong or bad impression to people who did not know the situation. For most of this group the Isle of Dogs (in contrast to Canary Wharf) projected a largely negative image to the outside world, for example, as a hotbed of racial violence, or being full of yobs. This awareness was especially marked amongst the George Green youngsters; they were correspondingly more likely to take these 'outside-in' stories directly into account in constructing their own versions of what the area ‘was really like.’

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Should I Stay or Should I Go?

But how did these story lines correlate with the predisposition to move out or stay put. I noticed in revisiting the material that where people were able to run the whole gamut of symbolic identifications associated with island race-ism along the string :Cubitt Towner- Islander-East ender-Cockney-English-British , and where this coincided with membership of extended and geographically dispersed social networks of family and friends, they were able to take a more relativistic and relaxed (but still racially tinged) view of demographic change on the Isle of Dogs. So you got statements like:

‘When I go and visit my sister in Shenfield and hear the way she goes on about the Asians there and what they are like, I come back here and think, well, perhaps it’s not so bad here, we’ve got problems but every place where you’ve got a mix, you’re bound to have some problems, there’s good and bad in every community. And I think to myself, well if it got really bad here I could always move to my sister’s, or even my aunt’s in Clacton, she’s got a really nice place there but I am quite happy here really’.

Because she felt could always move if she wanted to, she felt she didn’t have to. But if only one of these conditions obtained, then aspirations for a better life quickly stirred up anxieties about what might be lost as well as gained in the move. This might open up a space for the elaboration of racially coded rationales:

‘Well we were thinking – may be when Sammy is a bit older – the schools round here, they are really are not up to much. You know they’ve really gone downhill a lot since I was a kid. I sometimes think he’d have a better life somewhere where there’s more room, where it’s safe to play out, more fresh air, better schools, less crime. The only thing that is stopping us is Frank’s job – he’s well settled where he is, he doesn’t really want to change. I guess he could commute in – everybody does these days, don’t they? But it’s not ideal. And then we would miss some of the people round here – they’re really good neighbours some of them – not all, there are a few bad pennies, But and if we went out to some small town out in the sticks it might not be so friendly.’

Or, conversely:

‘No, no, I was born here and I’ll die here. People these days are always going on about the grass is greener on the other side of the street but – well, there might not be much grass round here, but it’s where I was brought up, my brother and uncle still live round the corner, a lot of people think it’s a rough old area, but there’s always a lot going on here, why would I want to move?’

Where racially impacted identifications combined with geographically dispersed social networks, people could avoid feeling trapped, by exporting their model of insularity and connecting it to wider racial geography. These island hoppers as we came to call them made frequent visits to friends, workmates and relatives who also lived in what they regarded as white spaces in outer East London and Essex. In some cases this enabled them to hold onto an all white on the night model – the wider society was still basically safe (because white), even though it was riddled with ‘black spots’ (like the Isle of Dogs). But in other cases their movement between the Isle of Dogs and Essex was precisely what tipped them over into the Custe’sr last stand model , because they generalised their model of the Island – a dangerous black space with a few safe white bolt holes – to the region as whole.

Finally, where the social networks were themselves as impacted as the pattern of identifications, then you got the most overtly racialised version of white flight. From the succinct, ‘the more they come in, the more we go out’ (a classic piece of pseudo-causality if ever there was one), to the more elaborate ethno-demographic scenarios, such as:

‘The joke is these people from rural places all over the world want to come and live in Stepney, and we lot can’t wait to get the hell out to the countryside. We are definitely going to move, if we possibly can. We are really fed up with the way things are round here. It’s all right for the people who live in Canary Wharf, they move around all the time, they have security guards, they send their kids to private school, they are not stuck on these lousy estates having to put up with the noise, the spitting, the smell of the cooking, all day, everyday . But what chance do we have of getting someone who has in a nice place in the country wanting to swap flats with us here?’

The fact that the positions of mobility and immobility are here posed in class as well as race terms seems to enable the speaker to get some argumentative purchase on the situation instead of being simply overwhelmed by it. Where this does not happen the space of flows takes on a more ominous and unconscious resonance.

We are presented here with a dynamic image of a young man going places, (like Bognor Regis and the Isle of Wight), very Island Race destinations to be sure, but he's getting there in a 'flash car' and by joining the wind surfing set. Perhaps it is no coincidence that he signs his map 'Alan Zammit, Art Director of State', as if he had already made the links between these signs of the 'good consumer society', living in the fast lane, working for the cultural industries and Cool Britannia .Yet these is another side to the story - and the picture.

As both discipline and metaphor, windsurfing is about the art of balance, how to keep your feet (or head) above water when the going gets rough, and above all how to bend the forces of Nature (or destiny) to your own advantage. Certainly, a metaphor of success in the self-made rat race, but also one that, at another level, provides a model of psychic equilibrium of particular relevance to those going through the 'storm and stress' phase of adolescence . Yet in the story Alan told about this picture, it becomes clear that the disturbed flurry of water represents both the emotional turbulence of adolescence and a 'sea change' going on in the area.

He confided that he was worried that the Isle of Dogs was slowly going to tip over and disappear into the Thames under the weight of Canary Wharf and all the new building going on. The Island not so much as floating as a sinking signifier. He was worried that there might be a flood and he would be drowned in his sleep. In a subsequent discussion with his friends he told the following story:

‘The other day we went down the market we saw this geezer come up out of a manhole and he was speaking some foreign language. I dunno what it was – Russian, I think. He didn’t know where he was, just stumbled around like a zombie, bumping into people. Then he started talking to these muggers and they showed him where to go and they all went off together.’

His friend backed up his story:

‘Yeah, probably was Russian cos they had one of their warships out there in the river. They're probably working together with the muggers in the sewers, you know. My dad says if Labour win the Russians are gonna take over Docklands and maybe the whole of London.’

This conversation raises lots of questions but the one I want to focus on concerns the use of the figure of the zombie to portray this boy’s racial anxiety and where it may lead him. Zombies are the dead who refuse to die , but come back to haunt the living – an interesting metaphor perhaps for the fate of the English working class in the age of New Labour. But in its uncanny mixture of automatism and disorganisation, the familiar and the alien , mobility and immobility, the Zombie provides , it seems to me, an accurate enough rendition of the condition of white flight, as a medium of the popular racist imagination: always and already poised to take off , but frozen in mid-stride, and never quite getting off the ground.

Phil Cohen is director of the London East Research Institute.

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© 2004·06