Michelle Obama is almost certainly correct to think that some white South Shore residents assumed the worst about her family 50 years ago, based on the Robinsons’ skin color. But a less accusatory interpretation of white flight is at least as plausible. Because South Shore was not Chicago’s first predominantly white neighborhood to experience racial turnover, its white residents in the 1960s and 1970s were aware of the established pattern: demographic change led to higher crime, lower property values, and deterioration. If not for this knowledge that “the black poor will follow where the black middle class goes,” Rotella contends, “much of the resistance to the initial black migration into South Shore would never have materialized.”
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Michelle Obama is almost certainly correct to think that some white South Shore residents assumed the worst about her family 50 years ago, based on the Robinsons’ skin color. But a less accusatory interpretation of white flight is at least as plausible. Because South Shore was not Chicago’s first predominantly white neighborhood to experience racial turnover, its white residents in the 1960s and 1970s were aware of the established pattern: demographic change led to higher crime, lower property values, and deterioration. If not for this knowledge that “the black poor will follow where the black middle class goes,” Rotella contends, “much of the resistance to the initial black migration into South Shore would never have materialized.”
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