white flight
white flight noun: the large-scale migration of white people from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions.
Noun
white flight (uncountable)
- The large-scale migration of white people from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions.
- The [Hyde Park-Kenwood Community] Conference was formed in an attempt to stop panic-inspiring rumors and "white flight," and so to work for an integrated, peaceful community.1954 July, Ann O'Reilly, “World Citizen Starts on His Block”, in Catholic Interracialist, volume 14, number 3, page 3
- This is illegitimate, since it is only the current bigotry in the society that causes property values to drop—as the result of white flight and the subsequent reduction in the size of the purchasing market.1988, Richard D. Mohr, Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society, and Law, →ISBN, page 193
Origin of white flight
Attested since 1954. Note that state laws enforcing racial segregation in schools were ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education the same year.
Questions about white flight
- What does white flight mean?
- White flight means the large-scale migration of white people from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions.
- What part of speech is white flight?
- White flight is a noun.
Words near white flight in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: white flight (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “white flight.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/white_flight. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.