The Nostalgia of White Flight

My high school classmates were back on my Facebook feed this morning, whooping it up about our rebel youth. The last time I wrote about this they were obsessing about our antiwar activism and about a rather tasteless performance some of us engaged in for a high school "battle of the bands." This time they revived a conversation from two-and-a-half years ago, which was originally started by the news of the death of our attorney from a 1968 freedom-of-speech suit against our principal. That thread devolved into nostalgia about the humorous newspaper for which the editors were suspended, then reminiscences about favorite teachers, and -- finally, because that principal, many teachers, and lots of parents left Newark for the suburb we lived in -- idylls about both our home town and the Weequahic section that so many of them lived in before moving.

Yes. The nostalgia of white flight.

When Chris Christie declared his candidacy for Presidency of the United States, he did it in the gymnasium of our high school. He graduated ten years after we did. His speech was an encomium to white flight. He made it synonymous with the American dream, saying:

I'm here in Livingston because all those years ago, my mother and father became the first of either of their families to leave the city of Newark to come here and make this home for us.

He spoke about his dad working days in the Breyer's ice cream plant and attending Rutgers at night. He added:

My parents moved to Livingston and they moved to Livingston to make this part of their fulfillment of their dream. Of their version of the American dream. 

He didn't mention that this move came immediately after the Newark rebellion of 1967. He didn't have to. His audience understands that without even thinking.

Chris Christie's high school buddy is best-selling author Harlan Coben. Coben, too, was born in Newark. His parents, too, fled to Livingston. I have read only a few of his dozens of popular mysteries, but what they all had in common was Livingston-as-utopia.

When I look at my high school yearbook I see 625 (give or take) white faces. I remember a Chinese boy and a Japanese girl. In the class that followed me there were two (2!) African American students, the first ever to attend the school. This was no accident and I remember speaking about this intentional segregation at the time. I remember adult neighbors, angry at my dad for refusing to pledge never to sell to a non-white family. But I also know that my parents moved to that town. I know that they made that choice.

A lot of the classmates waxing sentimental about our youthful rebellions brag about their parents liberality and even leftism. Some of those parents were activists in the unions. Some of them were members of socialist organizations. But they all left Newark for all-white Livingston. They describe the Weequahic section of Newark in the forties and fifties (when it was the home of celebrated novelist Philip Roth) as "Jewish" and "liberal." Yet all these "liberals" and "leftists" fled for an all-white suburb. It begs the question what those words mean.

But I am not interested in interrogating our parents. I am not even interested in tarnishing our memories of them, so many already gone. I am interested in asking what kind of "liberal" are you in 2019 if you cannot see any of this? I know all of you oppose Trump. I know all of you oppose "hatred" and "racism." But we grew up in a place that institutionalized white supremacy by establishing itself as a separate municipality, with separate taxes for separate schools. So many dads of my childhood friends went to Newark every day to enrich themselves, some with liquor stores, some with real estate, some with less egregious forms of cockroach capitalism. So many moms of my childhood friends had "help": women who rode the bus from Newark everyday to work in the homes of essentially middle-class families, families who could afford to act like gentry because the women who cleaned for them were systematically denied other opportunities!

This is why I am so suspicious of people who think that socialism will solve other social problems, especially white supremacy. I don't believe you actually care about it. I don't believe you even see it.