‘Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities’

Book Review: Author's hometown lays out ways to start a national dialogue

The intersection of Broad and Market Streets as seen from the Prudential Plaza Building, in Downtown Newark. (CC By 2.0)

“White flight” is one of those terms that drips with resentment and feeds on self-hatred.

As a label for the mass movement of white Americans out of cities during the 20th century, it’s no friendlier than “gentrification,” used to define the reverse movement over recent decades. But many white people, such as “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo, adopt and promote such self-abasing language. Why would any group make sense of themselves in such overtly hostile terms? How did it come about?

Jack Cashill’s “Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities” provides some answers for those who didn’t live through the ‘60s.

Correcting the Record

As with anything involving race in today’s America, one side of any “national conversation” on white flight is artificially amplified. The other is mostly unspoken or suppressed.

When Hollywood shows that other side, it’s through the perspective of antiheroes. Think the ultra-bigoted Walt Kowalski in “Gran Torino” or, a few generations earlier, Archie Bunker in “All in the Family.”

Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino." (Warner Bros. Pictures)

The conventional white-flight narrative flattens a diverse group of whites, from Southern farmers to Lithuanian factory workers to Irish cops, into a singular, homogenous force of hate, presumably doomed to lose to love. The “villains” in this quasi-Christian narrative assume the dimensions of metaphysical evil. The “heroes” are likewise flattened into martyrs or saviors and thus never permitted to be human.

That’s no basis for a dialogue or “national conversation.” It’s the basis for a never-ending sermon. The central lesson: You cannot expiate your blood guilt, no matter how hard you try, because forgiveness is forever out of reach.

It’s tempting and, at times, proper to correct the record as forcefully as it has been distorted. Yet, a more patient, less inflammatory approach has its value, too. For those with ears to hear, Mr. Cashill’s book could open up a dialogue.

The Fate of Newark

Mr. Cashill focuses on his hometown, Newark, New Jersey. Over just a decade or two, the Gateway City swung from majority white to majority black. He came of age during the rocky transition, including the 1967 riots that tore the city apart.

A dialogue needn’t stop at two people, let alone the half-abstract monoliths of “black” and “white.” “Untenable” weaves together multiple perspectives, some more sympathetically than others.

Sharing space are radical black activist Amiri Baraka, black conservative commentator Jesse Lee Peterson, Italian-American activist Anthony Imperiale, and even a very young Joe Rogan.

The intersection of Broad and Market Streets as seen from the Prudential Plaza Building, in Downtown Newark. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The dreaded WASP Man, assimilator of ethnicities, wasn’t immune to white flight—witness the ultra-fast transition of heavily Protestant Greater Grand Crossing in Chicago—yet he’s largely absent from Mr. Cashill’s Newark. He’s the remote “Protestant establishment” manipulating events behind the scenes or the past generation whose “cranky” history records their providential displacement from the neighborhood of his childhood, Roseville. That’s a still-acceptable interpretation of the new America, where 1776 has been replaced by 1619 and the 13 colonies by Ellis Island.

Roseville’s story is similar to that of “Rosedale,” a pseudonymous community in Texas studied by sociologist Scott Cummings, and the subject of a viral Twitter thread. As the neighborhood became blacker, crime rose. Gradually, and then all at once, the whites left.

Mr. Cashill doesn’t ignore other factors. New welfare policies destabilized the black family, remarkably strong after slavery and segregation. Left-wing radicals, both black and white, whipped up anger and violence, even against the city’s firefighters. The mainstream media maintained its steady drumbeat of hate, vilifying local leaders like Imperiale, and communities like Roseville.

Yet, day-to-day violence remains an inescapable “root cause” of white flight, and the inspiration for his book’s title: One of the author’s childhood friends, “a loyal Democrat,” called repeated muggings and break-ins the “untenable” drivers of his family’s departure from Newark.

For all his frankness on race and crime, Mr. Cashill doesn’t paint his black neighbors with an overly broad brush. Other ex-Newarkers evidently share that nuanced view:

“In my conversations with Newark refugees, I was struck by how many made a point of exempting their black friends and neighbors from any responsibility for the riots. Unlike their suburban peers, however, they did not exempt the bad guys. As one friend tells me, ‘I had the guilt beaten out of me a long time ago.’”

“Untenable” challenges other conventional narratives about white flight. Historians and Newarkers are better placed than I am to accept or contest some claims. For example, that the cabbie whose apprehension triggered the ‘67 riots was mostly lying, or that there are no well-attributed accounts of blockbusters paying black women to push baby carriages through white neighborhoods.

Ethnic origins in Newark. (Noahnmf /CC BY-SA 4.0)

But Mr. Cashill’s big-picture explanation of Newark’s racial transition is hard to dispute. Interviews, Facebook comments, admittedly “sketchy” city statistics, and other sources converge on a very similar story. By 1982, when he temporarily came home to work for the Newark Housing Authority, the reality of the situation was unavoidable: “The more I saw of Newark that year the clearer it became that flight was the only rational option for any adult capable of leaving, white or black.”

Ethnos and Civilization

Mr. Cashill is also blunt about which white groups stuck it out the longest.

“The Italians did not cut and run from Newark. The Jews did,” he writes in a critique of anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s account of Weequahic High School, once a stronghold of that community.

He chalks this up to Jewish Newarkers’ reliance on Weequahic and the city’s other public schools, where they unsurprisingly excelled. “For reasons both cultural and genetic, Jews long ago proved the futility of pursuing educational ‘equity,’” Mr. Cashill observes.

Italians, by contrast, had Catholic schools.

The racial transition saw Newark’s public schools go downhill, and not just academically. Like the adults at Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn, the subject of Harold Saltzman’s “Race War in High School,” Newark teachers sometimes faced coordinated violence from blacks. The Jews of Newark, though often more liberal than their Catholic neighbors, voted with their feet, and quickly. The frankest (here unquotable) explanation comes in novelist Phillip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman books, another thread in Mr. Cashill’s work.

Focused as he is on Newark, Mr. Cashill doesn’t quote Tom Wolfe’s New York-set “Bonfire of the Vanities.” Notably, though, one of that Southern satirist’s characters offers a comparably unvarnished take on the toughness of tri-state ethnic Catholics, these ones in the Bronx District Attorney’s Homicide Bureau:

“Homicide had been an Irish enclave, although recently the Italians had made their way into it … The Irish were stone courageous. Even when it was insane not to, they never stepped back.”

Elite appreciation for stone courageous Irish cops, and whites more generally, reached a low ebb in 2020. In Newark, as elsewhere, a monument to explorer Christopher Columbus was torn down to make way for an icon of the new America. Goodbye, Columbus. Hello, George Floyd.

A statue of Christopher Columbus in Washington Park, as photographed on March 3, 2020, has since been torn down. (Jim.henderson/CC BY-SA 4.0)

Christopher Columbus statue base, after Columbus was removed. Newark, New Jersey. (Kenneth C. Zirkel/CC BY-SA 4.0)

There’s no shortage of questions that a genuine national conversation about race might answer. For instance, why do white Americans, now more deracinated than ever, exhibit increasing loneliness, mental illness, drug addiction, obesity, and a host of other physical and social pathologies, as documented by Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton?

Could the dislocation of millions from Newark and communities like it be one root cause? If the answer makes too many people uncomfortable, any “national conversation” will be shut down. But the questions won’t go away.

"Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities" by Jack Cashill. (Post Hill Press)

‘Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities’ By Jack Cashill Post Hill Press, July 4, 2023 Hardcover: 288 pages

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