Multiculturalism: UK Black flight on way?

A report about black flight from the Northeast and Midwest to Southern states of America is in stark contrast to the white flight that takes place in the UK.

In this country multicultural communities are found wanting as better off mainstream residents pack up and leave urban areas for rural 'English bastions'.

Except in richer inner city areas like Westminster where we learn that it is the minority ethnic population who are to be forced to move out and into poor urban areas to make room for rich investors.

But it seems that black America has turned the tables and is taking the initiave to move out of economically strapped cities to areas were they believe they will fair better.

The New York Times Washington bureau reported yesterday that according to census data; ‘The percentage of the nation’s black population living in the South has hit its highest point in half a century as younger and more educated black residents move out of declining cities in the Northeast and Midwest in search of better opportunities.

For the first time Atlanta has replaced Chicago as the metro area with the largest number of African-Americans after New York. About 17 percent of blacks who moved to the South in the past decade left New York State, far more than from any other state.

At the same time, in other states, blacks have begun leaving cities for more affluent suburbs in large numbers, much like generations of whites before them.

“The notion of the North and its cities as the promised land has been a powerful part of African-American life, culture and history, and now it all seems to be passing by,” said Clement Price, a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark. “The black urban experience has essentially lost its appeal with blacks in America.”

Both Michigan and Illinois, whose cities have rich black cultural traditions, showed an overall loss of blacks for the first time, said William Frey, the chief demographer at the Brookings Institution. “This is the decade of black flight. It’s a new age for African-Americans. It’s long overdue, but it seems to be happening.” Said Mr. Frey.

The percentage of black Americans living in the South is still far lower than before the Great Migration in the earlier part of the last century, when 90 percent did. But today it is 57 percent, the highest since 1960.

Black flight may not yet be on the agenda here in the UK,  but being a decade or two behind the USA, it probably won’t be long before Britain’s multicultural communities seek better opportunities, perhaps even oceans away this country's urban centres.

Winsome-Grace Cornish