How to Use white flight in a Sentence

white flight

noun
  • The highways were essential to the white flight of the postwar decades.
    Max Holleran, The New Republic, 25 Apr. 2023
  • Two point five kids, a husband who works all day, a dog, white flight.
    BostonGlobe.com, 4 Aug. 2021
  • The changes played out over the 1960s as white schools were opened to minorities, sparking white flight to the suburbs.
    Anita Snow, Los Angeles Times, 1 Aug. 2019
  • By the early decades of the 20th century, white flight from St. Louis to the suburbs was well under way.
    Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, 7 Sep. 2017
  • While some attest to white flight as the reasons behind the demise of MySpace, the same can’t be said of Twitter.
    Chris Gilliard kishonna Gray, WIRED, 13 Dec. 2022
  • But by then white flight had devastated the city’s tax base.
    Washington Post, 11 Apr. 2022
  • Surprisingly, the places with the most white flight were scattered across the country.
    Michael Harriot, The Root, 25 Apr. 2018
  • That reversed a 60-year trend of white flight that had helped make Detroit the nation’s blackest big city.
    Bill McGraw, Detroit Free Press, 21 Dec. 2017
  • By contrast, North Pullman fell prey to white flight and poverty.
    Laurent Belsie, The Christian Science Monitor, 23 Dec. 2021
  • Once a thriving white community, Grove Park saw white flight in the 1960s.
    Patrik Jonsson, The Christian Science Monitor, 4 Mar. 2021
  • Decades of white flight have whittled down the city’s economic footing.
    NBC News, 13 Mar. 2021
  • In the 1980s, white flight began to reshape Ascension Parish.
    Joan Meiners, ProPublica, 3 Nov. 2019
  • Some white flight was brought on by prejudice from those who didn’t want to live near African-Americans.
    Chicago Tribune, 1 Apr. 2018
  • For the first time the city witnessed the disappearance of its economic elite — a sort of white flight without the racial aspect.
    Ashraf Khalil, Town & Country, 21 Dec. 2012
  • That began to change when white flight reached the capital city of Jackson in the 1960s and Rankin’s fields gave way to subdivisions and strip malls.
    Nate Rosenfield Rory Doyle For The New York Times, New York Times, 30 Nov. 2023
  • Amid the crack epidemic and white flight from the city, the department was desperate for recruits.
    Longreads, 2 May 2024
  • The American suburbs, created by white flight from the cities, have long been the site of racialized terror.
    Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 2 Sep. 2020
  • Given that magnet programs began in Montgomery as a way to stem white flight in the 1980s, the magnets have had some impact.
    Christopher Harress, AL.com, 13 Sep. 2017
  • The net effect was an outward flow of capital and white flight to the wealthy Oakland Hills neighborhoods.
    Julian Agyeman, The Conversation, 9 Mar. 2021
  • One by one — throughout the decades that ushered in desegregation, redlining and white flight — the stores shut down.
    Amelia Pak-Harvey, The Indianapolis Star, 4 June 2021
  • Marty’s family never left the South Bronx, even during the fires, riots, and white flight of the Seventies.
    Rozina Ali, Harper’s Magazine , 7 Dec. 2021
  • Mayor Henry Maier, though, believed that open housing would only cause white flight and erode his white support on the south side.
    Mary Spicuzza, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 17 Apr. 2018
  • Then came busing, and white flight, and Proposition 13, which shredded state revenue.
    Steve Lopez, latimes.com, 12 June 2019
  • For seven years in the mid-2000s, Detroit didn't even have a large grocery chain, in part the result of a long history of white flight from the city and underinvestment.
    Nathaniel Meyersohn, CNN, 16 June 2020
  • At the time, cities were looking for ways to improve the diversity of the municipal workforce and limit white flight to the suburbs.
    Mark Nichols, USA TODAY, 14 June 2020
  • Hopgood is not the only example of a white flight academy.
    Peter Greene, Forbes, 29 June 2021
  • That the black youths had driven to the county, populated in no small part by decades of white flight from the city, fueled heated exchanges online and over the airwaves.
    Jean Marbella, baltimoresun.com, 25 May 2018
  • Related In the ’60s, white flight ravaged the Bronx, and New York’s subsequent neglect resulted in widespread fires, crime and street gangs.
    Steve Knopper, Billboard, 8 Aug. 2023
  • But there are vast distinctions between the two sides, the residue of disinvestment and white flight by families like Johnson’s.
    Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Washington Post, 29 Oct. 2023
  • As in Chicago, unrest in Baltimore’s black neighborhoods cemented white flight to the suburbs and other parts of the city.
    Latoya Ruby Frazier, The Atlantic, 3 Apr. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'white flight.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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