Viciously maligned as racists since WWII, nobody bothered to ask working-class whites why they left the cities.
Against any reasonable expectation, America’s once-proud post–World War II suburbanization and middle-class expansion has become a critical flashpoint in our national politics. A generation of left-leaning scholars, major media (think the New York Times’s 1619 project), and antiracist activists have succeeded in establishing that era as one of profound black disfranchisement: As blacks began their second “Great Migration” out of the rural South around 1940, the federal government embarked on a massive suburbanization effort to benefit white people and isolate blacks, an effort that included highway construction, home mortgage insurance, and “redlining,” which effectively excluded blacks from homeownership and left them to pick through the rubble of rapidly deindustrializing urban places.
