WHAT do we understand by White Flight? The term originally described the exodus of white households from school districts in the United States that began admitting black students, but is now most closely associated with the mass migration of white people in the United States from urban to suburban environments during the mid-20th century. The process has appeared in many countries where communities of European descent have resisted racial integration.
I would now like to tell you about my own story of White Flight, not as a statistic, or a headline, or indeed a policy problem — but from the perspective of an indigenous British citizen trying to describe my own personal cultural experience and journey since the early 2000s, which to date I have not heard many of my fellow countrymen talk about publicly.
For many people like me, what is called ‘White Flight’ is first felt not in housing data or census tables. It is felt strongly, culturally, and emotionally — something familiar is slipping, and speaking about it became far too risky and not permitted.
I first began to feel this phenomenon in my home city of London in the early 2000s. This was when Blair began his fatal experiment of mass immigration from the former Eastern Communist bloc countries of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the former Yugoslavia.
I was living and working in central London at the time. Almost overnight I began to hear and see dramatic changes in my area, where for example more and more non-English speakers, most noticeably Polish plumbers and builders, would walk around the streets talking in Polish on their mobile phones and also you would hear cafe waitresses speaking with Eastern European accents, replacing the traditional first generation cockney or sometimes second or third generation Italian or Spanish Brit, whom I had grown up with.
The numbers accelerated and around 2003 I would get on my local bus and hardly hear any native English person.
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