Untenable

Long accused of racism and ';white flight,' the ethnic Americans driven from their homes and neighborhoodsthe author includedfinally get the chance to tell their side of the story.';A startlingly honest and poignant look at ';white flight' from the white perspective. A necessary and overdue corrective.' Brent Bozell III, founder and president of the Media Research Center I asked one lifelong friend, a rare Democrat among the displaced, why he and his widowed mother finally left our block in the early 1970s, twenty years after the first African-American families moved in. He searched a minute for the right set of words, and then simply said, ';It became untenable.' When I asked what he meant by ';untenable,' he answered, ';When your mother gets mugged for the second time, that's untenable. When your home gets broken into for the second time, that's untenable.' In researching this project, I found myself repeatedly stunned by the failure of self-described experts on white flight to ask those accused of fleeing why it was they fled. The reason the experts didn't ask, I discovered, is that they were afraid of what they might learn.