Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, by Jack Cashill (Post Hill Press, 288 pp., $20)
Our well-intentioned government—named the “Good Intentions Paving Company” by financial analyst James Grant—always seems to find itself scrambling to explain how its latest scheme for a better world has delivered us into an even lower circle of hell. Bureaucrats to the core, they’ve even developed a one-step procedure for dealing with this task: blame it on the people. The term “white flight” is a product of this procedure.
A principal benefit of this system is that the Paving Company doesn’t have to ask people—in this case, the whites who took “flight”—why they fled. It must be because they were fleeing from nonwhite people, and fleeing from nonwhite people is racist. Why would you bother consulting racists about their motives?
Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable, punctures this familiar white flight narrative. Cashill’s subtitle promises the “true story of white ethnic flight from America’s cities.” Cashill has learned a thing or two from his fellow descendant of Irish refugees, Ronald Reagan: damn the statistics, tell the stories. In fact, let people tell their own stories. In this book, they finally get the chance to do so.
Decades on, few have bothered asking white ethnic residents why they left the neighborhoods where they had met and married spouses, raised families, made their livings, drank beer together, cheered the home team, and gone to the movies. They (or their forebears) hadn’t left Ireland, Germany, Italy, or Poland lightly. It took poverty, starvation, tyranny, and decades of suffering, in many cases, to get them to our shores. We’re expected to believe that they dropped the fruits of a lifetime’s effort in America and decamped for the suburbs solely because some black families bought houses a few blocks away.
This certainly isn’t the story the white ethnics tell in the pages of Untenable. Their reasons for leaving boil down to two things: the rise of crime and the collapse of schools.
The book takes its title from one of those stories. Cashill asked a friend, a lifelong Democrat, why he and his mother had left the old neighborhood in the latter years of its long decline. “It became untenable,” came the careful reply. What did he mean by that? “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.”
Cashill posted word of his book project on his grade school’s alumni page; the responses he got from his fellow refugees from the Roseville neighborhood of Newark were numerous and moving. A smattering: “Leaving Roseville was one of the hardest and most emotional parts of my life . . . We had a wonderful life and didn’t know it until we see (sic) the way things changed . . . God, I miss the Roseville Section. Leaving there was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It just wasn’t safe to live there anymore . . . I’ve always envied those that can go home again.”
