As I’m not particularly interested in dramas about criminal gangs, I didn’t watch The Sopranos when it was on TV. This clip, courtesy of Arthur Sido, makes me wonder if I should have:
There are multiple ironies embedded in that short scene… and one overarching truth: The urban neighborhoods that white Nineteenth-Century immigrant families built and filled after arriving here have largely turned into rundown black enclaves it’s not safe even to drive through.
In the early part of the Nineteenth Century, the waves of immigrants were mostly from England and Ireland. After the Civil War, the balance shifted, with ever more Southern and Eastern Europeans in the mix. Toward the end of that century, demographic patterns began to shift: poor blacks in the American South started northward, looking for better opportunities than the South offered them. They flocked toward the urban centers of the North, and found that the European-heritage communities that dominated the cities weren’t particularly happy to greet them.
The black migrants of those waves were unready for the Northern cities. Let whose responsibility that was be put aside for now. Those Negroes, accustomed to economy of the agrarian South, faced both the unease and hostility of the Northern communities but also the challenge presented by urban economy, which was dynamic because it was industrial. Many found themselves worse off for their relocation.
That engendered a lot of resentment. There arose a de facto demarcation among urban neighborhoods: an intensification of informal boundaries previously based on ethnic heritage. Those boundaries came to include race. Attitudes hardened as unpleasant encounters multiplied. Gangs emerged that often profited from the fears and animosities involved.
Over time, there was racial “bleed-through.” Previously white urban neighborhoods slowly acquired a black population. As they multiplied, so did the crime that has traditionally accompanied urban black concentrations. The white families began to flee the neighborhoods they’d built for safer districts: mostly the suburbs. Steve Sailer reminds us:
“White flight” is the pejorative used to dismiss the lived experience of the many millions of white Americans whose neighborhood flipped from white to black in the second half of the 20th Century, such as Pope Leo XIV’s hometown of Dolton, IL, just across the city line from Chicago. The implication is that hallucinatory stereotypes about black crime and disorder in the schools caused bigoted whites to pointlessly flee geographically convenient urban locations for the soulless suburbs.
Steve also presents this graphic:

Those white families didn’t willingly (much less happily) flee the neighborhoods they and their predecessors had built. In departing they were often abandoning investments as well as history: churches, schools, businesses, community gathering places, and the like. The impetus to “white flight” had to be very strong.
It wasn’t about skin color alone. Some of it was, certainly, but there were other influences:
- Loud, boisterous black “culture;”
- Differences in faith and faith practice;
- Crime and the emergence of street gangs.
It was a harbinger of things to come. Proud, prosperous cities were steadily rendered less and less congenial to those who had previously filled them. Houses became tumbledown and lots went to seed. Storefronts were boarded up. Zones where cathedrals had stood turned to rubble.
We should have paid more attention.