White American in the context of "White flight"

⭐ In the context of white flight, which demographic shift contributed to the movement of White Americans out of urban centers alongside desegregation efforts?

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⭐ Core Definition: White American

White Americans (sometimes also called Caucasian Americans) are Americans who identify as white people. In a more official sense, the United States Census Bureau, which collects demographic data on Americans, defines "white" as "[a] person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa". Individuals within this group have light skin tones and hair colors that include brown, blonde, black or red. White Americans have historically constituted the majority population in the United States, though their share has been gradually declining in recent decades. As of the latest American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2024, an estimated 59.8% of the U.S. population—approximately 203.3 million people—identify as White alone, while Non-Hispanic Whites account for 56.3% of the population, or roughly 191.4 million people. Overall, 72.1% of Americans identify as White either alone or in combination with one or more other racial groups. European Americans are by far the largest panethnic group of white Americans and have constituted the majority population of the United States since the nation's founding. Middle Eastern Americans constitute a much smaller demographic of white Americans, making up around 1.1% of the US population in 2020.

According to the 2020 census, 61.6% of Americans, or 204,277,273 people, identified as White alone. This represented a national decrease from a 72.4% white alone share of the US population in the 2010 census. The share of Americans identifying as White alone or in combination (including multiracial white people) was 71.0% in 2020, a smaller decline from 74.8% of the population in 2010. As opposed to the declines seen in the white alone population, the number of people identifying as part white (in combination with other races) saw a large increase, growing from 2.4% of the population in 2010, to 9.4% in 2020.

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👉 White American in the context of White flight

The white flight, also known as white exodus, refers to the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse to more racially homogenous suburban or exurban regions. The term has more recently been applied to other migrations by whites from older, inner suburbs to rural areas, as well as from the American Northeast and Midwest to the milder climate in the South and West. The term 'white flight' has also been used for large-scale post-colonial emigration of whites from Africa, or parts of that continent, driven by levels of violent crime and anti-colonial or anti-white state policies. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular, especially in the United States.

Migration of middle-class white populations was observed during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s out of cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City and Oakland, although racial segregation of public schools had ended there long before the Supreme Court of the United States' decision Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In the 1970s, attempts to achieve effective desegregation (or "integration") by means of busing in some areas led to more families' moving out of former areas. More generally, some historians suggest that white flight occurred in response to population pressures, both from the large migration of blacks from the rural Southern United States to urban cities of the Northeastern United States, Midwestern United States and the Western United States in the Great Migration and the waves of new immigrants from around the world.

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White American in the context of Louisiana in the American Civil War

Louisiana was a dominant population center in the southwest of the Confederate States of America, controlling the wealthy trade center of New Orleans, and contributing the French Creole and Cajun populations to the demographic composition of a predominantly Anglo-American country. In the antebellum period, Louisiana was a slave state, where enslaved African Americans had comprised the majority of the population during the eighteenth-century French and Spanish dominations. By the time the United States acquired the territory (1803) and Louisiana became a state (1812), the institution of slavery was entrenched. By 1860, 47% of the state's population were enslaved, though the state also had one of the largest free black populations in the United States. Much of the white population, particularly in the cities, supported slavery, while pockets of support for the U.S. and its government existed in the more rural areas.

Louisiana declared that it had seceded from the Union on January 26, 1861. Civil-War era New Orleans, the largest city in the South, was strategically important as a port city due to its southernmost location on the Mississippi River and its access to the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. War Department early on planned for its capture. The city was taken by U.S. Army forces on April 25, 1862. Because a large part of the population had Union sympathies (or compatible commercial interests), the U.S. government took the unusual step of designating the areas of Louisiana then under U.S. control as a state within the Union, with its own elected representatives to the U.S. Congress. For the latter part of the war, both the U.S. and the Confederacy recognized their own distinct Louisiana governors. Similarly, New Orleans and 13 named parishes of the state were exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation, which applied exclusively to states in rebellion against the Union.

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White American in the context of Arkansas

Arkansas (/ˈɑːrkənsɔː/ AR-kən-saw) is a landlocked state in the West South Central region of the Southern United States. It borders Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, Texas to the southwest, and Oklahoma to the west. Its name derives from the Osage language, and refers to their relatives, the Quapaw people. The state's diverse geography ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the densely forested land in the south known as the Arkansas Timberlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River and the Arkansas Delta.

Previously part of French Louisiana and the Louisiana Purchase, the Territory of Arkansas was admitted to the Union as the 25th state on June 15, 1836. Much of the Delta had been developed for cotton plantations, and landowners there largely depended on enslaved African Americans' labor. In 1861, Arkansas seceded from the United States and joined the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. On returning to the Union in 1868, Arkansas continued to suffer economically, due to its overreliance on the large-scale plantation economy. Cotton remained the leading commodity crop, and the cotton market declined. Because farmers and businessmen did not diversify and there was little industrial investment, the state fell behind in economic opportunity. In the late 19th century, the state instituted various Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise and segregate the African-American population. White interests dominated Arkansas's politics, with disenfranchisement of African Americans and refusal to reapportion the legislature; only after the federal legislation passed were more African Americans able to vote. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Arkansas and particularly Little Rock were major battlegrounds for efforts to integrate schools. Following World War II in the 1940s, Arkansas began to diversify its economy and see prosperity. During the 1960s, the state became the base of the Walmart corporation, the world's largest company by revenue, headquartered in Bentonville.

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White American in the context of White ethnics

White ethnic is a term used to refer to white Americans who are not Old Stock or white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. They consist of a number of distinct groups and make up approximately 69.4% of the white population in the United States. The term usually refers to the descendants of immigrants from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, Ireland, the Caucasus and France/Francophone Canada. Italian Americans, Polish Americans, Russian Americans, Czech Americans and Slovak Americans, Hungarian Americans and Austrian Americans are considered white ethnic.

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White American in the context of Cultural framework

Cultural framework (culture model) is a term used in social science to explain traditions, value systems, myths and symbols that are common in a given society. A given society may have multiple cultural frameworks (for example, United States society has different cultural frameworks for its white American and African American populations). Usually cultural frameworks are mixed as certain individuals or entire groups can be familiar with any number of cultural frameworks.

There is an important relation between cultural frameworks and ideologies: Most successful ideologies are closely connected to cultural frameworks of societies they spread in. Cultural framework theory should not, however, be confused with ideology, a separate concept. Nazism, for example, was an ideology in Nazi Germany at the time, while religious beliefs, patriotism, and traditions dating back to Germanic and Frankish tribes were part of the German culture framework.

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White American in the context of Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign

Donald Trump ran a successful campaign for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He formally announced his campaign on June 16, 2015, at Trump Tower in New York City, initially battling for the Republican Party's nomination. On May 26, 2016, he became the Republican Party's presumptive nominee. Trump was officially nominated on July 19 at the Republican National Convention. He chose Mike Pence, the sitting governor of Indiana, as his vice presidential running mate. On November 8, Trump and Pence were elected president and vice president of the United States.

Trump's populist positions in opposition to illegal immigration and various trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, earned him support especially among voters who were male, white, blue-collar, working class, and those without college degrees. Many voters in the Rust Belt, who gave Trump the electoral votes needed to win the presidency, switched from supporting Bernie Sanders to Trump after Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination.

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White American in the context of Personal income in the United States

Personal income is an individual's total earnings from wages, investment interest, and other sources. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median weekly personal income of $1,196 for full-time workers in the United States in Q2 2025. For the year 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the median annual earnings for all workers (people aged 15 and over with earnings) was $51,370; and more specifically estimates that median annual earnings for those who worked full-time, year round, was $63,360.

Income patterns are evident on the basis of age, sex, ethnicity and educational characteristics. In 2005 roughly half of all those with graduate degrees were among the nation's top 15% of income earners. Among different demographics (gender, marital status, ethnicity) for those over the age of 18, median personal income ranged from $3,317 for an unemployed, married Asian American female to $55,935 for a full-time, year-round employed Asian American male. According to the US Census, men tended to have higher income than women, while Asians and Whites earned more than African Americans and Hispanics.

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White American in the context of Texians

Texians were white American immigrants to Mexican Texas and, later, citizens of the Republic of Texas. Today, the term is used to identify early Anglo settlers of Texas, especially those who supported the Texas Revolution. Mexican settlers of that era are referred to as Tejanos, and American citizens of the modern State of Texas regardless of race and ethnicity are referred to as Texans.

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