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An ambitious, well-researched, and interesting study, White Flight offers a provocative examination of the connections between race and conservative politics. While the backlash thesis for explaining the modern conservative movement has been with us for quite a while, Kevin M. Kruse has offered something fresh. In not trying to explain how working-class whites (often described as urban ethnics in many studies) devolved from New Deal liberals to Reagan conservatives, Kruse follows the tradition of Thomas Sugrue and Arnold Hirsch. He instead demonstrates the longstanding saliency of race in urban politics— even in Atlanta. Kruse's argument is simple—Atlanta's reputation for racial tolerance simply does not bear out when one examines the neighborhood-by-neighborhood battles over desegregating housing, schools, and public spaces. As Atlanta's white residents lost those contests they fled the city. But, according to Kruse, white flight represented more than a simple knee-jerk reaction to outside forces; instead it was part of a learning process experienced by many white Atlantans as they figured out a new set of political ideals. Like countless other working-class and middle-class whites, they learned a new language to express their dissatisfaction with the changes wrought by the postwar world and to express a new affinity for an emerging conservative politics. By couching their racism in the language of “rights, freedoms, and individualism” they brought about, according to Kruse, a “political revolution” (p. 6).
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