Jamelle Bouie ably dismembers an argument from Jonathan Chait that white flight from Detroit was the result of cold cost-benefit analysis and had nothing to do with racialized fears:
Yes, Chait is right to say that crime rose sharply, whites were afraid of it. But their migration from the cities occurred well before the crime explosion, and even then, suburban whites were least affected by growing crime rates. With that in mind, I think it’s fair to say that for a non-trivial number of whites, “fear of crime” was actually code for “black people.”
I think Chait is guilty of a common logical fallacy, which is that if a stereotype is widely held or even if you yourself believe a racial stereotype to be true, it can’t be racist because, well you aren’t wearing a white hood are you? This is the result of reducing prejudice to something only