While I’m not trying to distract from the main thrust of this piece (a lot of which I take no issue with), I do think the Cupertino example has been sensationalized in a potentially inaccurate way. I’m from Cupertino, and was in high school when the WSJ’s “New White Flight” article first grabbed national attention. The high school I attended is one of two high schools often brought up whenever White Flight and Cupertino are mentioned in the same sentence.

What the “New White Flight” and most subsequent citations of the Cupertino example often leave out is that Cupertino’s large demographic shift may not have been predominantly driven by White families leaving for schools with less demanding competition (though there was some of that), but by other population dynamics as the city grew, and as it’s primary industry shifted from agriculture to technology.

When the tech industry took off in Cupertino, orchards were flattened for houses. Wherever there were new properties and vacancies would be where newly arrived asian immigrants would settle down. Meanwhile, incumbent families tied to agriculture were probably moving out for employment reasons. This wasn’t a sudden process either. If you dig through the census you’d notice that the demographic shift occurred gradually over a span of thirty years. We do see an acceleration of the shift between 2000 and 2010, but I’ve always wondered if maybe that has more to do with Asian families crowding out White families for real estate freed open from natural attrition once factors like retirement, death, etc. came into play.

I think we’re being misleading if we don’t consider that some of these stories where entire communities become predominantly Asian aren’t stories of White families leaving, but of Asian families coming. While White Flight is very real, not every community where Asians become the plurality or majority population will have been because of it. Demographic changes can be complex and dynamic, and the factors that go into each case isn’t always going to share a uniform explanation. After all, if Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in America, and if they tend to cluster around the same geographies, we would be getting these areas with a greater concentrations Asians even without White people making a deliberate decision to leave. This shouldn’t take our attention away from White Flight, but then, White Flight shouldn’t completely replace our recognition for these other factors either.