If, as Row puts it, American fiction most often addresses race through silences and omissions, he wants to force these silences to speak, to reveal themselves as self-serving — meant to protect white supremacy. It’s a project that owes a debt to Toni Morrison’s 1992 book “Playing in the Dark.” Morrison wrote of an “Africanist” presence in American literature that amounted to no authentic black presence at all, only static figures representing “notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy or routine dread.” Row extends that analysis by turning his attention to the giants of postwar American literature, in whose work new forms of marginalization take root.

In wrestling with such fiction’s relationship to race, his collection draws its title and central concept from a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon: the exodus of white Americans from inner cities as the federal government experimented with integration policies and social unrest overtook communities across the nation. In his 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that white flight was a socially engineered conspiracy, an attempt to maintain white political and economic domination at a moment when black activism and federal intervention threatened to erode both. For Row, there’s an analogue in contemporary fiction: white authors fleeing the problem of race. Literary white flight — into imagined worlds from which black people and the urgent questions their presence begs have been absented — is no less a matter of power.

Row demonstrates this through astute close readings in which he analyzes postwar fiction with a loving sternness that avoids didacticism even as he pingpongs among cultural artifacts, decoding everything from Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” to emo music. In the title essay, he considers the setting of nearly all Anne Tyler’s work: Baltimore, particularly the neighborhood of Roland Park. Tyler is a writer “rooted in a place that is so comfortable, unthreatening and familiar that it becomes almost featureless, a state of psychic stability that needs no explicit expression.” So, too, Roland Park is a site of timeless normalcy, a place where the white world “will never be significantly altered.”

Yet this normalcy depends on the general absence of black people. If Tyler were to give them a voice, they might recount stories like the one told by a former colleague of Row’s who grew up in Baltimore. “When I was young, our name for Roland Park was Hang-a-nigger,” he tells Row. “My parents made sure I knew never to go up there, not for any reason.”

The effect of literary white flight is to regulate the American imagination and reproduce racialized power. Flight allows whiteness to function as if it were universal, a stand-in for “human,” rather than a particular racial category that relies on blackness for its expression. What Row desires is fiction that acknowledges the ways in which Americans are entwined with one another physically, psychically and socially. In the ambitious experimental essay “Parts of Us Not Made at Home,” he attempts to model such writing by delving into his own interracial background. He writes of his great-grandmother Amy Brazil, a woman who passed as white but who was an immigrant from the Azorean island of Flores and was most likely mixed-race, as many Flores islanders are. In uncovering this history, and perhaps even extending it through fiction, Row hopes to reveal stories of racial purity as what they are — fictions that we must counter with new ones.