Revolutionary ideas may be great today, but we have to keep in mind that people were not always so open-minded nor kind, especially when reading older documents like Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives. Just a few hundred years ago, Copernicus’ heliocentric theory was not so welcome by the church. I think in the grand scheme of things, Jacob Riis was trying to wedge open the minds of “the other half”, but he could not have been so radical as to be incredible. While he had his own prejudices, and I am not simply excusing his outright racism, Riis questioned the system and that was a good start for his time.
Although, I did find it ironic how he went from living in the streets to publishing the blatantly racist material that he did, but we also have to keep in mind that he thinks he is innocuous. This also goes to illustrate an interesting point that someone brought up in class today: how the oppressed becomes the oppressor eventually. Riis was a small living example of this notion, that in larger scale was the “old” immigrants oppressing the “new” immigrants who oppressed the even newer immigrants,
