Again, the issue of segregation and discrimination has popped up in the reading, and I thought it an important topic to cover in my third post. Nancy Foner repeatedly mentions that things are usually the worst for Dominicans, Blacks, and Hispanics. Out of all the different immigrant groups that venture to the United States each year – Asians, Europeans, Russians, Asian Indians, Latin Americans, West Indians, and so on – the previously mentioned groups are faced with the most hardships.
My first question is this: what makes the Dominicans worse off than most immigrants? What is going wrong in that country, and why are people leaving? The main reason that I can think of is that Dominicans are coming here the least educated and least financially stable. It would have been nice to be given a little more background history about the Dominican plight.
As for our country’s black population. Have we seriously not gotten over our racism? Apparently not, as both Nancy Foner and Stephen Steinberg have mentioned. One line that stuck out to me in the past reading was when Steinberg states that “not until the structures of American apartheid are thoroughly dismantled and the persistent inequalities are resolved” will African Americans find their way into the melting pot.
There are two reasons for “white flight” that Foner poses. One, as native-White Americans ascend the social and economic ladder, they seek the “green pastures” and leave the cities and their neighboring counties. The second reason for “white flight” is the emergence of a Black middle-class and their desire for the same things – “green pastures” and middle class living. What happens, is, white’s leave perfectly good neighborhoods and the result is town ruin.
How is it that we’ve come so far in Asian acceptance – remember the Chinese Exclusion Act of the early 20th century and the Japanese Concentration Camps during World War II? Foner states that it is highly unlikely to find a white-suburb in the New York area that isn’t also populated by Asians. If whites don’t flee from the Asians, why can’t we learn to accept the blacks?
Marina B. Nebro
