Both readings this week touched on those races that were not considered white nor black -- an inbetween. Although practically fully integrated with "whites" today, Jewish, Irish, and Italian Americans were all considered an 'other' in terms of race. The first reading about "Communities" focused on the seemingly diverse yet separateness of the various ethnicities. The second reading focused on the strife within people of the same ethnicities (e.g. Northern Italians vs Southern Italians). What stuck out more were the brief first-hand accounts in the "Communities" reading, which was also brimming with statistics. 

New York City is known for being one of the most diverse cities in the world, but what does that really translate into? Unarguably, more nationalities are represented here than anywhere else, but the problem is they are not integrated. As Joshua M. Zeitz points out in the first chapter of his book, citizens from the same community are likely to have completely different views of it. At first it seems impossible that you can live next door to someone and not even know he/she exists, or that the people whom we read about were so within their own ethnic bubble that everything and everyone else was foreign and unknown. However, I was reminded of a discussion in class about diversity within our own school. Strikingly, a large percentage of the student body does congregate in groups of the same ethnicities. There are clubs and fraternities/sororities that cater to a certain nationality. What happened decades ago with the Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants (among others), still occurs today. What can account for that? Well, it's a fact of life that we feel more familiar and comfortable with people we can relate to, contrary to the saying that "opposites attract". Some people do break free from this generalization but for the most part, it is applicable. If this were not true, we would not have ethnic enclaves (like the ones we are studying). Even though we live in the United States, we as a people are not united.

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