In The Harlem Ghetto, the author, James Baldwin shows how not only did African Americans live in the worse conditions while also being charged the most they prevented their own upward mobility by trying to be accepted by the white race. By assimilating to White America the African Americans within New York could only conform to the stereotypical views of them. Also during that time white people did very little to help Harlem over all, instead they focused more on trying to please the Harlem community with a few new parks and schools. By accepting these new schools the African Americans blinded the white community from seeing the real problem.
The Harlem Ghetto was an additional reading at the end of A Native Son, by Richard Wright. Much of the things written in Baldwin's essay can be seen in Wright's book. Two of the most prominent things in A Native Son are white people's view of African Americans as unintelligent and how whites exploit places like Harlem by trying to appeal to such communities. This can be seen in Baldwin's essay where he writes about how the only times the newspaper writes about an African American person is to show how violent they are. The essay also explains how affluent white people destroy old buildings to build new public housing building for the African American community only to make it more expensive to live there.