This week’s reading focused on the problems that arose due to conflicting opinions between different groups. Anbinder’s Five Points, discusses the history of two groups known as the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys, which fought in a riot after a culmination of gang violence that was fueled by political rivalry between the Democratic-supported Tammany Hall and the nativist Know Nothing Party. Similarly, in Pritchett’s Brownsville, we learn about the formation of the BCC or the Brownsville Community Council, which was established in order to fight the “war against poverty”. We also read about the battles over local schools that culminated in the 1968 Teachers Strike. Finally Sciorra and Reider’s articles talked about specific experiences dealing with racism: Sciotta focused on Italian Americans who displayed racism when toward African Americans, while Reider talked about the Jews and Blacks who were displaced in Canarsie.
The chapters in Brownsville particularly interested me this week because I felt that no matter how much effort was placed into bettering the community, no one was ever completely satisfied. This is mainly shown in the Teachers Strike issue that arose. Here’s a little background:
Even though the New York City Board of Education tried to give people in specific neighborhoods control over their schools (through decentralization), the teacher’s unions saw it as a union busting event because it reduced the collective bargaining potential of teachers and staff because education would not be centralized under one administration. The local Black population however, saw it as empowerment against a white bureaucracy. They also saw it as an effort to create an “Afrocentric” curriculum that, they believed, was better attuned to the needs of the blacks.
Ironically, I felt that the more the government tried to help the blacks, the more they just wanted to blend in. Towards the end of chapter 8, it also states that the majority of Brownsville’s black and Latinos left the neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s in search of integrated schools and neighborhoods. Although the “Afrocentric” curriculum would be better attuned, it also meant that the education would be individualized for certain groups. In reality, however, the majority wanted integration and believed in a pluralist society, or one in which diversity is acknowledged. So my question to you all is this: Do you think the singling out the blacks to give them a “better” education was the right approach to fight against the “war on poverty”? And if not, which would be a proper way of dealing with it, which people seem to just want to fit in?
