Response 4/12

It’s upsetting to see how much focus is placed on minority and majority, on color, race and power.  Places are labeled “the slums” and “the Projects” because they are left for the lower class to occupy.  As each wave of immigration passed conditions didn’t seem to improve as much as one would hope.  They say time heals all things, and that things get better with age, think along the lines of how a fine wine ages. Well that’s obviously not what happened here.  As Alexandra quoted from several passages, retrogression was clearly visible in New York.  As the population of immigrants and minorities grew a new “solution”(more like the big bad wolf in sheep’s clothing) appeared: public housing.  Public housing was just another way to lump together minorities in one place justifiably by using low costs as a motivator.

Nothing gets done about it because minorities are the “undesirables,” and people (the middle and upper class whites) would rather flee to suburbs and let neighborhoods fall into decline than do anything to better the lives of those who need it.  So public housing just made the obvious more obvious, being white meant being superior.   But now things are changing (slowly), minorities aren’t stuck in the projects, they aren’t stopped by laws and loopholes made to prevent them from entering white neighborhoods the way the GI bill did.

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