Although blacks have been here the longest, their rate of inclusion into society has been the slowest. Why is that? In his paper, Gary Gerstle asks “Were individuals and groups free to fashion an American identity of their own choosing or were they constrained by social structures and historical circumstances over which they had little control?” (Gerstle, 527). As Gerstle suggests, I believe there are external forces affecting the inclusion rate of blacks. These forces include the laws and how individuals feel about a certain group, whether they’re willing to backup a group or isolate it. Such forces come from the state and federal government but also the people surrounding the group.
Take James Meredith, for example. He was the first black student at the University of Mississippi. There were desegregation laws that gave James the right to go to school and yet the governor and many other residents fought against him. Two people were even murdered over this issue. The law was on James’s side but everyone was against him, including the wishy-washiness of the Kennedy administration, which didn’t want to lose favor with the South.
I think external forces, such as people’s perception of the laws, also affect internal forces, such as subculture. Part of the legality affects the subcultural habits. The government can change the law but if it’s not in one’s history to vote, then even though it’s legal it is not yet part of how a group identifies itself. The 1965 Voting Rights Act definitely made voting more accessible to blacks. The states weren’t impeding them from voting (at least on paper), but some blacks still didn’t vote. One reason might be that some are not part of a family who has been voting so it’s not yet part of what they do. This is certainly not true for all black families, but looking at it from the outside, it looks like both historical constraints and surrounding attitudes prevented some blacks from voting even though they had the right. It takes a long time to get rid of cultural habits and to acquire new ones and still the outer community fights it.
In his article, Peter Marcuse lists the three elements of a ghetto as “spatial segregation, inferiority, and involuntary definition of identity” (Marcuse, 231). He describes how the society surrounding a certain group acts as an external force that isolates that group from the mainstream. Maybe this originates from how society has labeled and viewed a certain group or race. My family lives in a diverse Great Neck community with Jamaican immigrants, Koreans, and blacks. My little sister’s friends live in the next town over (another part of the school district) and asked her “Why do you live in the ghetto?” Maybe those living in our neighborhood are somewhat isolated from other communities in the school district because the black residents are given an identity by the surrounding society and lack the power to change it.
