It was a cold and windy December afternoon. Two friends and I were walking down 42nd street, drinking in the city’s excitement. I pulled up the hood of my large sweater in an attempt to block out the chill. Just as soon as I pulled it on one of my friends told me to take it off. I couldn’t understand why until I noticed policemen wandering the streets. I can’t imagine a person being stopped and searched just for wearing a sweater let alone for being a certain skin color or perceived as a certain race. New York City’s Stop and Frisk policy is a perfect example of racial prejudice within New York City. I think immigrants who might have suffered through this racial profiling must have been shocked.
One of the themes I noticed in this week’s readings was the theme of immigrants being introduced to the different social environment of New York City, including its notions of race and ethnicity. In his writing, Mele states that Puerto Rican immigrants in the Lower East Side had to adjust to “harsh and unfamiliar social and economic conditions” within their new environment (125). This statement relates to Foner’s discussion on the prejudices immigrants face. Immigrants come from many different places where people know them and respond to them according to how they behaved in the past (or at least more so than when they arrive in New York). Suddenly, these individuals emigrate to New York City and find that they are generally percieved by others in a very different way. They are objectively and superficially grouped and categorized mostly according to how they look rather than how they behave, such as those immigrants from the West Indies who are shocked to find they are considered black. This assumption-based superficial grouping has nothing to do with who the immigrants are as people what their behavior has been. They are perceived as a certain race and are assigned with certain characteristics merely because of the color of their skin.
