Race can be so ambiguous sometimes. It causes debate and, even worse, discrimination. So many laws that have been passed regarding racial discrimination have not been enforced or abided by. This is the government’s way of indirectly not following the Constitution, which states that all men are equal. Anbinder writes about the progression of the Five Points and how new laws were passed to make living conditions better, but nothing really changed. In addition, things got worse in other areas as well. What does this have to do with race? Well, Gregory talks about how simply having whites present in an area made living conditions there easier. The irony is that many whites decided to move out of the area, know as “white flight.” They moved just because they could, like we talked about in class. Why wouldn’t they? I guess I can’t blame them, but the government took this as an invitation to not treat the people in these areas with the same respect that they would have, had the whites remained there.
The fact that something so unclear to us (I, myself, am confused as to what I should write down as my “race” on papers) has negatively impacted so many people’s lives is unbelievable. Government’s actions among these areas that we have been reading about seem by far unconstitutional, and we put up with it—even participated.
