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The Slum and the Ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and Reformers in Chicago, 1880-1930 (American Society and Culture) ReviewThe author (my father) shows that no groups of white people (Irish, Jews, Italians, etc.) have ever in the United States faced any sort of appreciable discrimination in terms of housing, employment, access to public facilities, or education. In contrast, blacks all over the US have faced severe, organized, legally enforced discrimination on all these essential fronts. However, most white ethnics have created for themselves the myth they their predecessors overcame the same sorts of obstacles faced by blacks. My father's elders had a phrase they used to demean black people: "We made it, why can't they?" My dad wrote this book as a PhD candidate in history at the University of Chicago. He examined two of the claims of his elders: (1) Just like Chicago's enormous black ghetto, the city had many white ghettos (i.e., ones for Irish, ones for Italians, ones for Jews, etc.); and (2) just like blacks, members of these white ethnic groups faced severe discrimination in their attempts to elevate their lots in life. What my father discovered is that claims of white ethnic ghettos and discrimination are purely mythical. None of the ethnic neighborhoods contained a majority of any particular white ethnic group. He found, for example, some supposed "Italian" neighborhoods would contain more, say, Jews than Italians, and vice versa. (He writes that his mother told him she had been raised in a Jewish neighborhood, but that the census data revealed her contained more Irish than Jews during the time she lived there.) He also found that for jobs and education, there really was no effective discrimination against any groups of white people. (Enrollment caps against Jews at Harvard or strictures against Jews at country clubs being minor exceptions that look quite silly compared to the discrimination faced by blacks banned from public elementary schools and union jobs.) He found for example that businesses with "Irish need not apply" or "No Jews Allowed" in fact employed Irish and served Jews. Ultimately, he showed discrimination among white ethnics against each other are most usefully viewed as resulting from ethnic rivalries in which all the participants "win", in terms of achieving full US citizenship and all the rights and privileges that go along with that. One of those rights and privileges turns out to be a subordination of these rivalries in the name of discriminating against blacks, of denying them full US citizenship. All white ethnic groups, according to my father's research, have throughout history united together to ban blacks (but not each other-with the rare and ultimately insignificant exception) from their places of employment, from their neighborhoods, from their schools, from their public facilities, their professional societies, from their families (i.e., intermarriage), from their political parties, and from their public institutions (i.e., voting, testifying in court, holding office). Granted, you can argue that blacks have in recent years have overcome all these bans (though my father didn't necessarily think so). However, no groups of whites have ever been faced any of these bans. I regard this book as essential for understanding why white immigrants have succeeded as a whole, whereas blacks have not.
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