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I gotta see if i can find that on Audiobooks. Sounds very interesting.
I read All Saints, which is a book about the Irish in South Boston...one of the most harrowing books i've ever read. I never knew that they lived in such tough conditions in Southie...even as late as a decade ago.
Yes, I read that book too. Very, very sad and that was the 1980's if I'm not mistaken.
Racist Tea-Partiers would've been shocked to see Public Housing in Urban America filled with Irish as recently as the 1980's haha.
Yes, I read that book too. Very, very sad and that was the 1970's and 1980's if I'm not mistaken.
Actually it starts in the late 60's. The poverty, drug use, hopelessness and violence in the book was beyond anything i could fathom...and i've seen some pretty tough conditions before. I was floored. Still am.
In the south, the hate priorities are different. It is mostly reserved for opposing collegiate sports teams and heffers. Sorry, meant to type coeds, instead of heffers.
I saw this movie when it came out. It depicted the tension when a working class Jewish male came to a school that is composed of mostly kids from upper class families. Despite both being white, I do believe it correctly played the tension between the various wealth classes quite well. I would believe a lot of this still plays out today.
I have lived in heavily white dominated cities growing up and to this day. So issues in the neighborhood relies mostly on status and wealth of different parts of town. You dont want to associate with that such part of town as that is where the lower class lives, etc. That was the way growing up for me at least in western Kentucky. You had several groups who tended to stick together through high school. The more wealthy folks who lived in Grampion Hills and near the country club who could afford to go to expensive colleges....the rest of the town whose parents (like my dad) were coal miners, and then the rest which lived across the railroad tracks whom we never visited. Not to mention the protestant-catholic divide..... I never met someone I knew that was Catholic til I went away to college. But that was our our town of 16k was in rural western Kentucky in the 70s to early 80s. Thankfully over the years since the barriers I hope have comed down some.
Yes, I read that book too. Very, very sad and that was the 1980's if I'm not mistaken.
Racist Tea-Partiers would've been shocked to see Public Housing in Urban America filled with Irish as recently as the 1980's haha.
They're still filled with the Irish there, but some of the projects got torn down as Southie started to gentrify. It's still a fairly tough neighborhood, but a lot of what drove the violence has been mitigated to a pretty large degree. The projects are mixed now too...they aren't completely Irish like they used to be.
Interesting. Something I just recently became aware of that reminds me of the dissention that occurs sometimes among light skinned and darker black people. I guess this world is full of divisions.
They're still filled with the Irish there, but some of the projects got torn down as Southie started to gentrify. It's still a fairly tough neighborhood, but a lot of what drove the violence has been mitigated to a pretty large degree. The projects are mixed now too...they aren't completely Irish like they used to be.
Yeah, probably much like Dorchester, which is also very diverse and gentrifying now.
I read another book(not "How The Irish Became White" though I've read excerpts of that one) that talked about how the election of Irish-Catholic JFK to the presidency in the 1960s, sort was a symbolic moment that Irish Catholics had made it to the mainstream of American society. And in the same period many Irish and Italians and Jews and Poles were fleeing to the suburbs--and later for many to Republican party membership. Back in the 1920s, the Catholic heritage of Al Smith was enough to divide the party and ruin his chances at a Democratic run at the presidency. Now days you have an Irish Catholic Paul Ryan as the suburban conservative wing of the Republican party.
For every remaining working class Irish neighborhood somewhere like Boston, there's tons more people who claim Irish heritage out in the suburbs who are as average as any white American or WASP at this point.
Yeah, probably much like Dorchester, which is also very diverse and gentrifying now.
It's a small city with limited development opportunies, that is growing like hell, so it's only a matter of time before the traditionally black neighborhoods have to accomodate gentrification based on real estate pressures alone. Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, Jamaican Plain, West Medford, Mission Hill....they're all gonna fall to gentrification.
Boston is very interesting. It has this reputation for being racist, but this is another city that i've had the privilege of visiting lots of times and i've had nothing but great times there. Every white person i met was cool as hell. The guys are all ball-busters (like East Coast white guys have the tendency of being), but they were real genuine and whatever racist feelings they may have had never manifested itself in my presence.
And truthfully, that's all i ask. I'm not into changing people's minds or worrying about whether or not someone harbors ill feelings against this race or that race...just treat ME fair, and it's all good.
Not hatred to me but simply that certain people maintain and identify with their particular European cultures. For example, I have people such as one Lithuanian-American (parents born there), who considers herself as such, not "white" or "white american." I can respect that as have a similar perspective about my heritage.
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