In the Brooklyn, racism is one of the big themes. Toibin doesn’t use this theme for just let readers emphasize with Eilis’s immigrant experience. It is a historical fiction, the book published at 2009 but it passes at the 1950s therefore, to be able to give the taste of the 1950s, Toibin uses the themes that created conflicts at that time period. Racism is one of them and actually, it comes with the immigrant experience. In the part of the book, it clearly stated that white people don’t like black people. They think black people will come and steal their job and life. As I researched and understood, the situation was exactly like that, it was actually harsher but in a nutshell, I think Toibin is right.
I found out the situation was poor -compared to now, but the African American community also had been doing better economically, largely due to wider trends of the United States. I can’t say the same for the racism though… Racism was much more open and the sharp competition for the lucrative manufacturing jobs often led to street violence among migrant blacks and other immigrant groups. As we can understand, the situation was not so bright. Right now, if the cops are shooting unarmed people now when they know they are on camera, I can’t imagine what they were like to blacks before the dawn of phone cameras and the Internet like in the 50s.
Speaking of racism, there were two (actually more) iconic victories in the supreme court. One of them is Brown Vs. Board of Education Topeka (1954). This was an iconic and landmark court cases that reflected on the future of blacks for education. This court case declared the laws of segregating black and white schools to be unconstitutional. The second one was, Sweatt vs. Painters (1950). Hemen Marion Sweatt was declined access to school in the University of Texas. The university didn’t want any blacks or mixed to be a part of the district. In Travis County, the state court issued a school only for black students in Houston Texas.
If we look at the book, we can see Eilish is different from the other immigrants. She treated differently and in my estimation, this is because of the Father Flood. As we talked about in the class, the religion is very critical in those days. Eilis would have never gotten to America without him. He went to school thanks to him, and she has some legit immigration papers -and it is arduous to get at those days. Probably in the future, those papers will help her about job or wedding. Other immigrants might not get a proper job, but she can and she did in the book.
People changed a lot. Racism is still a major problem in the worldwide but people started to unite. I still believe we have a long way to the worldwide peace but we made some pretty big steps towards to light. Especially new education systems like IB and AP, show how to be the one for the world, not for a nation or a skin color. The news is easily around of the world now, a photograph, a video can change a person’s mindset. It affects the world both ways but we can’t ignore the positive ways.