How The Other Half LIves Chapters 9, 10, 12, 13

In these four chapters, the thing I found most interesting was the way Riis clearly victimizes the Bohemians and the Blacks, and compares then with the “Polish Jews” and the Chinamen. Riis feels sympathetic for the Bohemians and African Americans situations. He seems to feel that it is not their fault. Those two chapters make the reader feel that the Bohemians and African Americans have been put in awful situations and are unable to get out. Riis is making the reader aware of their situation, as he does earlier in How the Other Half Lives. Riis does this by describing the Bohemians as slaves: “enforcing upon a proud race a slavery as real as any that ever disgraced the South” (109) and saying the Bohemian’s employer and landlord “reduces him to virtual serfdom” (109). Riis makes it clear that, in his opinion, the Bohemians and the African Americans have are forced into their situation: “The location of the cigar factories, upon which he depends for a living, determines his choice of home, though there is less choice about it than with any other class in the community, save perhaps the colored people” (110).  For both the African Americans and the Bohemians, “the sore grievances I found were the miserable wages and the enormous rents exacted for the minimum of accommodation” (110).

It seems that Riis especially likes the African Americans and feels for their situation. This is strange, because from these four chapters it can easily be perceived that Riis is very racist. After reading the first three chapters, some of his descriptions of the African Americans surprised me. He describes them as “immensely the superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews, below whom he has been classed in the past in the tenant scale” (116) when speaking of their cleanliness. He also prides the African Americans for their optimistic attitudes: “Poverty, abuse, and injustice alike the negro accepts with imperturbable cheerfulness” (118) and “In the art of putting the best foot foremost, of disguising his poverty by making a little go a long way, our negro has no equal “ (118).

Riis frequently compares the Bohemians and the African Americans with the Italians, Chinamen, and Polish Jews. He always favors the former, while putting down the latter. Riis throws little comments into his writing like “It does not help the case that this landlord employer, almost always a Jew, is frequently of the thrifty Polish race just described” (109) when speaking of the Bohemian’s situation. Riis is portraying the Jews negatively, and blaming them for the poverty and helplessness of the bohemians. Why would Riis sympathize with the Bohemians and the African Americans?