Ethnic conflict and white flight in postwar Brooklyn communities

Canarsie

Away From Liberalism

In his book Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism, author Jonathan Rider provides an impressively simple understanding of the complex issues that drove the Jewish and Italian inhabitants of Canarsie, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, away from liberalism and towards an overtly racist conservativism. According to his explanation, the most important factors in this shift were the strength of the intra-community bonds and a cultural mistrust of outsiders, combined with the increasing presence of African-Americans drawn to the neighborhood. As long as liberalism remained local to the community in terms of people (and not geography), it was an ideal concept, but conservative policies were more in keeping with protecting an established neighborhood from perceived negative or simply altering influences from a group of outsiders.

There were many concrete and abstract threats that the Canarsians perceived in the encroaching color line, including immorality, poverty and crime. What seems to have been the biggest fear, however, was intervention in community affairs by outside agencies in the form of both the African-American community itself and the government agencies whose housing plans and other programs were largely responsible for creating the racial migration into East New York in general and Canarsie in particular. They regarded askance any "formal remedies of strangers, including those of the state" when applied to what were perceived as local community affairs, and a major fear seems to have been a loss of the autonomy that two groups had sought in the establishment of their community in the decades prior to the time of Reider's examination in his book (Reider 82).

The Jewish and Italian communities of Canarsie had slowly assembled in this pocket of the city a other neighborhoods became increasingly dominated by African-Americans, accompanied b greater poverty and reduced opportunity. The Jewish and Italian groups were not looked on much better than the African-Americans by many other New Yorkers, and often could not afford to leave their neighborhoods for nicer neighborhoods as many others did, which led to a further decrease in value and opportunity in these neighborhoods. Canarsie became dominated by these two communities -- which solidified into one out of a common set of oppositional circumstances -- as they moved out of other neighborhoods in East New York and consolidated against the encroachment of general degradation. This also explains the deep-rooted mistrust of outsiders, which exists in these cultures to some degree historically.