New York is one of the most multicultural and ethnically diverse cities in the world and therefore many people consider it to be a great melting pot. However, considering the origins of the term “melting pot” this claim can be disputed. In his play The Melting Pot (1908) famous British author Israel Zangwill used the term “melting pot” as a metaphor to describe a fusion of nationalities, cultures and ethnicities. Even tough New York City is indeed very ethnically diverse, with respect to the actual mixing of ethnicities it is not as fused as often thought because in reality the city is still very segregated with many neighborhoods dominated by a single ethnic group. As Mireya Navarro, housing reporter for the New York Times, points out: “New …show more content…
During the 1940s, the starting years of the so called Second Great Migration, over 6 million African-Americans moved away from the South and into the large cities in the North. The African-American population in New York increased rapidly during and shortly after the Second World War and it quickly became one of the largest urban African-American population in the world. After the Second World War the federal government extended its housing plan to provide financing for urban renewal in the large American cities. However, most of the loan money was channeled towards whites and away from people of color as a result of racist practices within the Federal Housing Agency. With these federally ensured loans white families could move away from public housing into the cities suburbs, leaving behind mostly black families in underdeveloped neighborhoods. In New York government officials applied similar segregation policies and residential segregation was even enforced through Supreme Court rulings. In 1947, for example, three African-American males sued a joint venture between MetLife, a large insurance company, and the City of New York for discriminatory practices in Stuyvesant Town, a private residential area for whites on the east side of Manhattan. However,