{"id":7341,"date":"2016-05-13T16:53:42","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T21:53:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maxwellhalsted.publish.uic.edu\/?page_id=7341"},"modified":"2018-01-24T10:56:45","modified_gmt":"2018-01-24T16:56:45","slug":"race-colonies","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/home\/race-colonies\/","title":{"rendered":"“RACE” COLONIES"},"content":{"rendered":"

“RACE” COLONIES WEST SIDE<\/h1>\n

In metropolitan newspapers, mainstream print, and academic journals, commentators employed such \u00a0phrases as \u201cforeign colonies,\u201d \u201cforeign element,\u201d and \u201calien colonies\u201d to specify the expanding number of ethnic settlements and neighborhoods inside American cities.<\/p>\n

Excluded in the \u201calien\u201d count were \u201crace colonies\u201d or people of color, Mexicans from south of the border, African-Americans from the American South, Chinese from the West Coast.\u00a0 “Race colonies” or people of color–black, brown, yellow–were outside the pale of \u00a0“Americanization” and integration. \u00a0“Why Don’t Your Mamma Wash You With Fairy Soap”!<\/strong> advertised the pictorial packaging \u00a0for a prominent soap company.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

E.A. Ross, a prominent American sociologist, wrote: “To the practised eye, the physiognomy of certain \u00a0groups unmistakably \u00a0proclaims \u00a0inferiority of type. \u00a0I have seen gatherings of the foreign\u00ad born in which narrow and sloping foreheads were the \u00a0rule. \u00a0The \u00a0shortness \u00a0and \u00a0smallness \u00a0of \u00a0the crania were very noticeable. There was much facial asymmetry. Among the women, beauty, aside from the fleeting, epidermal bloom of girlhood, was quite lacking. \u00a0In every face there was something wrong-lips thick, mouth \u00a0coarse, upper lip too long, cheek-bones too high, chin poorly formed, the bridge of the nose hollowed, the base of the nose tilted, or else the whole face prognathous. There were so many sugar-loaf \u00a0heads, moon-faces, slit mouths, lantern-jaws, and goose\u00ad bill noses that one might imagine a malicious jinn had amused himself by casting human beings in a set of skew-molds discarded by the Creator.”<\/p>\n

Politicians courting the “white” vote were all too ready to exploit nativist prejudices embedded in race-hated. \u00a0A bad situation was\u00a0made worse when Negro workers with restricted prospects for work were employed as scabs and strike breakers by corporate owners. \u00a0Witness the 1904-05 strike in the Chicago Stockyards.<\/p>\n

Mexican workers were accused of working cheaper and displacing\u00a0both manual and craft workers from “alien” nationalities. A viable definition\u00a0of who was true-blue “white”\u00a0never transcended the prejudices and interests of the moment. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n