scholarly journals Rebalancing the extra-judicial scales: Documentary aesthetics and the legacy of the Central Park Five

Author(s):  
Sofia Baliño Rios

The Central Park jogger case has returned to news headlines with the 2019 Netflix mini-series When They See Us, a dramatised account of the original trials. It has reignited debate over the injustices faced by the Black community in the United States, and led to lawsuits and job resignations on the part of former police investigators and prosecutors. Since the case’s inception, issues of race, media reporting, economics, and the identity of New York City have influenced the trial and its aftermath and have inspired documentaries, books, and the landmark 1990 essay “Sentimental Journeys” by Joan Didion. In this article, I argue that the creators of two of these works, by testing the boundaries of narrative, demonstrate that the case was inexorably tainted by a pervasive feeling of social precarity and racial prejudice which cost five young men several years of their lives, and offer a productive line of enquiry for acknowledging such factors and their influence, if not resolving them.

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 708-727 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Foner

This article explores the significance of race among Jamaicans in New York City and London. What it means to be a black Jamaican, it is argued, depends on the racial context of the receiving area. Although in the United States and Britain Jamaicans face racial prejudice and discrimination, there are advantages to living in New York. Being part of the larger black population cushions Jamaican migrants in New York from some of the sting of racial prejudice and provides them with easier access to certain occupations and social institutions.


1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT MACDONALD

On a map or from the air, nothing defines New York City more clearly than the rectilinearity of Central Park at the heart of the curvilinear island of Manhattan. And nothing encodes the paradox of the thinking that created Frederick Law Olmsted's first great park – and simultaneously distinguishes it from many of the parks inspired by Central Park – than the virtually perfect geometry of its outline. The Park simultaneously confirms the grid structure of the streets of Manhattan and dramatically interrupts this structure: streets that run vertically uptown and downtown or horizontally across town must, when they reach the horizontal and vertical boundaries of the park, leave their verticality and horizontality behind to traverse the Park before rejoining the grid of streets and avenues at the far boundaries of the Park's expanse. If the Cartesian clarity of midtown Manhattan has come to represent the efficiency of American capitalism that was making the United States a major industrial power during the years when the Greensward Plan was designed and Central Park constructed, the Park represented (and continues to represent) a counter-sensibility: as Olmstead and Vaux predicted.


1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 572-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen I. Thompson

In a recent paper in this journal, Bernard Wong (1978) compares the assimilative experiences of Chinese in New York City and Lima, Peru. He concludes that the Lima Chinese are substantially more assimilated than their New York counterparts and attributes this distinction in part to differences in the attitudes of the larger societies in which the two Chinese communities are embedded. Discriminatory immigration and miscegenation laws and endemic racism in the United States inhibited the assimilation of the New York Chinese, while a substantially lower level of racial prejudice and official discrimination in Peru facilitated the assimilative process there.


1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”


1984 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 231-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avraham Shama ◽  
Joseph Wisenblit

This paper describes the relation between values and behavior of a new life style, that of voluntary simplicity which is characterized by low consumption, self-sufficiency, and ecological responsibility. Also, specific hypotheses regarding the motivation for voluntary simplicity and adoption in two areas of the United States were tested. Analysis shows (a) values of voluntary simplicity and behaviors are consistent, (b) the motivation for voluntary simplicity includes personal preference and economic hardship, and (c) adoption of voluntary simplicity is different in the Denver and New York City metropolitan areas.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003335492110075
Author(s):  
Claudia Chernov ◽  
Lisa Wang ◽  
Lorna E. Thorpe ◽  
Nadia Islam ◽  
Amy Freeman ◽  
...  

Objectives Immigrant adults tend to have better health than native-born adults despite lower incomes, but the health advantage decreases with length of residence. To determine whether immigrant adults have a health advantage over US-born adults in New York City, we compared cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors among both groups. Methods Using data from the New York City Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2013-2014, we assessed health insurance coverage, health behaviors, and health conditions, comparing adults ages ≥20 born in the 50 states or the District of Columbia (US-born) with adults born in a US territory or outside the United States (immigrants, following the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) and comparing US-born adults with (1) adults who immigrated recently (≤10 years) and (2) adults who immigrated earlier (>10 years). Results For immigrant adults, the mean time since arrival in the United States was 21.8 years. Immigrant adults were significantly more likely than US-born adults to lack health insurance (22% vs 12%), report fair or poor health (26% vs 17%), have hypertension (30% vs 23%), and have diabetes (20% vs 11%) but significantly less likely to smoke (18% vs 27%) (all P < .05). Comparable proportions of immigrant adults and US-born adults were overweight or obese (67% vs 63%) and reported CVD (both 7%). Immigrant adults who arrived recently were less likely than immigrant adults who arrived earlier to have diabetes or high cholesterol but did not differ overall from US-born adults. Conclusions Our findings may help guide prevention programs and policy efforts to ensure that immigrant adults remain healthy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Nycz

AbstractThis paper examines stylistic variation in the (oh), (o), (aw), and (ay) classes among native speakers of Canadian English living in or just outside either New York City or Washington, DC. Speakers show evidence of change toward US norms for all four vowels, though only (aw) shows consistent style shifting: prevoiceless (aw) is realized with higher nuclei when speakers express ambivalence about or distance from the United States, and lower nuclei when closeness to or positive affect about the United States is being conveyed. Canadians in New York also show topic- and stance-based shift in (oh): (oh)s are higher when expressing positive affect or closeness to New York City and lower when expressing negative affect or distance. These results suggest that mobile speakers continue to exploit the socioindexical links in their native dialect while learning and using new links in their adopted dialect—but only if those links are socially salient.


2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-105
Author(s):  
Peter G. Vellon

“For Heart, Patriotism, and National Dignity”: The Italian Language Press in New York City and Constructions of Africa, Race, and Civilization” examines how mainstream and radical newspapers employed Africa as a trope for savage behavior by analyzing their discussion of wage slavery, imperialism, lynching, and colonialism, in particular Italian imperialist ventures into northern Africa in the 1890s and Libya in 1911-1912. The Italian language press constructed Africa as a sinister, dark, continent, representing the lowest rung of the racial hierarchy. In expressing moral outrage over American violence and discrimination against Italians, the press utilized this image of Africa to emphatically convey its shock and disgust. In particular, Italian prominenti newspapers capitalized on this racial imagery to construct a narrative of Italianness and Italian superiority in order to combat unflattering depictions of Italian immigrants arriving in the United States.


1931 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-251
Author(s):  
Blewett Lee

On September 15, 1930, the State Board of Commerce and Navigation of New Jersey made a ruling that aircraft would not be permitted to land on any New Jersey waters above tidewater within the jurisdiction of the state. The application had been made for permission to operate a five passenger flying boat between Nolan's Point, Lake Hopatcong, a vacation resort, and New York City, and to set off a portion of the lake to make a landing place for the hydroairplane. It was stated that other inland waters in New Jersey were being used for a similar purpose, and the ground of the refusal was that aircraft flying from water constituted a menace to surface navigation. This ruling created considerable newspaper comment and aroused vigorous protest from persons interested in aviation, and by order of October 20, 1930, the ruling was limited to Lake Hopatcong.


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