Introduction

Do you know the city of Brooklyn? Brooklyn is a borough, which is familiar with its nickname ‘Crooklyn, Brooklyn’, which is located in New York City, in the south west of Manhattan. The independent “city”, with the third largest population after New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, is said to be the most famous city in the United States, and known as the most city of immigrants.

Features

By its history of settlement and city project, the city is consisted of lots of neighborhood of various immigrants, including Caribbean, Russian, Orthodox Jew, Irish, Chinese, Italian, (of course) African American, and more variety of people. As a collection of multi-ethnic neighborhoods, Brooklyn raises many excellent cultures within people’s ethnicity. In addition, they’re different not only in cultural aspect, but also economical, demographical, ethnical and sociological aspect. (Kenneth T. Jackson, Introduction P.2 L.29-32)

Marty Markowitz (Foreword L.5-7) says “The American dream is made up of stories of immigrants who created successful business; in Brooklyn, entrepreneurs built neighborhoods with their dreams.” As he said, many relevant things, for example, art, music, movie, sport, architecture and etc have been fascinating to the world. Brooklyn also brings up one of the most spread cultures in globalization era, which is called hip hop.

So far, I guess your image of this city is like, glittering, fascinating, full of variety, and kinds of these ideas. Yes. This is true; however there is also a difficulty to be in the most immigrants-city.

Multicultural co-existing

One of the merits of being full of variety may be expressed in the word ‘creativity’; however, variety also may cause conflict and trouble. In the movie ‘Do the Right Thing (1989)’, Spike Lee clearly describes this problem, which is the reality of Brooklyn.

In the movie, many types of people (immigrants) like, African American, Italian, Korean, White American and more are living together in one neighborhood. At the end of the story, frustration between people reached to the top, and this led to a riot. African Americans burned Italian’s Pizza store, one African American was killed by the police, and some guys threatened Korean couple by saying ‘Next is your turn!.’ In this scene Korean husband desperately yelled ‘No! We same!! I’m Black!!’

This movie shows the difficulty of multiculturalism or multicultural co-existing. Living together in multiculturalism might cause many conflicts between people with different cultures. Spike Lee describes how various and active Brooklyn is, but also he introduces us how complex and troublesome it is.

“Do the right thing: 11 out of 12”:

Reference & Source

“the neighborhoods of Brooklyn second edition”,
”Foreword” by Marty Markowits,
“Preface” by Osborn Ellion and Micheal E. Clark,
“Introduction” by Kenneth T. Jackson

by Yuki Atsusaka