City After The Yellow Fever Hit example essay topic

Racial Tension in Fever With the racial tension as high as it was in Philadelphia at the time of the Fever, one would think that any common enemy or goal would bring everybody together. However, when the illness known as the Fever hit the city, prejudice rose to different heights. Prejudice and racism is bad enough as it is. However, the citizens of Philadelphia were making it look like they wanted the blacks and immigrants to come back into the city. They told the blacks that they could come back to the city because they had immunity to the disease, when in actuality they only needed the blacks and immigrants to act as caretakers for the white upper class citizens. They forced the blacks and immigrants out of their homes, where they were loved by their families and friends, and into nursing the white residents of Philadelphia.

The blacks and immigrants went from a place that they truly loved and that truly loved them back to a place where they were forced to love those whom they had hated just weeks before. In other words, the blacks were forced into forming an artificial love for their enemies. This is a new level of prejudice. This type of racism is worse than the original, simpler form of racism that existed in Philadelphia before the Fever broke out. The illness was called the Yellow Fever Epidemic. Although it seemed like a terrible thing, it was actually like a godsend, in a very crude manner, to bring the many different races of Philadelphia together.

When the fatal epidemic hit the white people of Philadelphia, the blacks and other immigrants who were shut out were given immunity, or so they were told, and the chance to return back to the city. As Wideman wrote, "I was commandeered to rise and go forth to the general task of saving the city, forced to leave this neighborhood where my skills were sorely needed. I nursed those who hated me, deserted the ones I loved, who loved me". This is said by a black doctor named Dr. Rush, who is speaking of his extreme discomfort in leaving his community where he knows he is needed and appreciated to go and help a city full of people that will pretend to like him, so that in turn he will he try to save them.

The people who were shunned out of the city were now returning to essentially save the city of Philadelphia. The blacks and immigrants, the so called heroes that were sent to return to the city after the Fever hit were probably better off outside of the city where they were. They were in places where they were loved and their skills were much appreciated. They may have been doing the same work outside of the city that they would have been doing with the white people in Philadelphia, but they appreciated and actually cared for their work more so now then ever before.

They at least felt like they were working towards the same goal and for the same kind of person as themselves. On the other hand, when these blacks and immigrants were called over to the city after the yellow fever hit, they were basically being used by the people who had kicked them out in the first place. Even though they would basically be doing the same kind of work, the work would seem much more painful. Wideman's description of "commandeered to rise and go forth to the general task of saving the city, forced to leave the neighborhood where my skills were sorely needed", summed up their feeling for working with the enemy that had kicked them out of the city.

It simply stated that "The small strength I was able to muster each morning was sorely tried the moment my eyes and ears opened upon the sufferings of my people, the reality that gave the lie to the fiction of our immunity... I nursed those who hated me, deserted the ones I loved, the ones who loved me". The work was now described as a task. The blacks and immigrants had already formed a neighborhood and had their own identity. Their skills were needed by their own people in their own neighborhood.

The people the blacks and immigrants came back to were not people from their own loving neighborhoods and communities. Rather, they were from the racist city of Philadelphia. When the blacks and immigrants left to go back to the city, they realized that they were being used. Wideman wrote, ". ... the moment my eyes and ears opened upon the sufferings of my people, the reality that gave the lie to the fiction of our immunity".

In other words they all knew that immunity given to return to the city was so that the blacks could take care of the sick whites from the city.