The Irony of “Real Blessing”
Riis elucidates, "Says the report to the Legislature of 1857, when the evils engendered had excited just alarm," in its beginning, the tenant-house became a real blessing to that class of industrious poor whose small earnings limited their expenses, and whose employment in workshops, stores, or about the warehouse and thoroughfares, render a near residence of much importance." Not for long, however, as business increased, and the city grew with rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors, and the stamp was set upon the old houses. Their 'large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and living as beggary itself.” Although the tenements offer affordable rent to the low class, they turn out to be a curse. First, the excessive subdivision which does not foster sufficient ventilation is an invitation of ailments. Consequently, the occupiers’ health is imperiled. Moreover, the tenements degrade the occupants based on how they dwell in extreme poverty. The degradation affirms that the tenements are not absolute blessing to the low class; they are dwellings where poverty multiplies.
The Irony of “Imperturbable Cheerfulness”
Riis elucidates, “Poverty, abuse, and injustice alike the Negro accepts with imperturbable cheerfulness. His philosophy is of the kind that has no room for repining. Whether he lives in an English ward barrack or in a tenement with a brown-stone front and pretensions of the title of “flat.” It is ironic that a ‘negro’ would be cheered by ‘poverty, abuse, and injustice’ which are not pleasurable experiences. Ordinary, these conditions would have diluted cheerfulness. Riis elucidates the motivation of the cheerfulness: “The negro’s great ambition is to rise in the social scale to which his color has made him a stranger and an outsider, and he is quite willing to accept the shadow of the substance where that is the best he can get…With all his ludicrous incongruities, his sensuality and his lack of moral accountability, his superstition and other faults that are the effect of temperament and of centuries of slavery, he had his eminently good points.” Evidently, the black man in America has developed a cheerful temperament stemming from the slavery which he endured. The ironic cheerfulness suggests that the black man is resolute to delight in his American identity, regardless of the pervasive poverty and racism which he endures.
