Introduction
Most scholars view the iconic social form of the ghetto as having a particular racial component, and as being defined by social isolation, residential segregation, gross inequality, consistent poverty, and crime. This article includes the radical scholarship of the late 1960s and 1970s, which still exists in the early 21st century, albeit in a different, more theoretical way. In the past couple of decades, the tensions between theoretical and experimental, experience and structural processes, have been significant. As Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson argue in their article “Reconsidering the ‘Ghetto’” “in the final analysis, the relationship between operational and theoretical definitions of the ghetto and the function of each model of definition deserves further consideration and is crucial for theory building” (Chaddha, Anmol and Wilson, William Julius. December 2008. Reconsidering the “Ghetto,” City & Community 7.4).
Origins of the Term
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “ghetto” as “1. Formerly a section or quarter in a European city to which Jews were restricted. 2. A slum section of an American city occupied predominantly by members of a minority group who live there because of social or economic pressure.” Historically, the word derived from the Italian word “gietto,” or foundry, in Venice, where Jews were originally forced to live within an enclosed settlement. The word retains this association, a geographic constraint where certain identifiable groups are compelled to live. Wirth 1928 used the term ghetto to connote a natural area that all who enter will assimilate into and later escape from, a notion that was heavily refuted by later scholars. The idea of the ghetto was being bandied about at the time almost exclusively as a concept involving Jews and not other minority groups, but it was also related to geography, as a specific location for those who lived in a particular area but who would and could eventually go elsewhere in the city. Frazier 1932 discusses the “negro community” in Chicago but did not use the word “ghetto” to refer to blacks in these locales. It was Drake and Cayton 1945, published a decade later, that defined the term as meaning a poor, rundown section of the black community (Bronzeville); yet ironically, they maintained not all of Bronzeville was a ghetto. Three years later, the new secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Weaver, in Weaver 1948, argued persuasively about the existence of residential segregation in the north, making the point that nomer more “ghettos” should be created in the United States. Seventeen years later psychologist Kenneth Clarke, writing about the role of power in the creation of the ghetto, surmised that “America has contributed to the concept of the ghetto the restriction of persons to a special area and the limiting of their freedom of choice on the basis of skin color” (Clark 1965). Tabb 1970 provided an early critique of poverty and other social and economic relationships as they relate to ghettos in America and was one of the first to connect the ghetto to the Fanonian colonial paradigm.