Ray Hutchison - The Ghetto: Contemporary Global Issues and Controversies

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Copyright 2012 by Westview Press

Chapter 3, Toward Knowing the Iconic Ghetto, copyright 2012 by Elijah Anderson.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The ghetto : contemporary global issues and controversies /
[edited by] Ray Hutchison and Bruce D. Haynes.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8133-4503-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-8133-4504-8 (e-book)

1. Inner cities. 2. Sociology, Urban. I. Hutchison, Ray. II. Haynes, Bruce D., 1960HT156.G44 2012
307.3'366dc23

2011024796

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Bruce D. Haynes and Ray Hutchison

1. A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure:
A Sociological Specification of the Ghetto

Loc Wacquant

2. De-spatialization and Dilution of the Ghetto:
Current Trends in the United States

Peter Marcuse

Elijah Anderson

4. You Just Dont Go Down There:
Learning to Avoid the Ghetto in San Francisco

Nikki Jones and Christina Jackson

Bruce D. Haynes

Sharon Zukin

Ernesto Castaeda

Alan Gilbert

Brasilmar Ferreira Nunes and Leticia Veloso

10. Demonstrations at Work:
Some Notes from Urban Africa

AbdouMaliq Simone

11. From Refuge the Ghetto Is Born:
Contemporary Figures of Heterotopias

Michel Agier

Ray Hutchison

Ghetto (ghetto), Pronunciation: /'get,/noun (plural ghettos or ghettoes) a part of a city, especially a slum area, occupied by a minority group or groups. Historical: The Jewish quarter in a city: the Warsaw Ghetto an isolated or segregated group or area: the relative security of the gay ghetto; verb (ghettos, ghettoing, ghettoed) [with object] put in or restrict to an isolated or segregated area or group. Origin: early seventeenth century: perhaps from Italian getto foundry (because the first ghetto was established in 1516 on the site of a foundry in Venice), or from Italian borghetto, diminutive of borgo borough.

Although the term ghetto originated in Europe and referred to the area of the city to which Jews were restricted, it has come to embody the urban spaces of marginalized groups in the United States, most notably black Americans. In American popular culture, the term has come to signify both place and mindset of ghetto-centric publications such as 150 Ways to Tell If You Are Ghetto (Wayans, Spencer, and McCullough 1997), Straight from the Ghetto (Berry and Coker 1996), and the sequel You Still Ghetto (Berry 1998). There has even been a Broadway show, Ghetto Klown, written and performed by the Latin comedian John Leguizamo. In the New York Times bestseller Ghettonation: A Journey into the Land of Bling and Home of the Shameless, Cora Daniels (2008) argues that the term has morphed from a noun, denoting overcrowded communities of filth, starvation, violence and despair, to an adjective, describing an impoverished mindset that embraces low expectations.

Internationally, a ghetto culture machine and ghetto culture industry helped produce and market the black ghetto as a symbol of cultural authenticity, heroic resistance, and self-determination, a viewpoint that ignores the historic processes of state and and social isolation and segregation that gave rise to ghettos. From Moscow to Monrovia, American hip hop culture and Jamaican reggae styles mix with anticolonial political struggles and local identities (Osumare 2010). In the banlieues of Paris, North African shopkeepers append the term ghetto to their storefront signs. In Senegal, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Kenya, Gambia, and South Africa, radio stations model their programming on the hip hop-influenced urban culture of black Americans; from Poland to Morocco, disenfranchised youth of all races use rap and reggae music to describe the deteriorating inner city.

Over the course of the twentieth century, a preoccupation with the ghetto has emerged in social science research as well, moving from historical studies of Jewish communities in New York (Thomas 1921) and Chicago (Wirth 1928) to a label meant to highlight racial segregation of the black community (Haynes 1913; Weaver 1948; Clark 1967) and finally the study of marginalized communities around the world, which inevitably are compared to and measured against the black American ghetto (Wilson 1987; Jargowsky 1997; Peach 1996, 2001; Poulsen and Johnson 2000; see also Slater 2010). Such simplistic and misleading comparisons across the Atlantic have confounded discussions. In France, violence, lawlessness, and the supposed dysfunctional culture of North African, Arab, and Muslim immigrants are conflated by politicians, social scientists, and journalists in sensational depictions of working-class banlieues (Gilbert 2011). Confrontations between suburban youths and the police have been compared to urban race riots in American cities during the 1980s and 1990s, even as scholars have argued that it is the class position of the French immigrants, modulated by their ethnic provenance and racial appearance that sets them apart from the native-born blacks of the United States (Wacquant 2008). Ceri Peach (1996) notes a recurrent fear expressed by politicians, journalists, and scholars that Britain has ghettos or is developing towards the Black American Ghetto, yet the segregation of African-Caribbean immigrants or black Brits has always remained low (and has in fact has steadily declined over the past fifty years) while Asians are highly segregated (216232).

In scholarly research the ghetto has a complicated and rich history. In the introduction to the Ghetto Symposium published in City & Community, we discussed the origin of the term and the evolution of social science research from the 1920s to the present (Haynes and Hutchison 2008). In this introduction, we trace the term ghetto from its origins in Venice through its development during the late 1800s, and consider its application over the last century by social scientists to ethnic and racial communities across the globe.