Ghetto
Ghetto is Dwyer
The term was originally used in Venice derived from the word Borghetto, meaning Little Borgo, a cluster of homes and buildings often outside Italian city walls, to describe the area where Jews, tradespeople or agricultural workers were compelled to live. In rural Italy, Borghetto is not necessarily a pejorative term. In modern context, the term ghetto now refers to an overcrowded urban area often associated with specific ethnic or racial populations living below the poverty line. Crime rates in ghettoes are typically higher than in other parts of the city.[1]
Etymology
Dictionaries list a number of possible origins for the originally Italian term, including "gheto" or "ghet", which means slag or waste in Venetian, and was used in this sense in a reference to a foundry where slag was stored located on the same island as the area of Jewish confinement (the Venetian Ghetto),[2] and borghetto, diminutive of borgo ‘borough’.[3]
History
The term became more widely used for ghettos in occupied Europe in 1939-1944, when the Germans reused historic ghettos to confine Jews prior to their transportation to concentration and death camps during the Holocaust.
Hyperghettoization
Hyperghettoization, a concept invented by sociologists Loïc Wacquant, William Julius Wilson, and Willy Aybar (see Further reading), is the extreme concentration of underprivileged groups in the inner cities.[4][5]
Hyperghettoization has several consequences. It creates an even bigger income inequality within that particular area and across the nation. It destroys all of an inner city's major social structures, and acts as the straw that broke the camel's back for the social institutions of ghettos, whose positions are already precarious. Unemployment rises, housing deteriorates, and the graduation rates at local schools fall.[4][5]
Jewish ghettos
In the Jewish diaspora, a Jewish quarter is the area of a city traditionally inhabited by Jews. Jewish quarters, like the Jewish ghettos in Europe, were often the outgrowths of segregated ghettos instituted by the surrounding authorities. A Yiddish term for a Jewish quarter or neighborhood is "Di yiddishe gas" (Template:Lang-yi ), or "The Jewish street". Many European and Middle Eastern cities once had a historical Jewish quarter and some still have it.
Jewish ghettos in Europe existed because Jews were viewed as alien due to being a cultural minority and due to their non-Christian beliefs in a Renaissance Christian environment.
As a result, Jews were placed under strict regulations throughout many European cities.[6] The character of ghettos has varied through times. In some cases, the ghetto was a Jewish quarter with a relatively affluent population (for instance the Jewish ghetto in Venice). In other cases, ghettos were places of terrible poverty and during periods of population growth, ghettos (as that of Rome), had narrow streets and tall, crowded houses. Residents had their own justice system.
Around the ghetto stood walls that, during pogroms, were closed from inside to protect the community, but from the outside during Christmas, Pesach, and Easter Week to prevent the Jews from leaving during those times. Starting in the early second millennium Jews became an asset for rulers who regarded them as a reliable and steady source of taxes and fees, as well as a source of economic stimuli stemming from their exemption from Christian and especially Roman Catholic prohibitions against usury. They often went to great lengths to have them settle in their realm, offering protected settlements and endowing them with special "privileges". A first such ghetto was documented by bishop Rüdiger Huzmann of Speyer in 1084.
A mellah (Arabic ملاح, probably from the word ملح, Arabic for "salt") is a walled Jewish quarter of a city in Morocco, an analogue of the European ghetto. Jewish populations were confined to mellahs in Morocco beginning from the 15th century and especially since the early 19th century. In cities, a mellah was surrounded by a wall with a fortified gateway. Usually, the Jewish quarter was situated near the royal palace or the residence of the governor, in order to protect its inhabitants from recurring riots. In contrast, rural mellahs were separate villages inhabited solely by the Jews.
During World War II, ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944 were established by the Nazis to confine Jews and sometimes Gypsies into tightly packed areas of the cities of Eastern Europe, turning them into de-facto concentration camps and death camps in the Holocaust. Though the common usage is ghetto, the Nazis most often referred to these areas in documents and signage at their entrances as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden (German); both translate as Jewish Quarter. These Nazi ghettos used to concentrate Jews before extermination sometimes coincided with traditional Jewish ghettos and Jewish quarters, but not always. Expediency was the key factor for the Nazis in the Final Solution. Nazi ghettos as stepping stones on the road to the extermination of European Jewry existed for varying amounts of time, usually the function of the number of Jews who remained to be killed but also because of the employment of Jews as slave labor by the Wehrmacht and other German institutions, until Heinrich Himmler's decree issued on June 21, 1943, ordering the dissolution of all ghettos in the East and their transformation into concentration camps.[7]
Post-war
After World War II, many emigrated to the United States and Israel. With the Cold War progressing, industry was spread across the major cities and work assignments were given out.
United States
History
The development of ghettos in America is closely associated with different waves of immigration and internal urban migration. The Irish and German immigrants of the mid-19th century were the first ethnic groups to form ethnic enclaves in America’s cities. This was followed by large numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, including many Italians and Poles between 1880 and 1920. These later European immigrants actually were more segregated than blacks in the early twentieth century.[8] Most of these remained in their established immigrant communities, but by the second or third generation, many families were able to relocate to better housing in the suburbs after World War II.
These ethnic ghetto areas included the Lower East Side in Manhattan, New York, which later became notable as predominantly Jewish, and East Harlem, which became home to a large Puerto Rican community in the 1950s. Little Italys across the country were predominantly Italian ghettos. Many Polish immigrants moved to sections like Pilsen of Chicago and Polish Hill of Pittsburgh, and Brighton Beach is the home of mostly Russian and Ukrainian immigrants. [citation needed]
African American ghettos
Urban areas in the U.S. can often be classified as "black" or "white", with the inhabitants primarily belonging to a homogenous racial grouping.[9] Forty years after the African-American civil rights era (1955–1968), most of the United States remains a residentially segregated society in which blacks and whites inhabit different neighborhoods of significantly different quality.[10][11] Many of these neighborhoods are located in Northern cities where African Americans moved during The Great Migration (1914–1950) a period when over a million[12] African Americans moved out of the rural Southern United States to escape the widespread racism of the South, to seek out employment opportunities in urban environments, and to pursue what was widely perceived to be better quality of life in the North.[12] In the Midwest, neighborhoods were built on high wages from manufacturing union jobs; these in-demand jobs dried up during the decline of industry and the ensuing downsizing at steel mills, auto plants, and other factories starting in the early 1970s.[8] Segregation increased most in those cities with the greatest black in-migration and then crippling economic decline, epitomized in cities like Gary, Indiana.[13]
In the years following World War II, many white Americans began to move away from inner cities to newer suburban communities, a process known as white flight. White flight occurred, in part, as a response to black people moving into white urban neighborhoods.[13][14] Discriminatory practices, especially those intended to "preserve" emerging white suburbs, restricted the ability of blacks to move from inner cities to the suburbs, even when they were economically able to afford it. In contrast to this, the same period in history marked a massive suburban expansion available primarily to whites of both wealthy and working-class backgrounds, facilitated through highway construction and the availability of federally subsidized home mortgages (VA, FHA, HOLC). These made it easier for families to buy new homes in the suburbs, but not to rent apartments in cities.[15]
In response to the influx of black people from the South, banks, insurance companies, and businesses began denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking, insurance, access to jobs,[16] access to health care,[17] or even supermarkets[18] to residents in certain, often racially determined,[19] areas. The most devastating form of redlining, and the most common use of the term, refers to mortgage discrimination. Data on house prices and attitudes toward integration suggest that in the mid-twentieth century, segregation was a product of collective actions taken by non-blacks to exclude blacks from outside neighborhoods.[20]
The "Racial" Provisions of FHA Underwriting Manual of 1936, included the following guidelines which exacerbated the segregation issue:
Recommended restrictions should include provision for: prohibition of the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended …Schools should be appropriate to the needs of the new community and they should not be attended in large numbers by inharmonious racial groups.[13][21]
This meant that ethnic minorities could secure mortgage loans only in certain areas, and it resulted in a large increase in the residential racial segregation and urban decay in the United States.[22] The creation of new highways in some cases divided and isolated black neighborhoods from goods and services, many times within industrial corridors. For example, Birmingham, Alabama’s interstate highway system attempted to maintain the racial boundaries that had been established by the city’s 1926 racial zoning law. The construction of interstate highways through black neighborhoods in the city led to significant population loss in those neighborhoods and is associated with an increase in neighborhood racial segregation.[23] By 1990, the legal barriers enforcing segregation had been replaced by decentralized racism, where whites pay more than blacks to live in predominantly white areas.[8] Some social scientists suggest that the historical processes of suburbanization and decentralization are instances of white privilege that have contributed to contemporary patterns of environmental racism.[24]
Following the emergence of anti-discrimination policies in housing and labor sparked by the civil rights movement, members of the black middle class moved out of the ghetto. The Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968. This was the first federal law that outlawed discrimination in the sale and rental of housing on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion and later sex, familial status, and disability. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity was charged with administering and enforcing the law. Since housing discrimination became illegal, new housing opportunities were made available to the black community and many left the ghetto. Urban sociologists frequently title this historical event as “black middle class exodus” (also see black flight). Elijah Anderson describes a process by which members of the black middle class begin to distance themselves socially and culturally from ghetto residents during the later half of the twentieth century, "eventually expressing this distance by literally moving away."[25] This is followed by the exodus of black working-class families.[26] As a result, the ghetto becomes primarily occupied by what sociologists and journalists of the 1980s and 1990s frequently title the "underclass." William Julius Wilson suggests this exodus worsens the isolation of the black underclass – not only are they socially and physically distanced from whites, they are also isolated from the black middle class.[27]
Despite mainstream America’s use of the term "ghetto" to signify a poor, culturally or racially homogenous urban area, those living in the area often used it to signify something positive. The black ghettos did not always contain dilapidated houses and deteriorating projects, nor were all of its residents poverty-stricken. For many African Americans, the ghetto was "home": a place representing authentic blackness and a feeling, passion, or emotion derived from rising above the struggle and suffering of being black in America.[28] Langston Hughes relays in the "Negro Ghetto" (1931) and "The Heart of Harlem" (1945): "The buildings in Harlem are brick and stone/And the streets are long and wide,/But Harlem’s much more than these alone,/Harlem is what’s inside." Playwright August Wilson used the term "ghetto" in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) and Fences (1987), both of which draw upon the author’s experience growing up in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, a black ghetto.[8]
Recently the word "ghetto" has been used in slang as an adjective rather than a noun. It is used to indicate an object's relation to the inner city or black culture, and also more broadly to denote something that is shabby or of low quality. While "ghetto" as an adjective can be used derogatorily, the African American community, particularly the hip hop scene, has taken the word for themselves and begun using it in a more positive sense that transcends its derogatory origins.
Other ghettos
Chinatowns originated as racially segregated enclaves where most Chinese immigrants settled from the 1850s onward. Major Chinatowns emerged in Boston and Lowell, Massachusetts; Detroit, Michigan; Corpus Christi, Texas; Camden and Trenton, New Jersey; Chicago; Los Angeles, South Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and San Diego, California; New York City; New Orleans; Akron, Ohio; Cincinnati, Ohio; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; Vancouver; Toronto; Montreal and other major cities. Today, most Chinese Americans no longer reside in those urban areas, but post-1970s Asian immigration from China, Southeast Asia and the Philippines have repopulated many Chinatowns. Many Little Italys, Chinatowns (or Koreatowns and Japantowns) and other ethnic neighbourhoods have become more middle-class in recent times, dominated by successful restaurant owners, family-owned stores and businessmen able to start up their own companies. Many have become tourist attractions in their own right.
In the United States, many Hispanic immigrants from Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean concentrated in barrios located in cities with large Hispanic populations such as East Los Angeles, California; Boyle Heights, California, Orange County, California, Anaheim, Baldwin Park, Chino, Coachella, El Centro, El Monte, Fresno, Huron, Hemet, Indio, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Modesto, Monrovia, Moreno Valley, National City, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Cincinnati, Compton, Downey, South Central, Inglewood, South Los Angeles, Oakland, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, North San Jose, East San Jose, Santa Ana, California and Temecula; Alexandria, Virginia, Langley Park, Maryland, Wheaton, Maryland, Dallas, Houston, El Paso, and San Antonio, Texas; north of Philadelphia, PA and Phoenix, Tucson, and Yuma, Arizona; Denver; Oklahoma City; New York City; Brentwood, New York ;Chicago ;Sterling, Illinois. Many of these cities struggled with issues of crime, drugs, youth gangs and family breakdown. However, middle-class and college-educated Hispanics moved out of barrios for other neighborhoods or the suburbs. The barrios continually thrived by the large influx of immigration from Mexico, this largely due to the explosion of the Latino population in the late 20th century. The majority of residents in these urban barrios are immigrants directly from Latin America.[citation needed]
United Kingdom
Great Britain
The existence of ethnic enclaves in the United Kingdom is controversial.
Southall Broadway, a predominantly Asian area in London, where less than 12 percent of the population is white, has been cited as an example of a 'ghetto', but in reality the area is home to a number of different ethnic groups and religious groups.[29][30] Analysis of data from Census 2001 revealed that only two wards in England and Wales, both in Birmingham, had one dominant non-white ethnic group comprising more than two-thirds of the local population, but there were 20 wards where whites were a minority making up less than a third of the local population.[31][32] By 2001, two London boroughs - Newham and Brent - had 'minority majority' populations, and most parts of the city tend to have a diverse population.
The Savile Town area of Dewsbury was described as "some 97-100% Asian Muslim" by Kirklees NHS in 2007.[33] In the 2001 census, the area was 9.7% White British.[34]
Northern Ireland
In Northern Ireland, towns and cities have long been segregated along ethnic, religious and political lines. Northern Ireland's two main communities are its Irish nationalist/republican community (who mainly self-identify as Irish and/or Catholic) and its unionist/loyalist community (who mainly self-identify as British and/or Protestant). Ghettos emerged in Belfast during the riots that accompanied the Irish War of Independence. For safety, people fled to areas where their community was the majority. They then sealed-off these neighborhoods with barricades to keep-out rioters or gunmen from the other side. Many more ghettos emerged after the 1969 riots and beginning of the "Troubles". In August 1969 the British Army was deployed to restore order and separate the two sides. The government built separation barriers called "peace lines". Many of the ghettos came under the control of paramilitaries such as the (republican) Provisional Irish Republican Army and the (loyalist) Ulster Defence Association. One of the most notable ghettos was Free Derry.
See also
References
- ^ ghetto - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
- ^ http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=ghetto&searchmode=none
- ^ The New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition, Erina McKean, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-517077-6
- ^ a b Hurst, Charles. Social Inequalities: Froms, Causes, and Consequences. 6th Edition. Pp. 263,274, glossary
- ^ a b Joel Blau (1993). The Visible Poor. Oxford University Press US. pp. 44–45. ISBN 0-19-508353-9.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|isbn13=ignored (help) - ^ GHETTO Kim Pearson
- ^ Ghetto in Flames Yitzhak Arad, pp. 436-437
- ^ a b c d Ghettos: The Changing Consequences of Ethnic Isolation
- ^ Inequality and Segregation R Sethi, R Somanathan - Journal of Political Economy, 2004
- ^ Douglas S. Massey (2004). "Segration and Strafication: A Biosocial Perspective". Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race. 1 (1): 7–25. doi:10.1017/S1742058X04040032.
{{cite journal}}: External link in|journal=|month=ignored (help) - ^ Sethi, Rajiv; Somanathan, Rohini (2004). "Inequality and Segregation". Journal of Political Economy. 112 (6): 1296–1321. doi:10.1086/424742.
- ^ a b The Great Migration
- ^ a b c The Suburban Racial Dilemma: Housing and Neighborhoods By William Dennis Keating. Temple University Press. 1994. ISBN 1-56639-147-4
- ^ Central City White Flight: Racial and Nonracial Causes William H. Frey American Sociological Review, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Jun., 1979), pp. 425-448
- ^ "Racial" Provisions of FHA Underwriting Manual
- ^ Racial Discrimination and Redlining in Cities
- ^ See: Race and health
- ^ In poor health: Supermarket redlining and urban nutrition, Elizabeth Eisenhauer, GeoJournal Volume 53, Number 2 / February, 2001
- ^ How East New York Became a Ghetto by Walter Thabit. ISBN 0-8147-8267-1. Page 42.
- ^ The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, Jacob L. Vigdor The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jun., 1999), pp. 455-506
- ^ Federal Housing Administration, Underwriting Manual: Underwriting and Valuation Procedure Under Title II of the National Housing Act With Revisions to February, 1938 (Washington, D.C.), Part II, Section 9, Rating of Location.
- ^ Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States by Professor Kenneth T. Jackson ISBN 0-19-504983-7
- ^ From Racial Zoning to Community Empowerment: The Interstate Highway System and the African American Community in Birmingham, Alabama Charles E. Connerly Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 22, No. 2, 99-114 (2002)
- ^ Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California Laura Pulido Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Mar., 2000), pp. 12-40
- ^ Anderson, Elijah (1990). Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. The University of Chicago Press. p. 2. ISBN 0-226-01816-4.
- ^ Wilson, William Julius (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. The University of Chicago Press. p. 49. ISBN 0-226-90131-9.
- ^ Wilson, William Julius (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. The University of Chicago Press. pp. 7–8. ISBN 0-226-90131-9.
- ^ Smitherman, Geneva. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.
- ^ Browne, Anthony (May 5, 2004). "We cant run away from it white flight is here too". The Times. London. Retrieved May 3, 2010.
- ^ Kerr, J., Gibson, A. and Seaborne, M. (2003) London from punk to Blair. Reaktion Books.
- ^ www.london.gov.uk/gla/publications/factsandfigures/dmag-briefing-2005-38.rtf
- ^ www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BSPS/ppt/May06_BB.ppt
- ^ http://www.kirklees-pct.nhs.uk/fileadmin/documents/meetings/march_07/KPCT-07-42%20Report%20estate%20strategy.doc paragraph 4.3
- ^ http://www.kirklees.gov.uk/community/statistics/census-by-settlement/KS06settle2003.xls