Top Quotes: “Ghetto: The History of a Word” — Daniel Schwartz

Background: This book provides an excellent lookback at the origin of the word ‘ghetto’ and the two major groups to which it has been applied — Jewish and black people (plus a short look at ‘gay ghettos’). The author cites many influential sociologists from the 1950s til today who have studied the vicious cycle of the ghetto: if you place people in a limited area with limited resources and power, things get overcrowded and problems arise and the people are then blamed for being incapable of caring for their homes, living peacefully, etc. I also learned a lot about the lead-up to the Holocaust, which involved placing Jewish people in very restricted segregated areas which made it impossible for them to live healthy lives and this was then used to justify the horrific genocide that ensued.

Intro

“The word [ghetto] derives from the name of a Venetian island that once housed a copper foundry or geto. 500 years ago, in 1516, the Venetian authorities required the city’s Jews to live on that island, in an area enclosed by walls. In 1555, Pope Paul IV forced Rome’s Jews into a similarly enclosed quarter. The term gradually spread to other European cities where Jews were similarly segregated. In all these places, they simultaneously suffered and flourished.”

“The ghetto can no longer be simply defined as a segregated area in which most black lives. It is better understood as a space for the intrusive social control of poor blacks.”

Jewish Ghettos

“By the time Hitler consolidated his power in 1933, the concept of Jewish segregation already had a long and complicated history. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Jews in France, England, and German lands (there was no unified Germany until 1870) still lived in semi-voluntary Jewish quarters for reasons of safety as well as communal activity and self-help. Yet the quarters in which Jews lived were hardly cut off from the surrounding city. Medieval Jews had substantial freedom to come and go as they pleased. They traveled and had regular contact with Jewish travelers.”

“Nonetheless, Jewish life became increasingly difficult. Thanks to the church’s growing fears for the purity of the individual Christian, restrictions increased. Sharing a common table or having sexual relations with Jews was considered polluting.”

“Jewish life, especially religious and intellectual life, knew periods of true flowering. Moreover, Jewish quarters were almost never obligatory or enclosed until the 15th century.”

“In 1492 in now-united Spain, the joint monarchs decreed the expulsion of all Jews who had not converted to Christianity, noting that enclosed urban quarters had not prevented contact between Jews and Christians, and that the kingdom’s remaining Jews would entice converts back to Judaism — -therefore expulsion was the only remedy. By that time, Jews had already been expelled from England (in 1290) and from France (between 1306 and 1394). Jews in the German lands suffered great massacres during the 14th century and by the 15th were scattered in many small towns.”

“Meanwhile, the rulers of Poland welcomed Jewish migrants to help them build up the country, despite the objections of the church.”

“Although some Jews resided in Venice in the 15th century, they possessed no legal status and could not engage in moneylending. In 1513, the government granted two wealthy Jews a five-year charter permitting them to engage in moneylending to provide the hard-pressed treasury with annual payments while also assisting the needy native poor. Some Jews were also authorized to sell rags, secondhand clothing, and other used items.”

“Many Venetians, and especially members of the clergy, who prided themselves on having ‘a most Catholic city,’ were greatly bothered by the phenomenon of newly arrived Jews living throughout Venice. Consequently in 1516, the Senate passed legislation requiring all Jews residing throughout the city, as well as any who were to come in the future, to reside together on the island Ghetto Nuovo. To prevent Jews from going around the city at night, gates were erected on the side of the Ghetto Nuovo where a small wooden footbridge crossed a canal, and also at its other end. Christian guards were to open these two gates at sunrise and close them at sunset; only Jewish doctors and merchants were routinely allowed outside after curfew.”

“The Venice ghetto created a completely Jewish space within a much larger Christian polity. The space had little regulation from the outside — the Jews could both govern it and call it their own. Although the Jews tried to avoid moving to the ghetto, the institution reflected a compromise that legitimized but carefully controlled their presence in the city.”

“The emperor Titus conquered and destroyed Jerusalem and brought Jewish prisoners to Rome as slaves. He granted them the right to practice their religion.”

“When Christianity became the official state religion in the 4th century, things took a turn for the worse for Jews as they faced various forms of humiliation. Pope John Paul II, for example, began making Jews run Carnival races in the winter in which they were stripped down to their loincloths and force-fed beforehand.”

“In 1555, Paul IV issued a bill that stated that all Jews should live ‘separated completely from the dwellings of Christians’ in order to press them into conversion and save them from eternal damnation. After centuries of identifying themselves as Romans and enjoying relative freedom of movement, the city’s Jews were forcibly relocated from the neighborhood of Trastevere to a small strip of land on the other side of the Tiber, where they were packed into a few dark and narrow streets that were regularly inundated by the flooding river. Gates were built into the ghetto walls. The walls that once offered Romans protection now became an instrument of imprisonment.”

“For Jews whose ancestors had arrived before the spread of Christianity, this was a shattering blow. Jews were anything but aliens or foreigners: they shared language and food with others; they spoke and wrote Italian and generally behaved in the same manner of other Roman residents.”

“The enclosure of Rome’s 3,000–4,000 Jews in a tiny, squalid strip made the city’s new constructions — like the Basilica of St. Peter’s — that much more spectacular. Bereft of new construction, the ghetto offered visual proof of the difference between old and new, Jews and Christians, damned and saved. The squalor of the ghetto was viewed not as the direct consequence of discrimination and forced overpopulation, but as the natural state and deserved fate of those who had betrayed Christ.”

“During the day, when the gates were open, Christians were free to enter the ghetto, while Jews could leave to work outside. By the third decade of the ghetto’s existence, however, Jews began to experience a strong sense of spatial separation. All the same, culturally speaking, the Jews never stopped being Romans, speaking Italian.”

“The pernicious circular logic of the ghetto is evident. Isolation from mainstream society, as well as the decrepitude caused by overcrowding, produced notorious conditions, behaviors, and traits that could gradually be invoked to rationalize further negative attitudes and more extreme isolation. The consequences of ghettoization provided an apparent justification for the original condition.”

“Napoleon was the first to attempt to demolish the ghettos of Italy and free the Jews. In 1797 his troops tore down the gates and liberated the Jews.”

“In Hitler’s justification of his hostility to the Jews, Hitler referred to the Catholic Church, which had always regarded the Jews as undesirables and which on account of the moral dangers involved had forbidden the Christians to work for the Jews and banished the Jews into the ghetto.”

“Early Nazis took issue with the fact that ghettos on German soil would make it virtually impossible to keep Jews out of the Aryan economy. If Jews owned stores in the ghetto, then German wholesalers would rely on their orders. If instead Germans operated these stores, then they would become dependent on Jewish consumers. If no stores were in the ghetto, Jews would have to venture into German zones for daily shopping. A ghetto in German cities thus seemed irreconcilable with the goal of eliminating all economic interdependence between Jews and Germans. To resolve this dilemma, they suggested that Germans no longer provide Jews with basic necessities.”

“Jews were segregated in special ‘Jew Houses’ located alongside the Christian population. They were forbidden to enter German theaters, share train cars, or bathe with Germans on beaches from the fear that touch pollutes. They were also prohibited from purchasing fruit or candy when entering shops. Jews were not allowed to have driver’s licenses or own cars. They were barred from governmental district, public squares, and hospitals. Their children were banned from German schools.”

“The main purpose of the Nazi ghetto was not simply segregation, but economic exclusion and control — not as easy to achieve on German soil as some had hoped.”

“The Nazi ghetto illustrated that it was now possible to control a segregated population with absolute efficiency. These ghettos’ walls were put in place virtually overnight instead of over several years, thanks to a crucial new technology, barbed wire, which had been invented in the 1860s.”

“In the Nazi ghetto, problems fed on each other in a vicious cycle. Nazis created the impression that the people relegated to the ghetto had contracted illnesses like typhus before their arrival there, rather than acknowledging that they had fallen ill because of extreme overcrowding. The purported probability that they would spread the illness was an important reason to have them ghettoized.”

“Nazi ghettos did not begin as holding pens for subsequent extermination; rather, they were built in anticipation of the Jews’ expulsion. The ghettos emerged gradually, with Jews being used initially as slave labor. Only after Jews became superfluous and grotesque due to ill health did the function of the ghettos change. Once the Jews had spent a few years in the ghetto, they became too emaciated, sick, and lethargic to work. Their pathetic condition reinforced the belief that they were subhuman.”

Black Ghettos

“In 1944, Victoria Dobbins bought a house on a white block just outside of Chicago’s black neighborhoods. A few days later, when she arrived with her belongings, she found the neighbors removing the plumbing. Mrs. Dobbins went to a police station and pleaded for protection, but the officer refused. The house was torched and flooded by neighbors, leaving it in shambles.”

“Racist housing covenants, violence, and racial steering created territorial restriction and led to overcrowding and misery in black neighborhoods. With the shortage of housing for blacks, buildings began to be used beyond their capacity, accelerating property depreciation. Ironically, the decay of housing caused by the restrictive covenants helped convince whites that blacks were incompetent tenants and homeowners. The invisibility of the agreements led whites and even some blacks to believe that this was the natural way of life for blacks, and that any neighborhood into which they moved would deteriorate.”

“By the forties, the Northern cities with the largest black communities tended to be the most segregated, like Chicago, where 86% of the city’s blacks lived in majority-black neighborhood. But in Boston, only 37% did and only 55% did in Philadelphia. It took some time before all moved in the direction of Chicago’s and New York’s segregation, but they did.”

“In San Francisco, the Chinese could not buy houses outside of Chinatown until 1947, when some wealthier members of the community escaped their dense and overcrowded precinct and established a suburb in the nearby districts of Sunset and Richmond. 41% of the total Chinese population in America in 1920 was wedged into tightly defined neighborhoods in SF, NYC, Oakland, Chicago, LA, Portland, Seattle, and Boston, the remainder living in small towns and rural areas. The Chinese were the first racial group to be forcibly segregated by restrictive covenants.”

“The University of Chicago refused to admit black patients to its medical center (save the ER) and routinely overcharged blacks for its medical services in the ER. Its mission was inextricably lined to preserving white demographic dominance in its local neighborhood, Hyde Park, from blacks wishing to escape the densely packed and degraded Black Belt nearby.”

“Swedish researcher Myrdal thought that was black living standards approached white living standards, white prejudice would decrease. ‘The Negroes’ poverty, ignorance, slum swellings, health deficiencies, dirty appearance, disorderly conduct, and criminality feed the antipathy of whites for them,’ he wrote. The black way of life was brought about by white race prejudice, but white prejudice was, in turn, built on the objective conditions inherent in their way of life. The goal should be to focus on raising the black living standard as quickly as possible.”

“Racism had created the covenant, which gave rise to both pathological conditions and a rich manifestation of black life and culture.”

“Whether they be Italians, Chinese, or blacks, the residents of all slum neighborhoods are blamed for the condition of the neighborhoods they inherit.”

“Blacks were living 90,000 per square mile while whites were 20,000 to the square mile. Extreme overcrowding led to run-down buildings and schools that ran on shifts, leaving many children ‘on the streets’ for the remainder of the school day. Such aspects of black life, which contributed to pathological behavior such as juvenile delinquency and teenage pregnancy, were seemingly attributable to the restrictive covenant.”

“Once in place, a ghetto led to the perception that a place was ‘blighted,’ that blacks gravitated there, and that it was the natural home to the city’s inferior outcasts. Actually, it was a place where rents were low, where blacks had no choice but to live, and where nobody else wanted to settle. Segregation exacerbated racial differences and reduced that chances that blacks could ever participate as equals. The ghetto’s very existence — dangerous, disease-ridden, congested, and run-down — reinforced the stigma that all blacks everywhere in the country already bore. All blacks were associated with the ghetto and judged by it, including the upper classes and those who lived beyond its perimeters.”

“Largely as a result of the work of the NAACP, five cases challenging the judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants were brought to the Supreme Court between 1948 and 1953, crucially eliminating a barrier against access to housing. The court ruling was complex. Because the covenants had been drawn up by private citizens, they were legal under the 14th Amendment, which protected the rights of individuals to engage in private conduct, regardless of its discriminatory nature. However, once these contracts were challenged in court, they were now seen as gaining their binding power from state enforcement, and the 14th Amendment forbade the enforcement of discriminatory action by the state.”

“The problems addressed by the civil rights movement and those confronted by blacks in Northern cities were very different. Desegregating lunch counters and achieving voting rights were all fine and good in the South, but they did nothing to address the privately sanctioned housing segregation, slumlords, run-down neighborhoods, and police abuse pervasive in the North.”

“A massive research project about central Harlem led by Robert Clark found that the pathologies of the Harlem community were tied directly to the residents’ powerlessness, to their inability to control their own lives and destinies. Its social agencies are financially precarious and dependent upon sources of support outside the community. Its economy is dominated by small businesses which are largely owned by absentee owners, and its tenements and other property are also controlled by absentee landlords. Harlem’s schools were controlled by forces outside of their community. Harlem was made up of socially engendered ferment, resentment, stagnation, and potentially explosive reactions to powerlessness and continued abuses.”

“The ghetto of the civil rights era was wholly different from the ghetto that existed at the time of World War II, when only ¼ of the U.S. black population lived in urban areas. By the 1960s, roughly 3/4s of blacks resided in cities, mainly in the north. In Philly and NYC, the overall percentage of blacks doubled in that period. In LA, Detroit, and Chicago, the percentage doubled. Over these two decades, much that was known about the situation of blacks in the North became outdated. Take the social status of migrants. At the end of the war, the average migrant was uneducated, possibly illiterate, having grown up in a rural farming community or small town. By the mid-1960s, by contrast, most migrants were moving to Northern cities from Southern cities. They arrived there with more education than the whites who remained to greet them. Inequality within black residential areas increased as educated blacks took on more middle-class jobs than ever.”

“With suburban development after World War II, whites with higher incomes finally had housing alternatives that had been unavailable to them previously. By the 1960s, with much of the housing vacated by whites now available to blacks, the demand for urban housing no longer so exceeded the supply. With schools no longer legally segregated, whites now had an impetus to leave the cities behind. Getting into a separate jurisdiction made de facto segregation easier to obtain.”

“Although the economic and educational attainment of Northern blacks improved significantly between the 40s and the 60s, they all still ended up living in black neighborhoods. Even when higher-income blacks were the first to move into white neighborhoods, those areas quickly became predominantly black. No ethnic or racial group had ever been so isolated from mainstream American society. Thus, by the 1960s, blacks grew increasingly resigned to the belief that the ghetto was here to stay. While the civil rights movement focused on their right to rent and buy anywhere in the city and de facto segregation in public schools, many more militant blacks in the Black Power movement saw control of the ghetto’s educational, political, and economic institutions as the far more relevant goal.”

“The link between high black unemployment and the geography of jobs became a problem by the mid-1960s, when anyone driving on an urban expressway during morning rush hours would have observed one lane crowded with white-collar workers driving to a central business district and [the other direction] crowded with poorer inner-city residents heading to blue-collar jobs in suburban office or industrial parks. Distance in miles was exacerbated by low ownership of cars among poor people. Only 14% of Watts households owned cars, as compared to 50% of LA residents.”

“By the mid-1960s, 15 years of expansion had altered not only the distribution of the metropolitan area’s population, but also that of its workplaces. A study of 40 large metro areas revealed that whereas barely 10% of jobs in wholesale had been located on the outskirts of these cities in the immediate postwar period, by the mid-60s, that figure had risen to nearly 33% with a similar shift in service jobs. While in 1948, less than ¼ of retail jobs in these metro areas had been in the suburbs, by 1963, that number had risen to nearly 50%. By 1963, 50% of manufacturing jobs lay on the periphery.”

“Developments in transportation and communication had facilitated a more flexible use of land, allowing manufacturing, retail, wholesaling, or housing to spring up in new areas. Companies, factories, and other sources of employment that had once found it advantageous to be located in urban centers now discovered that it was unnecessary to pay the additional price for such centrality. Proximity to ports, rail lines, and freight terminals became increasingly irrelevant as more and more goods were transported by truck. Firms could enjoy lower transport costs if they relocated near major highway intersections in the suburbs. Similarly, the sharp rise in auto ownership diminished the need for public transit, allowing companies to move farther from mass transit hubs.”

“Sociologist Lewis argued that the culture of poverty had its own structure and rationale. A coping mechanism for those consigned to an essentially hopeless existence, it was an inherited way of life. Among the typical characteristics of the culture of poverty was an inability to defer gratification and a consequent focus on the present. Family life was characterized by ‘early initiation into sex; a relatively high incidence of the abandonment of wives and children; a trend toward female-centered families.’ Lewis argued that those mired in the culture of poverty were socially isolated from the institutions and values of mainstream society and thus constituted a population apart. They were not so socially distant, however, as to be unaware of what was taking place in the wider society. They spoke as if they believed in middle-class values even if they did not actually try to live up to them. Childhood did not exist as others knew it because of extreme violence, early initiation into sexual activity, and a mother-centered family stemming from marital instability.”

“For a culture of poverty to prevail, the dominant ideology of the society had to uphold thrift and blame failure on the personal flaws of individuals. Indeed, Lewis did not feel that a culture of poverty could be found in all societies. Citing a wide range of examples — from Cuba and medieval Jewish ghettos to the sweepers of India — he pointed out that it was certainly possible to be poor while maintaining a self-sufficient culture. Even in places such as the U.S., where a culture of poverty did exist, he speculated that 80% of the poor did not participate in it. Those who did tended to be low-income blacks, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and Southern poor whites.”

“Lewis suspected that the civil rights movement had accomplished more by improving the self-image and self-respect of blacks than by winning economic gains, even if these two effects reinforced each other.”

“Lewis denied that the problems of blacks could be attributed to life in the ghetto. On the contrary, he argued that problems found in the U.S. ghetto are prevalent in countries with no segregated minorities. Problems that same would attribute to racial segregation were instead a broader phenomenon of poverty and the culture of poverty. The tendency to attribute fatalism, helplessness, and feelings of inferiority in U.S. blacks to racial segregation was misleading. Lewis had observed these same traits in the slum dwellers of Mexico City and San Juan.”

“Sociologist Elliot Liebow in the ’60s argued that similarities in the behaviors of poor blacks from one generation to the next were not the product of cultural transmission. Rather, they resulted as sons experienced the same defeats as their fathers. Once a man experienced these failures, he lost all confidence: ‘Sometimes he sits down and cries at the humiliation of it all. Sometimes he strikes out at [his wife] or the children with his fists, perhaps to lay hollow the claim to being man of the house in the one way left open to him.’ These behaviors did not arise from a disbelief in conventional values, but rather an inability to live up to those values. So a substitute system of ‘shadow values’ arose where special conditions could be invoked — such as having too much love for women to stay with any one of them. This permitted them to be ‘men once again.’”

“White privilege led to advantages in the labor market as whites go through life expecting not to do dirty work. This is a hallmark of a colonial society, one in which people of color take the servile jobs while whites go through life assuming they can avoid them. White privilege also entails nonmaterial advantages, including the psychic benefits of having jobs and living conditions that make it possible to always have someone at least one step below.”

“Harvey Milk believed that gay people could achieve political and social power only through visibility, and that this visibility could occur only through mass residential mobilization within a defined physical space. Calling the Castro a ghetto, just as Jews had once referred to the Lower East Side, Milk helped turn the ghetto into a vehicle for winning the political power that gays have begun to achieve today.”

“In the late ’60s, gay activists and intellectuals began referring to their residential enclaves as ghettos. ‘We have formed a ghetto, out of self-protection…We came not because it is so great here, but because it was so bad there.’”

“Urban renewal improvements were covers for massive relocations of the urban poor, including stacking them up in high-rise structures that were, in so many ways, unsuitable for making a living, raising a family, or developing linkages to structures of power and influence. Demarcation for urban renewal, especially for public housing, led property owners to give up on buildings they knew would eventually be seized through eminent domain and razed to the ground. By the time the government did act, the poor people living there were blamed for failing to maintain ‘their’ properties — a classic blame-the-victim dynamic that goes back to the original ghettos. In many cases, neighborhoods were cleared before construction started. Some city lands were to lie fallow for decades. By the mid ’50s, about 200,000 dwellings for the poor had been demolished, with little to replace them.”

“In Newark, one urban renewal project was to expand the commercial center of the city and surround it with Rutgers University-Newark buildings that would create a buffer between downtown and the ghetto. The university paid no property taxes. The tax revenues lost through this buffer zone were supposed to be more than offset by the tax-paying business interests and consumers that it would attract, and the stability that it would bring to the decaying urban core. Newark’s urban renewal followed a standard script in its residential construction: the good payoff would be to ‘attract the white middle and upper classes back to the city rather than provide housing for displaced poor Blacks.’”

“To Clark, the ghetto was a vehicle through which both the state and capitalism pursued continued growth at the expense of the most vulnerable. He anticipated the new school of Marxist urban sociology that arose in the ’80s and showed how real estate elites saw ghettos as targets of opportunity, and their residents as dependent or superfluous.”

“The black middle class’ massive upward mobility had enabled this group to separate from the black poor. Wilson argued that these developments had their roots in the civil rights era, a protest movement dominated by middle-class blacks. Biased in favor of middle-class interests, the movement had never focused on the subordination of ‘ghetto blacks,’ or on de-facto segregation. The legacy of that failure could be seen in the conditions of the black poor.”

“It seemed that everyone in the ghetto was receiving a check from the government. As the number of U.S. residents grew by half between 1950 and 1980, government programs were extended to whole new demographics. In these three decades, in constant dollars, health costs rose by 6 times, public assistance by 13 times, education spending by 24 times, social insurance outlays 27 times, and housing costs by 129 times. Not all of this spending had been directed at the ghetto, but the ghetto was absorbing far more than its proportionate share.”

“Wilson claimed that there was no link between benefit levels and the rising number of births among unmarried women. He claimed that the rise in welfare dependency had been caused by a lack of jobs, not an increase in benefits.”

“Wilson attributed the contracting black male marriageable pool to economic changes caused by a shift from the production of goods to the production of services, and by the relocation of industry from the North to the South as well as from the urban core to suburbia. Jobs had disappeared in areas where blacks were most heavily concentrated, and in places where they had moved after whites had migrated out of the city. In the three decades after 1950, more than 9 million whites had departed the central cities while 5 million blacks arrived, including many rural blacks. The decline in jobs was most severe in wholesale trade, manufacturing, and retail — areas that required the least education. The problem was thus not merely a geographic shift in jobs but also a mismatch between skills and available employment. Although new jobs were appearing in the central city, these required far more education than poor blacks could obtain. Wilson speculated about whether those jobs that allegedly required higher education really did so, suspecting that the association between formal skills and such jobs was false and kept many poor blacks out of the labor market. Was it possible that the new high tech was so sufficiently ‘user-friendly’ to be operated by people who had simply mastered the three Rs?”

“Between 1970 and 1980, in the nation’s five largest cities (NYC, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit), all of which had seen a decline in population, the number of poor residents had increased by an average of 22%. Even more striking was that the number of people residing in high-poverty areas had increased by 161%. Wilson blamed this concentration of poverty on the flight of middle-class blacks, who had enjoyed an increase in economic opportunities as a consequence of the civil rights era. Middle-class and poor blacks could not be found in large numbers in the same communities.”

“Prior to the ’60s, the black middle class had been an important social buffer in communities with high unemployment. Serving as role models for the poor, they not only reinforced mainstream values but also helped sustain the churches, rec facilities, stores, and schools in these communities. With the departure of the middle class, poor blacks were now left without this bulwark.”

“For blacks in the ’80s, social isolation, combined with joblessness and a poor marriage market, created an ecological niche in which the average poor black individual lived with far more restricted opportunities than did the average poor white. While poor whites rarely lived in poor, isolated urban neighborhoods, poor blacks could frequently be found in such communities. The extreme social isolation of poor black neighborhoods meant that in comparison to poor whites, poor blacks had little contact with the working and middle classes. Not only did they have limited access to networks of people who could help them find better jobs, but they also had few role models. This in comparison to the past in which a youngster growing up would typically observe many more employed and law-abiding adults, more working and professional two-parent families, and more youngsters completing school with opportunities at the end of the line.”

“The speech of many blacks in high-poverty urban neighborhoods became more distant from the speech of whites by 1990 than it was in earlier decades — including the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. This had in turn fostered presumptions of racial difference and faith in white supremacy. While blacks did speak a distinct dialect during slavery and Reconstruction, the most salient features of African American Vernacular English emerged in the decades of residential segregation after WWII — that is, in the black ghetto. African American Vernacular English is not a remnant of 400 years of overt racial and economic oppression, but a product of the extreme spatial and social isolation of black Americans in the second half of the 20th century.”

“Those who speak Black English are generally regarded as speaking bad English or slang; they are often deemed lazy or incapable of learning so-called Standard English or are said to be consciously rejecting mainstream society. Thus, a dialect that emerged through the sustained spatial isolation of the people who spoke it came to signify inherent inferiority. Spatial isolation produced distinctive behaviors, which were then stigmatized, seen as innate, and used as evidence to justify continued spatial segregation and socioeconomic marginalization — a vicious cycle.”

“Not only whites ‘clutched their pocketbooks, walked stiffly,’ and averted their eyes. Even many middle-class and older blacks lived in fear of the anonymous black male. When younger black men dressed in the ‘urban uniform’ of sweatsuits, sneakers, caps, and sunglasses, they were often trying to be intimidating enough to avoid becoming victims. Yet they also needed to be able to avoid being so scary as to cause whites panic. Thus, black males had to master code-switching to survive on the street.”

“City dwellers, and especially black men, are attentive to all public interaction because getting it wrong in any particular interaction could have dangerous consequences. When a bias, like a racial stereotype, is strongly held, it is hard to disconfirm it with facts or data from interactions on the street. Thus, even when an interaction is positive, it is easy to believe that it is just an exception. ‘If a stranger cannot pass inspection and be assessed as safe…the image of a predator may arise.’ Whites — so used to being in control — now felt a sense of powerlessness on the city streets.”

“UCLA sociologist Robert Waldinger found that middle-class blacks with higher education used their social networks to find jobs in the municipal economy. One labor relations director said, ‘Our biggest recruitment is by word of mouth.’ Middle-class blacks developed a lock on jobs there while the poorest blacks had essentially been shut out of the labor market.”

“Low-paying service jobs blacks didn’t even bothering applying to because they saw the wages declining were now being actively taken by a new generation of immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, and China, whose social networks created ‘ethnic occupational niches.’ Once established, employers became partial to immigrants over blacks. They also heeded the biases of their workers, who often wished to exclude blacks.”

“Waldinger argued that poor blacks had no desire to repeat the lives of their fathers, who had been blocked from rising beyond the lowest rungs of the economy by their own poor skills.”

“Wilson saw concentrated poverty as a phenomenon of economic restructuring and depopulation: the communities that he studied, which had been demographically robust in the ’40s had lost half of their residents between 1970 and 1990. These demographic shifts were accompanied by a major decline in the resources that contributed to neighborhood vitality. Abandoned buildings became crack houses and spaces for other illegal activities. Finding it difficult to maintain a sense of community, the more conventional working-class residents followed the middle class to other neighborhoods.”

“In 1996, three years after Clinton had passed a large increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit, he signed a bill that made good on his campaign promise to reform welfare. It imposed strict work requirements and time limits on AFDC — cash assistance to the poor — but it left intact the other major safety-net programs, including food stamps and Medicaid. The effect was to transfer control over benefits from the states — which set AFDC levels and in the South kept them to minimal levels — to the federal government which set the levels of the EITC and food stamps. On a net basis, the Clinton years increased aid to the poor, especially in the South.”

“Some of Clinton’s own circle resigned from his administration because they thought welfare reform would gut the safety net needed to transition to the labor market. Some liberal critics of Clinton thought the legislation lacked critical supports, such as child care, which would have enabled mothers to enter the labor force. As it result, it would harm countless poor children when benefits were cut off. The law, in their view, told former welfare recipients to ‘find a job’ without providing the necessary means for them to do so.”

“In the ’70s, children had served as lookouts for drug dealers. Now their role increased. Once the harsh drug laws came into effect, adult dealers who wished to avoid long prison sentences put up children to sell drugs for them. Fearful of getting robbed, these minors used some of the money they earned to purchase guns, which changed the codes of street behavior.”

“The path of the ghetto has led from an initial state of semi-flourishing and autonomy to one of pathology and control.”

“Today, the idea of the ghetto has become synonymous with ‘segregated housing patterns’ and ‘racial residential segregation.’ It signifies restriction and impoverishment in a delimited residential space. This emphasis highlights the important point that today’s residential patterns did not come about ‘naturally’; they were promoted by both private and state actions that were often discriminatory and even coercive. Nonetheless, this conception of the ghetto truncates our understanding. It does not convey the variations in degrees of control and degrees of flourishing that the history of the Jewish ghetto from Venice to Warsaw reflects. In Venice, Jews lived in a ghetto characterized by: We regulate you, but if you follow the rules, you can have a vigorous religious, cultural, and intellectual life. The Jewish experience under the Nazis illustrates the state exercising the firmest possible control over its subjects’ lives, a control that included the ending of these lives by starvation and disease or deportation to concentration camps. If we define the ghetto in terms of unequal housing, as important as that is, we miss how segregation can be compatible with a range of outcomes, compatible, that is, with wide variations in both control and flourishing.”

“In the early years of the black ghetto, black men lived in a ghetto in which there was semi-flourishing, just as they lived with less fear of being stopped or even shot by police. Whereas cops would violently repress those communities when they decided to do so, they were by today’s standards unconcerned with safety and violence in black neighborhoods. Though blacks have made substantial progress in many realms, those still stuck in the ghetto experience less flourishing and more intrusive control than ever before.”

“Though ghettos can also be found in suburbs (40% of the poor live in suburbs today, and they are mainly black and Latinx), the most notable black-white segregation continues within the major Northeast and Midwest metro areas, ‘America’s Ghetto Belt.’ They house about one in sex African Americans today, a condition exacerbated by ongoing black-white wealth differences and the disproportionate impact of the foreclosure crisis on black homeowners. Segregation is maintained today by suburban zoning restrictions that place restrictions on residential density.”

“While the ghetto dweller’s associations within the residential space can be warm, what is equally characteristic is that ghetto conditions do not naturally lead to an ‘inner solidarity.’ Instead, residents go to great lengths to differentiate among themselves in moral terms. Ghettos consist of ‘kinds of people’ who would not ordinarily choose to live side by side. Its inhabitants, who are despised by the larger society, expend as much energy drawing distinctions between one another as they do defending themselves against that external force. Their internal differentiation is so strong that collective action is less likely — even under the greatest threat.”

“The highest priority of most white people (and most Americans of any race) is to protect and advance the welfare of themselves and their families. Above and beyond racism, this ability of the American people to compartmentalize, to live with moral dissonance, is the crucial underlying foundation of the forgotten ghetto.”