A half-century later, Duneier, a Princeton University sociologist, explained to an overflow audience at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that the word’s meaning has become vastly different. “If I teach a class on the ghetto at Princeton, students expect to hear about the ‘hood, and are astounded to hear about Jewish history the first few weeks,” he said.

How the meaning of the word ghetto has shifted, and the importance of understanding its history, were the subject of Duneier’s talk, and also of his book, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, which was awarded the seventh annual Zócalo Book Prize.

The meaning of the word ghetto already was in flux when Duneier was a child, becoming associated with African Americans in nearby places like Harlem and Brooklyn. At the same time, Jews like Duneier were coming to see their identity through the lens of the Holocaust, and the world was starting to understand what the Nazis’ forced segregation of the Jews had meant. “The Nazi ghettos were on my mind when I thought of the ghetto, but actually for most of Jewish history, it was really the ghettos of the early modern era that defined the understanding of Jews as to what ghettos were,” said Duneier.

The early modern Jewish ghettos, which began in Venice, Italy in 1516 and lasted until Napoleon abolished them in the early 19th century, had a number of distinctive characteristics, Duneier said. They were protective of both the Jews inside and wider society outside. They discriminated based on religious belief—you could leave if you converted. Their segregation was porous—you could do business and meet friends outside, coming and going over the course of the day. And they were physically overcrowded.

“I sometimes refer to the ghetto as the differentiating machine,” said Duneier. The ghetto takes people who are somewhat different, segregates them, and makes them even more different—thus providing a deeper rationalization for keeping them more separate and exotic over time. Over centuries, Jews became wholly different from the rest of society. At the same time, however, “they were able to carry on a way of life determined by beliefs. They could semi-flourish,” said Duneier. “They were degraded by their segregation but their life was ongoing.”

Fast forward to the University of Chicago in the 1920s, where sociology was trying to establish itself as a science, in part by using generalizations to explain social phenomena. A young sociologist named Louis Wirth wrote a book called The Ghetto that “said there’s this idea from Jewish history, the ghetto, that we can use to understand other racial and ethnic groups as well,” including Italians, Chinese, and African Americans in Chicago. Jews, meanwhile, had self-segregated to neighborhoods like the Lower East Side of New York, the West Side of Chicago, and Boyle Heights in Los Angeles. “For Wirth, the self-segregation of the Jews was a problem,” said Duneier. Wirth used the ghetto as an argument for assimilation, asserting that Jews had built invisible walls around themselves, ignoring the “intense, virulent anti-Semitism” underlying the ghetto’s creation.

Meanwhile, another scholar, Salo W. Baron at Columbia University, was making the opposite argument in a 12-page essay called “Ghetto and Emancipation.” Baron wanted readers to “understand all the ways in which Jews flourished during the age of the ghetto,” highlighting the benefits of this segregated way of life. Thus, on the eve of Hitler and the creation of a new kind of Jewish ghetto, “there was a debate over whether the ghetto was a good thing or a bad thing.”

Hitler used the medieval ghettos to rationalize his segregation of the Jews in ghettos. He told Catholic Church officials, “‘I’m just doing what you guys did for centuries,’” Duneier recounted. “‘I’m putting the Jews back in the ghetto. I’m going to really achieve the goal you had set for yourselves.’” The Church accepted this logic—as did journalists. Duneier quoted an article in The New York Times that read, “‘Hitler is recreating the ghetto of the middle ages on Polish soil.’”

Yet the difference between Hitler’s ghettos and earlier Jewish ghettos “is night and day,” Duneier said. Hitler’s ghettos were not protective but destructive. They discriminated by race; conversion was no way out. They were sealed off; trying to escape would get you shot. And they were full of disease, starvation, and severe overcrowding. “The Nazi ghetto was simply a link in the larger chain of execution that resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews,” Duneier said.

So how did the ghetto, as an idea and concept, become black? The word didn’t truly become associated with African Americans until around 1945, which is why Duneier argues that the origins of this shift lie in the Nazi ghettos. Black servicemen were fighting in World War II to free Jews from concentration camps while at the same time African Americans in cities across the country were being segregated due to the rise of restrictive covenants that kept them out of certain white communities.

In 1945, University of Chicago graduate students St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton published a book called Black Metropolis that highlighted a “contradiction between American ideals and American actions” that could be seen in the “black ghetto,” said Duneier. “They were essentially arguing that blacks were America’s Jews.”

The ghettos of America changed as the decades passed, and African American sociologists’ understanding of them changed, too, as different intellectuals wrote about what the ghetto meant in their particular historical moment. Kenneth Clark wrote about the ghetto as it was transformed by the federal government’s building of big housing projects. William Julius Wilson wrote about middle-class African Americans’ exodus from the ghetto, leaving behind an increasingly poor and isolated population.

In conclusion, Duneier asked “what kind of reference to the Holocaust or Nazi ghettos should be in this moment for people who are trying to understand the ghetto?”

The Nazi ghetto represents the most extreme form of control that’s ever existed for a ghetto, he said. But it was also a symbol of extreme resistance, in the form of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Today, in our age of mass incarceration and extreme forms of control by the government, as well as tremendous resistance in the forms of movements like Black Lives Matter, Duneier said, “understanding the particular context in which African American intellectuals took up the word [ghetto] is more relevant than ever.”

Duneier then turned to the audience for a lively question-and-answer session that touched on the past, present, and future of the ghetto.

One audience member asked why the word ghetto hasn’t generally been used for Asian-American or Latino communities.

“I thought a lot about the application of the term to other communities and asked myself why certain communities may or may have not taken it up,” said Duneier. Long before Jews and blacks were segregated in America, restrictive covenants were used to keep the Chinese in certain neighborhoods—which came to be known as Chinatowns rather than ghettos. Latinos used the term barrio, and “had their own complicated history with that term.”

What can history teach us about recent social science studies of the ghetto?

Over the last few decades, said Duneier, social scientists have studied what happens when people are moved out of the ghetto into better neighborhoods. The results appear minimal. Yet these experiments are very short. One of the important lessons of the history of the Jewish ghettos is how long it took after the Jews left the ghetto for those effects of ghettoization to disappear, said Duneier. “It took a long time for the Jews to be able to integrate and to cast off many of the disadvantages that came with ghettoization. It took generations.”

Two questioners asked Duneier about the ghetto of the future: in America, where he sees economic segregation possibly replacing racial segregation; and across the world, as borders dissolve and nation-states evolve. Could an entire nation-state be ghettoized in the future as resources grow scarce and the gap between rich and poor grows, the audience member asked?

Duneier answered concisely: “Yes.”

The post Mitchell Duneier Explains the Invention of the Ghetto, as Place and as Idea appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, many people understandably dislike the word “ghetto” for its associations with stigmatizing and harmful stereotypes—especially of African Americans. In Ghettonation: A Journey into the Land of the Bling and the Home of the Shameless, Cora Daniels writes that “ghetto” today refers to “gold teeth, … Pepsi-filled baby bottles, and baby mamas.” One New York City councilwoman went so far as to try to ban its “negative usage” in New York City’s official government documents. Even a figure as prominent as Mario Luis Small, the first black dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago—the very university where the ghetto was established as a social scientific idea almost a century ago—has written a nuanced essay explaining his reasons for abandoning the idea.

In this book, I hope to show that the ghetto remains a useful concept—provided we recall its rich historical background and stop divorcing it from its past. The word derives from the name of a Venetian island that once housed a copper foundry, or geto. Five hundred years ago, in 1516, the Venetian authorities required the city’s Jews to live on that island, in an area enclosed by walls. Venice was thus the first place to have a ghetto with today’s connotation of restriction in space. In 1555, Pope Paul IV forced Rome’s Jews into a similarly enclosed quarter, which, a few years later, came to be called by the Venetian name “ghetto.” The term then gradually spread to other European cities where Jews were similarly segregated from the larger population. In all these places, they simultaneously suffered and flourished.

Although the ghettos were demolished in the 19th century, in tandem with a gradually swelling wave of Jewish emancipation, the term “ghetto” was increasingly used from the late 19th century on, first to refer to dense Jewish quarters in Europe and America and then occasionally in reference to black urban neighborhoods. The word was given even greater prominence when it was reappropriated by the Nazis as they confined the Jews of Eastern Europe behind barbed wire in the late 1930s. A few years later, the idea of the ghetto took on new significance in the United States. During World War II, as black Americans served in the military (usually in arduous roles of logistical support) and witnessed the liberation of the Jews, blacks at home saw parallels between the ghettos established by the Nazis and their own segregated neighborhoods, between the Caucasian purity that whites were seeking to preserve in the United States and the Aryan purity that Hitler was trying to impose on Europe. As they had during World War I, they found themselves asking, in effect, “Have we been fighting once again for everybody else’s freedom except our own?”

For many of the undergraduate students who take my seminar on the idea of the ghetto, it comes as news that Jews, not blacks, were the original ghettoized people. This is a first clue to a motivation behind this book: ghettos can get lost. Had my course been offered earlier in Princeton’s history, before the mid-1940s, it would have had nothing to do with blacks and no one would have expected it might. Instead, an instructor would have focused exclusively on Jews. The link between blacks and the ghetto has been around for less than 10 percent of the term’s 500-year history.

It is not just the Jewish ghettos that have been forgotten by certain younger cohorts. It has become harder and harder to recall the black ghettos of previous generations—ghettos that were quite different from those we know now. And as the word “ghetto” has itself become less meaningful in many quarters, so too have we largely forgotten the way the word was understood in discussions of race, poverty, and place by social scientists, activists, politicians, journalists, and other intellectuals. It’s little recognized that the term embodies some of the most brilliant work in the history of the social sciences, much of which was contributed by black scholars such as those presented in these pages.

I have tried to recover that particular history by focusing selectively on a series of figures: Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, whose account of the Chicago “ghetto” in the Nazi era underlined the importance of restrictive housing covenants and other coercive measures—and served as an alternative to the famous portrait of the black situation in An American Dilemma by the Swedish economist and later Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal; Kenneth Clark, who revived the ghetto as an explanatory concept during the civil rights movement to show how segregation was damaging Northern blacks even without Jim Crow; and William Julius Wilson, who showed how the successes of the civil rights movement facilitated the departure of the black middle class from the ghetto, leaving behind a destitute population with a paucity of economic opportunities. In an era when the spotlight was no longer on the problems of poor blacks, he argued that the only way to interest whites in joblessness among black adults or even poverty among black children was to focus on programs that would also help whites. But working around the racism (and classism) of advantaged whites was not in itself enough to build the kind of support he had hoped for.

So we’re back to individual ghettos that are left to their own devices, as well as the activists and reformers who desperately try to achieve miracles on the ground. One particular effort garnered recent attention, support, and celebrity for its guiding founder: Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children’s Zone. He advances the idea that whereas single-focus efforts to improve the lot of the black poor do not succeed, a full-court press will. His initiative also presumes that private philanthropy can sometimes be a substitute for public policy, and at best an integral part of it. Although President Barack Obama tried to make Canada’s ideas the centerpiece of a national urban policy, Obama found it impossible to get meaningful support from Congress. Thus far, Canada’s success hinges on his own charismatic efforts and on the generosity of a few highly committed white billionaires.

We are left with the remains of an age-old system of exclusion—and no straightforward remedy. Worse yet, we are only now emerging from what has arguably been the largest and most consequential of all recent interventions in the lives of poor blacks: a War on Drugs based, ultimately, on its own misguided fantasy of a solution. The tactic emerged gradually, only after deindustrialization rendered poor urban blacks increasingly superfluous. The black ghetto became a hyperpoliced and monitored zone. Today, most men in the ghetto, subject as they are to paramilitary-style policing such as stop-and-frisk operations, will spend some time in prison. The ghetto can no longer be simply defined as a segregated area in which most blacks live. It is better understood as a space for the intrusive social control of poor blacks. As such, many of the ideas about the ghetto that emerged at the time of World War II may be more relevant than ever.

In this book, I seek a sense of historical awareness that is increasingly missing from our understanding. So much has been lost that needs to be remembered, if only because the ghetto’s troubled legacy has not gone away.

The post The Ghetto’s Complex and Troubled Legacy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.