Ghetto

Modern ghettos are characterised by extreme deprivation. This picture shows Royston, Glasgow.

Part of a series of articles on Racial Segregation

Antisemitism Jewish Pale of Settlement May Laws Segregation in the US Black Codes Jim Crow laws Redlining Racial steering Blockbusting White flight Black flight Gentrification Sundown towns Proposition 14 Indian Appropriations Indian Reservation Japanese American internment Italian American internment Immigration Act of 1924 Separate but equal Ghettos

The term 'Ghetto' was originally used to refer to the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy and then in Jewish ghettos in Europe, where Jews were required to live. The corresponding German term was Judengasse known as the Jewish Quarter. In Moroccan Arabic, ghettos were called mellah. The term came into widespread use for Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944 with severely constrained conditions, where the Nazis required Jews to live prior to transporting them to concentration and death camps.

A 20th century American co-opted usage of the term informs us that ghetto is a section of a city occupied by a sub-group who live there, especially because of social, economic, or legal pressure. The term "ghetto" is now commonly used to refer to any poverty-stricken urban area. In the U.S, "Rural ghetto" is used to describe mobile home parks, farm labor housing tracts, and Indian reservations. Urban neighborhoods where Mexican immigrants settled in the late 20th century (called barrios) are said to be comparable to ghettos, because most immigrants are clustered in culturally isolated enclaves.

Ghetto is formed in three ways:^[1]

• As ports of entry for racial minorities, and immigrant racial minorities.
• When the majority uses compulsion (typically violence, hostility, or legal barriers) to force minorities into particular areas.
• When the majority is willing and able to pay more than the minority to live with its own kind.

"Ghetto" is also used figuratively to indicate geographic areas with a concentration of any type of person (e.g. gay ghetto, student ghetto).

Etymologies suggested for the word 'Ghetto' derive from "getto", the Italian term for casting, the Griko Ghetonia (Γειτονία, neighbourhood), the Italian borghetto for "small neighborhood", or the Hebrew word get (Hebrew: גט), literally a "bill of divorce." A common explanation is that the name is derived for the "campo gheto", an area that iron foundries in Venice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries used for cooling slag (Venetian "gheta"; Italian "ghetta"), where Jews were forced to locate.

Ghettos for Jews

Main articles: Jewish Quarter (diaspora) , Jewish ghettos in Europe , Mellah , and Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944

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 Christian authorities or in World War Two, the Nazi's. A Yiddish term for a Jewish quarter or neighborhood is "Di yiddishe gas" (Yiddish: די ייִדדישע גאַס ), 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 cultural minorities due to their non-Christian beliefs in a Renaissance Christian environment, Jews were placed under strict regulations throughout many European cities.^[2] 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 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 without during Christmas, Pesach, and Easter Week to prevent the Jews from leaving during those times.

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 population 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 the areas in documents and signage at their entrances as Judischer Wohnberzirk or Wohngebiet der Juden (German), both translate as Jewish Quarter.

United States

History

The Irish immigrants of the 19th century were the first ethnic group to form Urban Areas in America’s cities, followed by Italians and Poles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Irish and Eastern European immigrants in the early twentieth century actually were more segregated than blacks of that era. They lived almost as segregated as blacks do today.^[3] Because there was no official housing segregation against most European immigrants, the second or third generation families were able to relocate to better housing in the suburbs after World War II if possible.

Other ethnic ghettos in New York were the Lower East Side in Manhattan, New York, which was predominantly Jewish until the 1950s, and Spanish Harlem, which was home to a large Puerto Rican community dated back to the 1930s. Little Italys across the country were predominantly Italian ghettos.

In the United States, between the abolition of slavery and the passing of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, discriminatory mores (sometimes codified in law, or through redlining) often forced urban African Americans to live in specific neighborhoods, which became known as "ghettos."

The black ghetto

See also: White flight and Racial segregation in the United States

Black-White segregation is decreasing fairly consistently for most metropolitan areas and cities. Despite these pervasive patterns, many changes for individual areas are small.^[4]. Thirty years after the civil rights era, the United States remains a residentially segregated society in which both blacks and whites inhabit different neighborhoods of vastly different quality.^[5][6] Cities throughout history have contained distinct ethnic districts. But rarely have they been so isolated and impoverished as the African American neighborhoods found in U.S. cities today.^[3] The racial segregation found in ghettos can lead to social, economic and political tensions.^[7]

Due to segregated conditions and widespread poverty as a result of Brown v. Board of Education, some black neighborhoods in the United States have been called "ghettos". Most of these neighborhoods are in North-eastern cities where African Americans moved during The Great Migration (1914-1950) a period when over a million^[8] 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 a better life in the North.^[8] African-American ghettos started out well, economically. In the Midwest, ghettos were built on high wages from manufacturing jobs. The African-American ghettos of the mid-twentieth century appear to have been much less harmful than those of today.^[3] However, segregation increased most in those cities with the greatest black in-migration.^[7] Whites felt more threatened by larger influxes of blacks, and their racism grew.

In the years after 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, and remains a significant cause in the spread of urban decay.^[9][7] Discriminatory practices, especially those intended to "preserve" emerging white suburbs, restricted the ability of non-whites to move from inner-cities to 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.^[10][7]

In response to the influx of black people from the South, banks, insurance companies, and businesses began redlining denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking, insurance, access to jobs,^[11] access to health care,^[12] or even supermarkets^[13] to residents in certain, often racially determined,^[14] 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 whites to exclude blacks from their neighborhoods.^[15] 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.^[16] The creation of these highways in some cases divided and isolated black neighborhoods from goods and services, many times within industrial corridors. For example, Birmingham’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.^[17] 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.^[15] 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.^[18]

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 the rising above the struggle and suffering of being black in America.^[19] 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.^[2]

Other ghettos

Chinatowns, where most Chinese immigrants settled from the 1850s onward in Chicago, New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Oakland (Near San Francisco), Los Angeles, Newark, Trenton and Camden, New Jersey and other major cities originated as racially segregated enclaves. However, most Chinese Americans no longer reside in those urban sections, but Asian immigration since the 1970s repopulated Chinatowns, even though Little Italys, Chinatowns and other ethnic neighborhoods 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 Southwest U.S., Mexican Americans had historical low-income urban areas known as barrios located in cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego, Escondido, Oceanside, National City, Houston, Denver, San Jose, Santa Ana, San Bernardino and San Antonio struggled with issues of crime, drugs, youth gangs and family breakdown. However, middle-class and college-educated Hispanics moved out of barrios for the suburbs. The barrios continually thrived by the large influx of immigration from Mexico, this largely due to the explosion of the Hispanic/Latino population in the late 20th century. The majority of residents in these urban barrios are immigrants directly from Mexico and Latin America.

England

The term "ghetto" is not widely used in Great Britain to describe present-day areas of poverty, though these do exist in many inner cities. Areas where low incomes and high proportions of ethnic minorities (including West Indians, sub-Saharan Africans, and Asians of Indian and Pakistani origin) are found together in the London areas of Brixton, Hackney, Harlesden, Queen's Crescent, Tottenham and Peckham. Parts of Lewisham, Southwark, Lambeth, Brent, Newham and Camden are known as ghettos. More recently formed 'affluent' ghetto in Golders Green, the London Borough of Barnet. It appears that a Jewish ghetto has formed over the years to such a high extent that it has created its own sub-form of affluent ghetto unique to the area.

Similar underprivileged non-white inner-city areas outside the capital include the Aston, Handsworth and Lozells areas of Birmingham; Chapeltown and Harehills in Leeds; St Ann's in Nottingham; Burngreave and Park Hill in Sheffield; Moss Side, Longsight, Stretford, Hulme, Denton, Gorton and Cheetham Hill in Manchester and Toxteth, Croxteth, Norris Green, Wavertree and Anfield in Liverpool. Racial tensions and the impact of immigration are strongly felt in areas with a working-class majority. Gang Culture, and gun crime have also affected areas, like the ones mentioned.

In the 16th and 17th centuries the ghettos were set up in Frankfurt, Rome, Prague, and other cities.

Wales

The term "ghetto" is not widely used in Wales to describe present-day areas of poverty, though these do exist in every layer of every city. For instance, in Cardiff, Wales's capital city, there are the rough inner city areas- Cathays, Gabalfa, Roath, and Splott, which are to the north/east of the city, while Canton, Grangetown, Riverside, Butetown, Ely, which is the Chinatown, Caerau, and some areas of Fairwater are to the south/west. These are made of people of all races, white, eastern, and africans. Although Radyr, Llandaff, Whitchurch, Pentyrch, and Rhiwbina are mostly made up of middle-class households, there are rough streets and council houses dotted everywhere. The wealthier area is Llandaff although it is not a rich area.

Ireland

Major cities and towns in Northern Ireland can be roughly divided into ghettos, of Catholic Irish nationalists/republicans and Protestant British unionists/loyalists. This division is less apparent in more affluent areas, but in more working class areas, territory is marked, particularly in loyalist areas, by flags and murals.

Scandinavia (Nordic Countries)

In Scandinavia most "ghettos" are concrete suburbs, expecially those around Stockholm, Copenhagen, Malmö, Oslo, Århus, Helsinki and Gothenburg. No "ghetto" areas are made up by a major ethnic-group. The areas are mostly mixed, with few Scandinavians and a higher concentration of immigrants, mostly from the Middle-east, Eastern Europe/Balkans, Turkey, Africa, Asia and Latin-America. The areas are troubled by gang violence and vandalism, also riots have been seen in the last couple of years. In finnish "ghettos" crime rate aren`t notably bigger but difference can be seen.

Notable "ghettos" are Rinkeby, Tensta, Angered and Rosengård in Sweden. Ishøj, Brøndby, Ydre Nørrebro, Vollsmose and Gellerup in Denmark. Romsås, Skien and Ammerud in Norway. Jakomäki, Itäkeskus, Kallio, Kontula and Hakunila in Finland

Post-World War II France

There are also ghettos in modern France. The poorer banlieues, or suburbs, of France, especially those of Paris, house an impoverished population largely of North African and sub-Saharan African origin in large medium- and high-rise building developments known as "Cités". They were built in the 1960s and 1970s in the industrial suburbs to the north and east of Paris, especially in the Département of Seine-Saint-Denis (also known from its departmental code as "le 93" or "le 9-3"), and in other French cities like Venissieux near Lyon. They are similar in style and have similar problems as the large inner-city urban renewal projects in the US (like Cabrini Green in Chicago). Social issues that inhabitants of French ghettos must deal with regularly, including racism and police brutality, were famously highlighted in the 1996 film La Haine (which depicts the adventures of three young people from the ghetto: one white , one black and the other arabic). Although there has been civil unrest (sometimes resulting in rioting) in these ghettos for decades, many people outside of France were not fully aware of the situation until the more internationally publicised 2005 riots, which largely originated within these areas.

Czech Republic

A Roma ghetto in Chánov, Czech Republic.

A few ghettos have appeared in the Czech Republic. These ghettos are mainly inhabited by Roma who move there both voluntarily or involuntarily (municipalities often try to relocate them from other areas). The majority of the people are unemployed and uneducated, and the crime rate is high. As a ghetto begins to appear non-Roma people move away. The most infamous ghetto in the Czech Republic is Chánov (part of the city of Most). Other cities with neighborhoods slowly transforming into ghettos include Karviná.

During the Second World War, the Terezín ghetto was created to house mass numbers of Czech Jews before deportation to concentration camps, (typically Auschwitz), where the Jews would be exterminated. The Nazis sanitized the ghetto to appear like a "joyful place" to dupe the Red Cross during two visits. The Jewish artists of Terezin created memorable artwork during their stay before being shipped out to concentration camps and gas chambers.

Cultural life

Some ghettos have been known as vibrant cultural centers, for example the late 19th century Paris, or Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. Many African-American artists and musicians such as Tupac Shakur, John Lee Hooker, Notorious B.I.G., Nina Simone, and Cab Calloway, to name only a handful, were born and raised in ghettos, and much of their music comes from their own suffering, experiences and life in the ghetto or their own experiences with desegregation, eg. Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam" (on the 1964 Nina Simone In Concert), John Lee Hooker's "Rent Blues", Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five's "The Message", Donny Hathaway's "The Ghetto", Huey's "Nobody Loves The Hood", and Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher". The 1970s sitcom Good Times was modeled after life in the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago. The show portrays a ghetto family that always triumphs over adversity and it has been criticized for painting too rosy a picture of how the ghetto really works .

In the United States and Britain, the word "ghetto" is often glorified in popular culture and sometimes used as an adjective to describe a certain way of dressing, speaking, and behaving.

See also

• Shanghai ghetto
• Slum
• Favela
• Shanty town
• Skid row
• Ethnic enclave
• Rural ghetto

References