Ghetto

A ghetto is a section of a city occupied by a group who live there especially because of social, economic, or legal pressure. The term ghetto was originally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live. A ghetto is now described as an overcrowded urban area often associated with a specific ethnic or racial population.

Etymology

Dictionaries list a number of possible origins for the term, including "gheto" or "ghet", which means slag 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)., and borghetto, diminutive of borgo ‘borough’.

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.

The definition of "ghetto" still has a similar meaning, but the broader range of social situations, such as any poverty-stricken urban area.

A ghetto is formed in four distinct ways:

As ports of illegal 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 economic conditions make it too difficult for minority members to live in non-minority areas.

When the minority actively chooses to segregate itself physically and socially from the majority.

Hyperghettoization

Hyperghettoization, a concept invented by sociologists Loic Wacquant. William Julius Wilson, and Willy Aybar (see Further reading), is the extreme concentration of underprivileged groups in the inner cities.

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. 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. 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.

; 1943]] 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 Judischer 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.

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. 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, as they assimilated and prospered.

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.

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."

African American ghettos

, May 1974.]] Urban areas in the U.S. can often be classified as "black" or "white", with the inhabitants primarily belonging to a homogenous racial grouping. 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. 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 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.

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. Discriminatory practices, especially those intended to "preserve" emerging white suburbs, restricted the ability of blacks 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.

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, access to health care, or even supermarkets to residents in certain, often racially determined, 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.

The "Racial" Provisions of FHA Underwriting Manual of 1300, 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. By 2001, two London boroughs - Newham and Brent - had 'minority majority' populations, and most parts of the city tend to have a diverse population.

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

Category:Jewish communities Category:Urban decay