Constructing the Ghetto, W.E.B DuBois

The Missing Link & The Construction of the Ghetto, Massey and Denton

Based on the readings and class discussions on the definition of “ghetto”, I have come to the overall conclusion that ghettos were highly concentrated African American neighborhoods in cities that were as a result of racist procedures coming from the government to isolate African Americans from white citizens. These procedures include the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration in the 1930s. But as I read and discussed in class, I pondered the fact if we all lived in ghettos. I took the definition of ghetto from the readings as a place of a highly segregated racial community of any race as opposed to just applying it to African Americans. If that’s the case, I felt that based on my own studies and life exposure to American cities, the majority of big metropolitan areas are just a bunch of ghettos compressed into one big city.

However, I also felt that there was something off by having the term “ghetto” associated to just any racially homogenous neighborhood, especially those of white communities. The reason I say this is because in this modern media culture that I grew up with, the term “ghetto” always seemed to be correlated with synonyms, such as “unappealing”, “poor”, “violent”, and “minority”. Growing up in NYC, all the neighborhoods I ever visited that were predominantly habited by white citizens were always and still are rich, clean, organized, and safe. Specifically, I am describing neighborhoods, such as the Upper East Side, Midtown, and Lincoln Center, where one will rarely find any black or Latinx residents. These affluent and white neighborhoods makes my neighborhood seem more like the ghetto we discussed in class if we were to compare them.

I could even take my argument further by offering some background history of my own neighborhood. While the NYC housing crisis and drug epidemic of the late 70s and 80s affected the whole city, the effects were more pronounced in areas of high minority concentration, such as the boroughs of Bronx, Brooklyn, and upper Manhattan, where my neighborhood resides. While things started to flip for the better during the 1990s (as a result of new policies implemented to improve NYC housing and reduce crime), in many ways, my neighborhood as well as the communities in other boroughs to this day are still recovering from the dilemma that once engulfed them more than two decades ago. Meanwhile, places like the Upper East side had fewer or less escalated problems than the others outer communities faced during this time. And the racial make-up from these neighborhoods hasn’t changed. The Upper East Side during the 80s was still mostly white residents while Washington Heights is still Caribbean residents, mostly from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (although it seems to be changing as a result of gentrification).

In many ways, I always felt that a ghetto was always used as a term to describe a neighborhood with the majority of the population compromising of minority groups along with low safety, weak schools, and low economic activity. That’s why it feels weird for me to call something like the Upper East side as a ghetto. I even become skeptical calling an affluent black community a ghetto. A ghetto as I was raised to believe in, doesn’t necessarily have to be a typical de-industrialized black community with abandoned houses, abandoned lawns, broken windows, and squatters living in vacant places (much of what stereotypical online photos of Detroit have become). Instead, I’ve always seen a minority neighborhood with residents of low human capital, low income, and a place continuously recovering from effects of crime and drug era decades ago enough to call a ghetto. And obviously, any neighborhood with the same characteristics of people like the ones stated above and a neighborhood with a current ongoing drug and crime problem is definitely a ghetto.