Although ghettoes are understood as segregated African American communities, white Americans are largely responsible for creating and sustaining the ghetto. The history of the American ghetto’s creation is deeply intertwined with legacies of white violence and exclusion. This legacy of white Americans exerting power over residential spaces continues today in new and shifting forms. This continued segregation, in turn, acts as a boundary to blacks’ social mobility and blurs the boundaries of class and race in the United States.
Historically, white violence has discouraged blacks who do have opportunities for mobility from capitalizing on them. In the wake of increasing black immigration into northern cities in the early 20th century, whites’ riots pushed black residents of elite and middle-class neighborhoods into the ghetto out of fear for their lives (Massey and Denton 1993:34). Later in the century, legal advocacy, interpersonal intimidation, and restrictive covenants took form as whites’ preferred strategies for maintaining segregated residential communities. Through these tactics, whites concentrated African Americans within confined spatial boundaries and prevented African Americans who were otherwise able to live in expensive areas from escaping resource-poor neighborhoods.
Our class discussion identified several ways in which whites’ strategies for protecting residential spaces, and urban spaces more generally, from blacks have evolved over time. Most of these contemporary strategies function economically, such as when white residents price African Americans out of neighborhoods, or when property tax hikes force black homeowners, and even those whose properties have been passed down intergenerationally, out of their homes. In terms of the housing market and real estate, white homeowners’ selectivity in choosing buyers may also perpetuate residential segregation. And white investors’ interventions into historically black communities may spur increases in home prices, rent, and the cost of living, as well as cause racial turnover in both the residential and non-residential communities a neighborhood serves. In these ways, whites use updated strategies to control contemporary residential and urban spaces.
What purpose do these patterns of white control over residential and urban spaces serve? By excluding African Americans from their communities, white Americans have created and sustained a powerful system of residential segregation. I also argue that white Americans have disempowered black Americans from ascending in socioeconomic class. By confining African Americans of a range of socioeconomic classes to the ghetto, white Americans have prevented blacks Americans from making lucrative and sustainable investments in housing, from learning in better-resourced public schools, from living in safer neighborhoods, and from accessing a host of other advantages and resources that are tied to privilege, power, and socioeconomic mobility. Whites’ evolving tactics of segregation have confined African Americans in resource-poor neighborhoods, rendering mobility in socioeconomic class extremely difficult.
The ghetto’s history of racialized exclusion intertwined with poverty necessitates a thoughtful interrogation of the distinctions and overlaps between class and race in the United States. On the one hand, African Americans have been excluded from certain residential spaces and concentrated in the ghetto because of their racialization in the United States’ racial classification schema. At the same time, however, race is not the only variable at play in the creation and persistence of the ghetto. Segregation concentrates African Americans from a range of economic statuses into areas defined by their poverty. While the ghetto is home to supportive and resilient black communities and families, it is also a high-poverty area that few residents are able to leave if they so desire. Understanding the history of the ghetto’s creation requires that we understand that class and race are deeply intertwined, such as when white Americans have disproportionally reaped the financial benefits from homeownership in the wake of World War II, but are not synonymous, as when considering that African Americans of varied incomes levels may live in the ghetto. The persistence of the ghetto, then, is deeply connected to racialized patterns of social mobility and the historical relationship between class and race.
Theo Hurley
I agree with you on a lot of the information you eloquently shared Theo. In particular, I appreciated your point about how the ghetto as we know it today may be based on color, but how race itself is not the only factor that creates and maintains the ghetto. Indeed, the racialization of our nation enshrines access and power by color and thus relies on a myriad of institutions to employ this unfortunate lived reality.
I would push back on your point about how white Americans have disempowered Black Americans from ascending in socioeconomic class. I think white Americans have tried to disempower Black Americans – the history of this nation attests to that – however, I think there is something to be said about the ways in which Black Americans have been and continue to be resistance and resilient to the efforts of white Americans to thwart progress and mobility. In fact, Tyler Perry, a filmmaker mogul, recently celebrated the grand opening of Tyler Perry Film Productions studios in Atlanta, Georgia (330 acres) on a base that once belonged to the confederate army. He primarily employs those society has marginalized in many ways – convicts/felons/ homeless people /low-income people / Black people- etc. His empire is now worth over $1 Billion dollars. Tyler grew up poor, homeless, abused and in many ways neglected. His story is just one of the many ways in which – Blacks and other people push forward and refuse to be complacent in a society that oppresses them and bring up other people from their communities simultaneously.
I think one way the creation of the ghetto has worked to disempower African Americans is the way that it concentrates poverty into very segregated spaces, like you mentioned. Concentrated poverty works to create conditions that are hard to overcome and escape for people who live in that area. For example, poor areas tend to have schools that perform very poorly because a lack of proper funding and, more recently, an over-reliance on alternative teacher programs that don’t require teachers to have much training in their field before stepping into the classroom. Areas with concentrated poverty often tend to health issues as well. If not for polluted air that leads to asthma and other respiratory conditions, these areas often exist as food deserts where access to healthy, organic food is hard to come by but fast-food chains like Burger King and McDonalds are prevalent and rather cheap, leading to large percentages of obesity in adults and children. Education and health are only two of the many aspects of life that are negatively impacted by concentrated poverty, and they can have life-long consequences for those who are living/growing up in such conditions. These work to create cycles of poverty, where we see multi-generational poverty like we talked about in class.
I think to Praise’s point, however, there have been challenges to this disempowerment. As African Americans and other social groups who have escaped these areas of concentrated poverty experience social mobility, they find ways to invest in their communities (whether that is a neighborhood or a symbolic community like the Black community) to help others achieve the same social mobility and success that they have. This can hopefully work to create cycles of multi-generational success and combat concentrated poverty and segregation.