Ghetto
A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group are concentrated, especially as a result of political, social, legal, religious, environmental or economic pressure.
[2] However, other early societies may have formed their own versions of the same structure; words resembling ghetto in meaning appear in Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian, Germanic, Polish, Corsican, Old French, and Latin.
[7][6] Similarly, the Italian variant ghet, found in some Jewish notarial documents from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, seems to be a folk-etymological modification of ghetto, influenced by the Hebrew gēṭ.
[6] However, linguist Anatoly Liberman argues that this explanation fails to account for the problematic phonetic change from Latin i- to Italian g- ~ gh-, and that there is no certainty that getto ever meant 'foundry' in the Venetian dialect.
[7] Alternatively, Liberman has suggested that in some Romance-speaking regions a slang borrowing from the Germanic gata ('street' or 'narrow street') may have existed in various forms, which eventually evolved into the Italian ghetto.
[citation needed] Jewish ghettos in Christian Europe existed because of majority discrimination against Jews on the basis of religion, language and dated views on race: They were considered outsiders.
[citation needed] During World War II, the Nazis established new ghettos in numerous cities of Eastern Europe as a form of concentration camp to confine Jews and Romani into limited areas.
On June 21, 1943, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree ordering the dissolution of all Jüdische Wohnbezirke/ghettos in the East and their transference to Nazi concentration camps or their extermination.
[14] In 2018, the Danish government at the time, led by Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, announced its intention to "end the existence of parallel societies and ghettos by 2030.
"[19][20] A number of measures was introduced to solve the issue of integration, including policies like 25 hours of obligatory daycare or corresponding parent supervision per week for children in the appointed areas starting age 1, lowering social welfare for residents, incentives for reducing unemployment, demolition and rebuilding of certain tenements, rights for landlords to refuse housing to convicts, etc.
[27] Like the city centre, suburbs may be rich, middle-class or poor — Versailles, Le Vésinet, Maisons-Laffitte and Neuilly-sur-Seine are affluent banlieues of Paris, while Clichy-sous-Bois, Bondy and Corbeil-Essonnes are less so.
Since the late 20th century, Brighton Beach in Brooklyn has become the home of predominately Jewish Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, who left after the Soviet Union lifted some migration restrictions and later after its fall.
The social disruption and economic competition following World War I, as veterans returned to the US, resulted in an outbreak of racial violence of whites against blacks in many of these Northern cities, such as Chicago, Omaha; Washington, DC, and others.
Between 1967 and 1987, economic restructuring resulted in a dramatic decline of manufacturing jobs, which had formerly provided good livings for unionized, working-class blacks and whites.
The inability of black people to move from the ground floor, as Ward suggests, is dependent upon prejudice and segregationist patterns established in the South prior to World War I, where most African Americans were disenfranchised by the turn of the century and deprived of political power.
[47] The United States began restructuring its economy after World War II, fueled by new globalizing processes, and demonstrated through technological advances and improvements in efficiency.
Sharon Zukin declares the designated stratum of African-Americans in the labor force was placed even below the working class; low-skill urban jobs were now given to incoming immigrants from Mexico or the Caribbean.
[45][54]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.
[35] 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.
[57] Following the emergence of anti-discrimination policies in housing and labor sparked by the civil rights movement, members of the black middle class moved out of the ghetto.
This was the first federal law that outlawed discrimination in the sale and rental of housing on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion and later sex, familial status, and disability.
Their analysis consists of the dominant racial group in the U.S. (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) and their use of certain racist tactics in order to maintain their hegemony over black people and lengthen their spatial separation.
Dynamics of low-wage service and unemployment triggered from deindustrialization, and the intergenerational diffusion of status within families and neighborhoods, for instance, prove the rise in socioeconomic polarization between classes to be the creator of American ghetto; not racism.
Characteristics of this culture included lively music and dance, violence, unbridled emotions, flamboyant imagery, illegitimacy, religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, and a lack of emphasis on education and intellectual interests.
[61] Because redneck culture proved counterproductive, "that culture long ago died out...among both white and black Southerners, while still surviving today in the poorest and worst of the urban black ghettos",[62] which Sowell described as being characterized by "brawling, braggadocio, self-indulgence, [and] disregard of the future",[62] and where "belligerence is considered being manly and crudity is considered cool, while being civilized is regarded as 'acting white'.
"[62] Contemporary African-American or Black ghettos are characterized by an overrepresentation of a particular ethnicity or race, vulnerability to crime, social problems, governmental reliance and political disempowerment.
This term argues that inequalities of wealth and power reinforce spatial separation; for example, the growth of gated communities can be interconnected with the continued "ghettoization" of the poor.
[49] Another characteristic to African-American or Black ghettos and spatial separation is the dependence on the state, and lack of communal autonomy; Sharon Zukin refers to Brownsville, Brooklyn, as an example.
This relationship between racial ghettos and the state is demonstrated through various push and pull features, implemented through government subsidized investments, which certainly assisted the movement of white Americans into the suburbs after World War II.
While "ghetto" as an adjective can be used derogatorily, the African-American or Black community, particularly the hip hop scene, has taken the word for themselves and begun using it in a more positive sense that transcends its derogatory origins.
