“A black city within the white”. Revisiting America’s dark ghetto

Abstract

This article returns to the social history of African Americans to show that a ghetto is not simply a conglomeration of poor families or a spatial accumulation of undesirable social conditions (income deprivation, housing blight, or endemic crime and other disruptive behaviors), but an institutional form, an instrument of ethnoracial closure and power whereby an urban population deemed disreputable and dangerous is at once secluded and controlled. Such compulsory institutional encasement founded on spatial confinement has been noted by every major Afro-American student of the black urban predicament in the twentieth century, from W.E.B. Du Bois and St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton to E. Franklin Frazier, Kenneth Clark’s and Oliver Cromwell Cox. The elision of the ethnoracial dimension of urban relegation in the academic tale of the “ghetto underclass” emerging in the 1980s, which redefines the “ghetto” in strict income terms, is revealed to express the mounting suppression of race in policy-oriented research as the “War on Poverty” gave way to the “War on Welfare.” Key-words: ghetto, urbanization, afro-american studies.