Ghetto

Ghetto is a culturally loaded term that, like slum, is applied to socially disadvantaged neighborhoods in American cities. Both words are slurs that distort rather than describe the actualities of the places that are so labeled. Ghetto implies a level of separateness from mainstream society, and of internal homogeneity, still more intense than that of a slum. The term was first applied to ethnically specific immigrant enclaves within the so-called slum districts of American inner cities during the late 19th century. By the early 20th century, with the consolidation of Asian neighborhoods within some cities, and the internal migration of black Americans to many more neighborhoods, the word began to develop racial as well as ethnic connotations. By the 1960s, the term had become synonymous with the entrenched disadvantage and accumulating anger of urban blacks. In the late 20th century, the “ghetto blaster,” blaring uncompromising lyrics by rap musicians about blanket discrimination and minority self-expression, caused widespread disquiet. In the early 21st century, Ghettopoly, a Monopoly-type board game in which crack houses, peep shows, and Chinese triads replace upmarket property investments, city utilities, and railway stations, caused outrage for its stereotypical view of black people and minority cultures in America.

The word ghetto has an uncertain etymology. It probably derives from the Italian getto (or foundry), as the first ghetto was founded in Venice in 1516 on the site of a foundry. Italian ghettos were city districts to which Jewish settlement was restricted by the local authorities. The Rome ghetto, for example, was established in 1556 by Pope Paul IV. Jewish ghettos developed in other European cities. The Warsaw ghetto is probably the best known, and the London ghetto (as dramatized in Israel Zangwill's 1892 novel, Children of the Ghetto) is probably the best described.

It was Zangwill's sense of what a ghetto represented as a cultural milieu, rather than its precise regulatory and territorial development in Europe over the centuries, that explains the word's adoption by [Page 305]American observers of mass immigrant settlement in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. It had become a truism for Americans since the middle of the 19th century that immigrants from Europe were importing Old World poverty and that the immigrant poor created slums in American cities. These immigrant slums, however, were often regarded as through houses: as the new arrivals from Britain and north-western Europe found their feet in America, they moved out of the slums and assimilated into the receiving society. This complacent viewpoint became harder to sustain by the end of the century, as the growing wave of “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe and from Asia replaced the “old immigrants” in the slums. These latest arrivals seemed to be culturally more distinct and less adaptable than their predecessors. Americans worried that the “new immigrant” poor would remain trapped in the slums because they were culturally less equipped than their predecessors to adjust to a modern society. It was in this context that Americans began to talk about the emergence of selfcontained foreign “colonies” within the slums. The Chicago reformer Robert Hunter, for example, argued in 1904 that Jewish, Italian, German, Irish, and Russian colonies often made up the main portion of the slums in American cities. It was the so-called colonies of Eastern European Jews that Americans first began to label as ghettos. In New York, for example, the journalist and urban reform advocate Jacob A. Riis described “Jewtown” as an element within the city's slums in his influential book How the Other Half Lives (1890), but in his sequel, The Battle With the Slum (1902), he redefined it as the “Ghetto.” He argued that Jews had lived in ghettos since time out of mind, and had recreated a ghetto within the slums of New York. When Louis Wirth wrote his classic definition of the ghetto in 1927, it had become axiomatic that the American ghetto was a segregated district within the slums in which the poorest and most backward groups of the Jewish population had congregated.

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