ghetto

View more History, Politics, Society videos

For more information on ghetto, visit Britannica.com.

A part of a city, not necessarily a slum area, occupied by a minority group. The term was first used for the enforced concentration of Jews into specific residential areas in European cities from the Middle Ages, but has now spread to include other ethnic groups in unofficial ghettos, especially black minorities in the USA. Lifestyles within the ghetto differ distinctly from those of the ‘host’ population and the prejudices of the host confine the sub-group to particular locations. see redlining. Although ghettos are characterized by social disadvantage, most ghettos display a spread of socio-economic groups and the better-off may move to the affluence of the ‘gilded ghetto’. see also segregation.

Beginning with the Egyptian bondage and continuing through the Assyrian deportation, the Babylonian captivity, and the great Diaspora, Jewish people have found themselves living among Gentiles of many nationalities (See Judaism, Development of). Originating from the Latin word for "nations," "Gentile" simply means any non-Jewish person.

Frequently, especially in Europe beginning in the Middle Ages, Gentiles established Jewish-only quarters of the city called ghettos. This was not a new concept. Way back in the time of the Exodus, Jewish people were confined to the "land of Goshen" while building bricks for the Egyptians. Although the term is now used in a more generic sense, it often was the custom to wall in the Jewish ghetto at night and to completely lock it off during Christian Holy Days to prevent mixing between Christians and Jews.

Even under these harsh and demeaning circumstances, Jewish leaders attempted to run their communities according to Talmudic law, providing for the especially poor and fostering Jewish study and scholarship.

Among the most notorious ghettos were those established by the Nazis during World War II. One such ghetto was established in 1940, when the Nazis ordered all the Jews in Warsaw, Poland, to gather in a certain part of the city, then erected a ten-foot wall to seal off the area. An article published by the Public Broadcasting System describes the conditions: More than 400,000 Jews lived there, near starvation; 10 percent of the population died from disease by the end of the first year. Deportations of "non-productive" inhabitants began in 1942, and 300,000 Jews were deported that year, most of them to Treblinka death camp. In April of 1943, when the Nazis moved to liquidate the ghetto, the remaining inhabitants began their desperate, and hopeless, resistance. Shortly before his death in battle, resistance leader Mordecai Anielewicz wrote, "My life's dream has been realized. I have lived to see Jewish defense in the ghetto rally its greatness and glory."

Sources: Fisher, Mary Pat, and Lee W. Bailey. An Anthology of Living Religions. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. “The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19–May 16, 1943).” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/ holocaust/peopleevents/pandeAMEX103.html. October 5, 2003.

From their earliest days in the Diaspora, Jews chose voluntarily to live close together, reflecting a practice commonly adopted by groups dwelling in foreign lands. Their quarters, often referred to as the Jewish quarter or street, initially were almost never compulsory, and they continued to have contacts on all levels with their Christian neighbors. However, the Catholic church looked askance at such relationships, and in 1179 the Third Lateran Council stipulated that Christians should not dwell together with Jews. This vague policy statement had to be translated into legislation by the secular authorities, and only infrequently in the Middle Ages were laws enacted confining Jews to compulsory, segregated, and enclosed quarters. The few such Jewish quarters then established, such as that of Frankfurt, were never called ghettos, since that term originated in Venice and became associated with the Jews only in the sixteenth century.

The Ghetto of Venice

In 1516, as a compromise between allowing Jews to live anywhere they wished in Venice and expelling them, the Venetian government required them to dwell on the island known as the Ghetto Nuovo (the New Ghetto), which was walled up with only two gates that were locked from sunset to sunrise. Then, when in 1541 visiting Ottoman Jewish merchants complained that they did not have enough room in the ghetto, the government ordered twenty dwellings located across a small canal walled up, joined by a footbridge to the Ghetto Nuovo, and assigned to them. This area was already known as the Ghetto Vecchio (the Old Ghetto), thereby strengthening the association between Jews and the word "ghetto."

Clearly, the word "ghetto" is of Venetian rather than of Jewish origin, as sometimes conjectured. The Ghetto Vecchio had been the original site of the municipal copper foundry, called "ghetto" from the Italian verb gettare, 'to pour or to cast', while the island across from it, on which waste products had been dumped, became known as il terreno del ghetto, 'the terrain of the ghetto', and eventually the Ghetto Nuovo.

Although compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quarters had existed in a few places prior to 1516, since the term "ghetto" had never been applied to them before 1516, the oft-encountered statement that the first ghetto was established in Venice in 1516 is correct in a technical linguistic sense but very misleading in a wider context, while to apply the term "ghetto" to an area prior to 1516 would be anachronistic. The most precise formulation is that the compulsory segregated and enclosed Jewish quarter received the designation "ghetto" as a result of developments in Venice in 1516.

The Spread of the Ghetto

The word "ghetto" did not long remain confined to the city of Venice. In 1555, Pope Paul IV issued his restrictive bull, Cum Nimis Absurdum. Its first paragraph provided that the Jews of the Papal States were to live together on a single street, or should it not suffice, then on as many adjacent ones as necessary, with only one entrance and exit. Accordingly, the Jews of Rome were moved into a new compulsory, segregated, enclosed quarter, which apparently was first called a ghetto seven years later. Influenced by the papal example, local Italian authorities established special compulsory quarters for the Jews in most places in which they were allowed to reside. Following the Venetian nomenclature, these new residential areas were called "ghetto" in the legislation that established them.

In later years, the Venetian origin of the word "ghetto" in connection with the foundry came to be forgotten, as it was used exclusively in its secondary meaning as referring to compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quarters and then in a looser sense to refer to any area densely populated by Jews, even if they had freedom of residence and lived in the same districts as Christians.

Although the segregated, compulsory, and enclosed ghettos were abolished under the influence of the ideals of the French Revolution and European liberalism (as in Venice, 1797; Frankfurt, 1811; and Rome, where the gates and walls were removed in 1848 although the Jews were basically confined to that area until the city became a part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1870), the word "ghetto" lived on as the general designation for areas densely inhabited by members of minority groups, almost always for socioeconomic reasons rather than for legal ones, as had been the case with the initial Jewish ghetto.

"Ambiguous Usage of the Word Ghetto"

It must be noted that the varied uses of the word "ghetto" have created a blurring of the Jewish historical experience, especially when employed loosely in phrases such as "the age of the ghetto," "out of the ghetto," and "ghetto mentality." Actually, the word can be used in its original sense of a compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quarter only in connection with the Jewish experience in Italy and a few places in the Germanic lands, and not at all with that in Poland-Russia. If it is to be used in its original sense in connection with Eastern Europe, then it must be asserted that the age of the ghetto arrived there only after the Nazi invasions of World War II. However, there was a basic difference: unlike ghettos of earlier days, which were designed to provide Jews with clearly defined permanent space in Christian society, twentieth-century ghettos constituted merely temporary stages on the planned road to total liquidation.

Finally, to a great extent because of the negative connotations of the word "ghetto," the nature of Jewish life in the ghetto is often misunderstood. The establishment of ghettos did not lead to the breaking off of Jewish contacts with the outside world on any level. Additionally, from the internal Jewish perspective many evaluations of the ghetto's alleged impact upon the life of the Jews and their mentality require substantial revision. In general, the decisive element determining the nature of Jewish life was not so much whether or not Jews were required to live in a ghetto, but rather the nature of the surrounding environment and whether it constituted an attractive stimulus to Jewish thought and offered a desirable supplement to traditional Jewish genres of intellectual activity. In all places, Jewish life must be examined in the context of the external environment, and developments, especially those subjectively evaluated as undesirable, should not be attributed solely to the alleged impact of the ghetto.

Bibliography

Bonfil, Robert. Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy. Translated by Anthony Oldcorn. Berkeley, 1994.

Calabi, Donatella. "Les quartiers Juifs en Italie entre 15e et 17e siècle. Quelques hypotheses de travail." Annales 52 (1997) 4: 777–797.

Ravid, Benjamin. "From Geographic Realia to Historiographical Symbol: The Odyssey of the Word Ghetto." In Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, edited by David Ruderman, pp. 373–385. New York, 1992.

—BENJAMIN C. I. RAVID

A run-down urban area primarily inhabited by a single minority group. Ghettos are often characterized by high unemployment, high crime, gang activity, inadequate municipal services, widespread drug use, high rates of dropout from school, broken families and an absence of businesses. As a result, real estate value in ghetto communities are generally much cheaper than in other communities.

Investopedia Says:
Ghettos may be identifiable by physical characteristics such as large numbers of poorly maintained buildings, large amounts of graffiti, trash or debris accumulated in the street or on properties, and weedy vacant lots. Racial zoning laws, mortgage lending discrimination and income disparity contributed to the creation of many ghettos in the United States in the mid-20th that still persist to this day.

Related Links:
These measures may seem similar, but the reality is an issue of qualitative versus quantitative. Standard Of Living Vs. Quality Of Life
Find out where your income and lifestyle place you in comparison to the national average. Losing The Middle Class
Is microfinance a way to help the poor, or will it just make them poorer? Microfinance: Philanthropy Through Industry

LearnThatWord.com is a free vocabulary and spelling program where you only pay for results!

Many Jews died in the ghetto. However, there is no proof that the ghettos were originally created for the distinct purpose of killing Jews, or that as the war continued, the Nazis tried to turn the ghettos into sites at which they could carry out their plan to decimate the Jews of Europe. Nevertheless, the Germans were not troubled by the huge number of Jews dying from hunger and lack of other basics.

There is also no evidence that the Nazi leadership themselves ordered the establishment of ghettos in the exact form they eventually took. Even on September 21, 1939, when Reinhard Heydrich called for the centralization of Polish Jews into separate areas of cities and used the term ghetto, he did not mean it in the way it was ultimately carried out. Most likely, ghettos were instituted separately by local officials. Thus, each ghetto was unique in how and when it was set up, how it was sealed off from the rest of the city, and how it was governed.

The first ghetto in Poland was established in the city of Piotrkow Trybunalski in October 1939, just a month after the war broke out. Next, a ghetto was closed off in the city of Lodz on April 30, 1940. The largest ghetto in Europe, the Warsaw Ghetto, was set up in November 1940. Only four months later, in March 1941, the population of the Warsaw Ghetto reached an all-time high of 445,000. In other areas, ghettos were only instituted later on. For example, the ghettos of Silesia (in what is now southwest Poland) were established at the end of 1942 and beginning of 1943. In the parts of the Soviet Union occupied by the Germans, ghettos were usually set up after some of the local Jews had been murdered. Ghettos were also constructed in Hungary, Amsterdam, and Theresienstadt.

Each ghetto was closed off and guarded in its own particular way. The Lodz Ghetto was set off from the rest of the city by a wooden fence and barbed wire. In some spots, a brick wall was also built. Guards stood on both the inside and outside of the line dividing the ghetto from the outside. The Warsaw Ghetto was surrounded by an 11-mile wall. Guards patrolled the wall and were posted at its gates. However, it was possible to smuggle food and other items into the ghetto. The Piotrkow Trybunalski Ghetto did not have a fence or guards. Poles could go in and out of the ghetto freely, and Jews were allowed to leave the ghetto. It was only locked at the end of 1941. In October of that year, Hans Frank, the head of the Generalgouvernement, ordered the execution of any Jew found outside the ghetto area without permission to be there. Furthermore, most ghettos were locked during Deportations.

Each ghetto was also governed uniquely. Because the ghetto was actually a type of city-within-a-city, the Jews were forced to run services and institutions for themselves for which they had no previous experience. In addition to running the Judenraete, which were established before the ghettos and were a separate entity, Jews in the ghetto ran postal services, police forces, and various other services that a city would normally provide. They were also compelled to distribute food rations, and arrange for housing, health care, and jobs. Sometimes, a ghetto was divided into two separate areas: one for the workers, and one for the rest of the population. Some ghettos also contained other types of Refugees besides Jews. For example, at one point, Gypsies were held in the Lodz Ghetto.

Jews living in the ghettos of the east obtained food in two different ways: from official German sources, and from the unofficial black market. Officially, the Jews were given ration cards that allowed them to buy much less than the rest of the local population. By mid-1941, in Poland, the Germans were giving out ration cards that provided only 184 calories per day---7.5 percent of the minimum daily requirement. The Germans themselves received a full ration, while the Poles received a ration of 26 percent of the daily needs. In order to supplement the pitiful rations, the Jews were forced to pay exorbitant prices for food sold on the black market. However, most of the Jews had very little money, so many starved to death. Only wealthy Jews could afford to buy on the black market. Some Jews who worked in German factories received food on the job.

In some cases, the Germans used different names to refer to the areas in which they forced the Jews to live. Mostly, they used the common term, ghetto. However, sometimes they called those areas "Judischer Wohnbezirk," meaning Jewish residential sections.

Soon after the "final solution" began, the Germans began to eliminate the ghettos. The first ghettos were liquidated in the spring of 1942. The last Polish ghetto to be destroyed, Lodz, was emptied in the summer of 1944. Most of the Jews taken from the ghettos were deported to extermination camps where they were murdered. Only a small number were taken to concentration camps and forced labor camps near the end of the war. Almost all of the Jews of Eastern Europe had been forced to leave their homes for the ghettos of their cities and towns. By the end of the war, however, not one Eastern European ghetto was left in existence. In Hungary, where the last ghettos were established in 1944, most existed for only a few weeks pending the deportation of the Jews to auschwitz. In January 1945 when Pest was being conquered by Soviet forces, the budapest Ghetto became the only ghetto to be liberated.

Originally, areas of medieval cities in which Jews were compelled to live. Today the term usually refers to sections of American cities inhabited by the poor. (See inner city.)

• Cities, Towns, Villages, and Districts - ghetto: district occupied primarily by one religious or ethnic group, usu. poor
• Social Structure and Conditions - ghetto: section of city to which minority group is confined or lives by choice

This article is about the social concept. For other uses of the word "ghetto", see Ghetto (disambiguation).

A ghetto is a part of a city predominantly occupied by a particular group, especially because of social or economic issues, or because they have been forced to live there (e.g. the Jewish Ghettos in Europe).

The term was originally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live. The term ghetto now refers to an overcrowded urban area often associated with specific ethnic or racial populations living below the poverty line. From a statistical perspective, ghettos are typically high crime areas relative to other parts of the city. ^[1]

Contents 1 Etymology 2 History 3 Hyperghettoization 4 Jewish ghettos 4.1 Post-war 5 United States 5.1 History 5.2 African American ghettos 5.3 Other ghettos 6 United Kingdom 6.1 Great Britain 6.2 Northern Ireland 7 See also 8 References

Etymology

Dictionaries list a number of possible origins for the originally Italian term, including "gheto" or "ghet", which means slag or waste in Venetian, and was used in this sense in a reference to a foundry where slag was stored located on the same island as the area of Jewish confinement (the Venetian Ghetto).^[2], and borghetto, diminutive of borgo ‘borough’.^[3]

History

The term became more widely used for ghettos in occupied Europe in 1939-1944, when the Germans reused historic ghettos to confine Jews prior to their transportation to concentration and death camps during the holocaust.

Hyperghettoization

Hyperghettoization (see: BET), a concept invented by sociologists Loïc Wacquant, William Julius Wilson, and Willy Aybar (see Further reading), is the extreme concentration of underprivileged groups in the inner cities.^[4][5]

Hyperghettoization has several consequences. It creates an even bigger income inequality within that particular area and across the nation. It destroys all of an inner city's major social structures, and acts as the straw that broke the camel's back for the social institutions of ghettos, whose positions are already precarious. Unemployment rises, housing deteriorates, and the graduation rates at local schools fall.^[4][5]

Jewish ghettos

Main articles: Jewish Quarter (diaspora), Jewish ghettos in Europe, Mellah, and Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe

Plan of Jewish ghetto, Frankfurt, 1628.

Demolition of the Jewish ghetto, Frankfurt, 1868.

In the Jewish diaspora, a Jewish quarter is the area of a city traditionally inhabited by Jews. Jewish quarters, like the Jewish ghettos in Europe, were often the outgrowths of segregated ghettos instituted by the surrounding authorities. A Yiddish term for a Jewish quarter or neighborhood is "Di yiddishe gas" (Yiddish: די ייִדדישע גאַס ), or "The Jewish street". Many European and Middle Eastern cities once had a historical Jewish quarter and some still have it.

Jewish ghettos in Europe existed because Jews were viewed as alien due to being a cultural minority and due to their non-Christian beliefs in a Renaissance Christian environment. As a result, Jews were placed under strict regulations throughout many European cities.^[6] The character of ghettos has varied through times. In some cases, the ghetto was a Jewish quarter with a relatively affluent population (for instance the Jewish ghetto in Venice). In other cases, ghettos were places of terrible poverty and during periods of population growth, ghettos (as that of Rome), had narrow streets and tall, crowded houses. Residents had their own justice system.

Around the ghetto stood walls that, during pogroms, were closed from inside to protect the community, but from the outside during Christmas, Pesach, and Easter Week to prevent the Jews from leaving during those times. Starting in the early second millennium Jews became an asset for rulers who regarded them as a reliable and steady source of taxes and fees, as well as a source of economic stimuli stemming from their exemption from Christian and especially Roman Catholic prohibitions against usury. They often went to great lengths to have them settle in their realm, offering protected settlements and endowing them with special "privileges". A first such ghetto was documented by bishop Rüdiger Huzmann of Speyer in 1084.

A mellah (Arabic ملاح, probably from the word ملح, Arabic for "salt") is a walled Jewish quarter of a city in Morocco, an analogue of the European ghetto. Jewish populations were confined to mellahs in Morocco beginning from the 15th century and especially since the early 19th century. In cities, a mellah was surrounded by a wall with a fortified gateway. Usually, the Jewish quarter was situated near the royal palace or the residence of the governor, in order to protect its inhabitants from recurring riots. In contrast, rural mellahs were separate villages inhabited solely by the Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto; 1943

During World War II, ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944 were established by the Nazis to confine Jews and sometimes Gypsies into tightly packed areas of the cities of Eastern Europe, turning them into de-facto concentration camps and death camps in the Holocaust. Though the common usage is ghetto, the Nazis most often referred to these areas in documents and signage at their entrances as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden (German); both translate as Jewish Quarter. These Nazi ghettos used to concentrate Jews before extermination sometimes coincided with traditional Jewish ghettos and Jewish quarters, but not always. Expediency was the key factor for the Nazis in the Final Solution. Nazi ghettos as stepping stones on the road to the extermination of European Jewry existed for varying amounts of time, usually the function of the number of Jews who remained to be killed but also because of the employment of Jews as slave labor by the Wehrmacht and other German institutions, until Heinrich Himmler's decree issued on June 21, 1943, ordering the dissolution of all ghettos in the East and their transformation into concentration camps.^[7]

Post-war

After World War II, many emigrated to the United States and Israel. With the Cold War progressing, industry was spread across the major cities and work assignments were given out.

United States

History

The development of ghettos in America is closely associated with different waves of immigration and internal urban migration. The Irish and German immigrants of the mid-19th century were the first ethnic groups to form ethnic enclaves in America’s cities. This was followed by large numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, including many Italians and Poles between 1880 and 1920. These later European immigrants actually were more segregated than blacks in the early twentieth century.^[8] Most of these remained in their established immigrant communities, but by the second or third generation, many families were able to relocate to better housing in the suburbs after World War II.

These ethnic ghetto areas included the Lower East Side in Manhattan, New York, which later became notable as predominantly Jewish, and East Harlem, which became home to a large Puerto Rican community in the 1950s. Little Italys across the country were predominantly Italian ghettos. Many Polish immigrants moved to sections like Pilsen of Chicago and Polish Hill of Pittsburgh, and Brighton Beach is the home of mostly Russian and Ukrainian immigrants.^{[citation needed]}

African American ghettos

See also: White privilege  and Racial segregation in the United States

Chicago ghetto on the South Side, May 1974.

Urban areas in the U.S. can often be classified as "black" or "white", with the inhabitants primarily belonging to a homogenous racial grouping.^[9] Forty years after the African-American civil rights era (1955–1968), most of the United States remains a residentially segregated society in which blacks and whites inhabit different neighborhoods of significantly different quality.^[10][11] Many of these neighborhoods are located in Northern cities where African Americans moved during The Great Migration (1914–1950) a period when over a million^[12] African Americans moved out of the rural Southern United States to escape the widespread racism of the South, to seek out employment opportunities in urban environments, and to pursue what was widely perceived to be better quality of life in the North.^[12] In the Midwest, neighborhoods were built on high wages from manufacturing union jobs; these in-demand jobs dried up during the decline of industry and the ensuing downsizing at steel mills, auto plants, and other factories starting in the early 1970s.^[8] Segregation increased most in those cities with the greatest black in-migration and then crippling economic decline, epitomized in cities like Gary, Indiana.^[13]

In the years following World War II, many white Americans began to move away from inner cities to newer suburban communities, a process known as white flight. White flight occurred, in part, as a response to black people moving into white urban neighborhoods.^[13][14] Discriminatory practices, especially those intended to "preserve" emerging white suburbs, restricted the ability of blacks to move from inner cities to the suburbs, even when they were economically able to afford it. In contrast to this, the same period in history marked a massive suburban expansion available primarily to whites of both wealthy and working class backgrounds, facilitated through highway construction and the availability of federally subsidized home mortgages (VA, FHA, HOLC). These made it easier for families to buy new homes in the suburbs, but not to rent apartments in cities.^[15]

In response to the influx of black people from the South, banks, insurance companies, and businesses began denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking, insurance, access to jobs,^[16] access to health care,^[17] or even supermarkets^[18] to residents in certain, often racially determined,^[19] areas. The most devastating form of redlining, and the most common use of the term, refers to mortgage discrimination. Data on house prices and attitudes toward integration suggest that in the mid-twentieth century, segregation was a product of collective actions taken by non-blacks to exclude blacks from outside neighborhoods.^[20]

The "Racial" Provisions of FHA Underwriting Manual of 1936, included the following guidelines which exacerbated the segregation issue:

Recommended restrictions should include provision for: prohibition of the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended …Schools should be appropriate to the needs of the new community and they should not be attended in large numbers by inharmonious racial groups.^[13][21]

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.^[22] The creation of new highways in some cases divided and isolated black neighborhoods from goods and services, many times within industrial corridors. For example, Birmingham, Alabama’s interstate highway system attempted to maintain the racial boundaries that had been established by the city’s 1926 racial zoning law. The construction of interstate highways through black neighborhoods in the city led to significant population loss in those neighborhoods and is associated with an increase in neighborhood racial segregation.^[23] By 1990, the legal barriers enforcing segregation had been replaced by decentralized racism, where whites pay more than blacks to live in predominantly white areas.^[8] 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.^[24]

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. The Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968. 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. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity was charged with administering and enforcing the law. Since housing discrimination became illegal, new housing opportunities were made available to the black community and many left the ghetto. Urban sociologists frequently title this historical event as “black middle class exodus” (also see black flight). Elijah Anderson describes a process by which members of the black middle class begin to distance themselves socially and culturally from ghetto residents during the later half of the twentieth century, "eventually expressing this distance by literally moving away."^[25] This is followed by the exodus of black working class families.^[26] As a result, the ghetto becomes primarily occupied by what sociologists and journalists of the 1980s and 1990s frequently title the "underclass." William Julius Wilson suggests this exodus worsens the isolation of the black underclass – not only are they socially and physically distanced from whites, they are also isolated from the black middle class.^[27]

Despite mainstream America’s use of the term "ghetto" to signify a poor, culturally or racially-homogenous urban area, those living in the area often used it to signify something positive. The black ghettos did not always contain dilapidated houses and deteriorating projects, nor were all of its residents poverty-stricken. For many African Americans, the ghetto was "home": a place representing authentic blackness and a feeling, passion, or emotion derived from rising above the struggle and suffering of being black in America.^[28] Langston Hughes relays in the "Negro Ghetto" (1931) and "The Heart of Harlem" (1945): "The buildings in Harlem are brick and stone/And the streets are long and wide,/But Harlem’s much more than these alone,/Harlem is what’s inside." Playwright August Wilson used the term "ghetto" in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) and Fences (1987), both of which draw upon the author’s experience growing up in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, a black ghetto.^[8]

Recently the word "ghetto" has been used in slang as an adjective rather than a noun. It is used to indicate an object's relation to the inner city or black culture, and also more broadly to denote something that is shabby or of low quality. While "ghetto" as an adjective can be used derogatorily, the African American 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.

Other ghettos

Chinatowns originated as racially segregated enclaves where most Chinese immigrants settled from the 1850s onward. Major Chinatowns emerged in Boston and Lowell, Massachusetts; Detroit, Michigan; Corpus Christi, Texas; Camden and Trenton, New Jersey; Chicago; Los Angeles, South Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and San Diego, California; New York City; New Orleans; Akron, Ohio; Cincinnati, Ohio; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; Vancouver; Toronto; Montreal and other major cities. Today, most Chinese Americans no longer reside in those urban areas, but post-1970s Asian immigration from China, Southeast Asia and the Philippines have repopulated many Chinatowns. Many Little Italys, Chinatowns (or Koreatowns and Japantowns) and other ethnic neighbourhoods have become more middle-class in recent times, dominated by successful restaurant owners, family-owned stores and businessmen able to start up their own companies. Many have become tourist attractions in their own right.

In the United States, many Hispanic immigrants from Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean concentrated in barrios located in cities with large Hispanic populations such as East Los Angeles, California; Boyle Heights, California, Orange County, California, Anaheim, Baldwin Park, Chino, Coachella, El Centro, El Monte, Fresno, Huron, Hemet, Indio, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Modesto, Monrovia, Moreno Valley, National City, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Cincinnati, Compton, Downey, South Central, Inglewood, South Los Angeles, Oakland, Ontario, Rialto, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley East San Jose, Santa Ana, California and Temecula; Alexandria, Virginia, Langley Park, Maryland, Wheaton, Maryland, Dallas, Houston, El Paso, and San Antonio, Texas; north of Philadelphia,PA and Phoenix, Tucson, and Yuma, Arizona; Denver; Oklahoma City; New York City; Brentwood, New York ;Chicago ;Sterling, Illinois. Many of these cities struggled with issues of crime, drugs, youth gangs and family breakdown. However, middle-class and college-educated Hispanics moved out of barrios for other neighborhoods or the suburbs. The barrios continually thrived by the large influx of immigration from Mexico, this largely due to the explosion of the Latino population in the late 20th century. The majority of residents in these urban barrios are immigrants directly from Latin America.^{[citation needed]}

United Kingdom

See also: UK locations with ethnic minority-majority populations

Great Britain

The existence of ethnic enclaves in the United Kingdom is controversial.

Southall Broadway, a predominantly Asian area in London, where less than 12 percent of the population is white, has been cited as an example of a 'ghetto', but in reality the area is home to a number of different ethnic groups and religious groups.^[29][30] Analysis of data from Census 2001 revealed that only two wards in England and Wales, both in Birmingham, had one dominant non-white ethnic group comprising more than two-thirds of the local population, but there were 20 wards where whites were a minority making up less than a third of the local population.^[31][32] By 2001, two London boroughs - Newham and Brent - had 'minority majority' populations, and most parts of the city tend to have a diverse population.

A "peace line" in Belfast, seen from the Irish nationalist/republican side. The small back gardens of houses are protected by cages as missiles are sometimes thrown from the other side

Mural at the edge of a loyalist ghetto in Belfast

The Savile Town area of Dewsbury was described as "some 97-100% Asian Muslim" by Kirklees NHS in 2007.^[33] In the 2001 census, the area was 9.7% White British.^[34]

Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland, towns and cities have long been segregated along ethnic, religious and political lines. Northern Ireland's two main communities are its Irish nationalist/republican community (who mainly self-identify as Irish and/or Catholic) and its unionist/loyalist community (who mainly self-identify as British and/or Protestant). Ghettos emerged in Belfast during the riots that accompanied the Irish War of Independence. For safety, people fled to areas where their community was the majority. They then sealed-off these neighborhoods with barricades to keep-out rioters or gunmen from the other side. Many more ghettos emerged after the 1969 riots and beginning of the "Troubles". In August 1969 the British Army was deployed to restore order and separate the two sides. The government built separation barriers called "peace lines". Many of the ghettos came under the control of paramilitaries such as the (republican) Provisional Irish Republican Army and the (loyalist) Ulster Defence Association. One of the most notable ghettos was Free Derry.

See also

• Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity
• Ethnic enclave
• Banlieue
• Barrio
• Favela
• Ghetto fabulous
• The Ghetto Midget
• Ghetto tax
• The Ghetto Wizard
• Ghost of the Ghetto
• Hooverville
• Hyperghettoization
• Poverty map
• Ruby the Jewel of the Ghetto
• Rural ghetto
• Shanghai ghetto
• Shanty town
• Skid row
• Slum

References

1. ^ ghetto - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
2. ^ http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=ghetto&searchmode=none
3. ^ The New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition, Erina McKean, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-517077-6
4. ^ ^{a b} Hurst, Charles. Social Inequalities: Froms, Causes, and Consequences. 6th Edition. Pp. 263,274, glossary
5. ^ ^{a b} Joel Blau (1993). The Visible Poor. Oxford University Press US. pp. 44–45. ISBN 0-19-508353-9. 
6. ^ GHETTO Kim Pearson
7. ^ Ghetto in Flames Yitzhak Arad, pp. 436-437
8. ^ ^{a b c d} Ghettos: The Changing Consequences of Ethnic Isolation
9. ^ Inequality and Segregation R Sethi, R Somanathan - Journal of Political Economy, 2004
10. ^ Douglas S. Massey (August 2004). "Segration and Strafication: A Biosocial Perspective". Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 1 (1): 7–25. doi:10.1017/S1742058X04040032. 
11. ^ Sethi, Rajiv; Somanathan, Rohini (2004). "Inequality and Segregation". Journal of Political Economy 112 (6): 1296–1321. doi:10.1086/424742. 
12. ^ ^{a b} The Great Migration
13. ^ ^{a b c} The Suburban Racial Dilemma: Housing and Neighborhoods By William Dennis Keating. Temple University Press. 1994. ISBN 1-56639-147-4
14. ^ Central City White Flight: Racial and Nonracial Causes William H. Frey American Sociological Review, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Jun., 1979), pp. 425-448
15. ^ "Racial" Provisions of FHA Underwriting Manual
16. ^ Racial Discrimination and Redlining in Cities
17. ^ See: Race and health
18. ^ In poor health: Supermarket redlining and urban nutrition, Elizabeth Eisenhauer, GeoJournal Volume 53, Number 2 / February, 2001
19. ^ How East New York Became a Ghetto by Walter Thabit. ISBN 0-8147-8267-1. Page 42.
20. ^ The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, Jacob L. Vigdor The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jun., 1999), pp. 455-506
21. ^ Federal Housing Administration, Underwriting Manual: Underwriting and Valuation Procedure Under Title II of the National Housing Act With Revisions to February, 1938 (Washington, D.C.), Part II, Section 9, Rating of Location.
22. ^ Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States by Professor Kenneth T. Jackson ISBN 0-19-504983-7
23. ^ From Racial Zoning to Community Empowerment: The Interstate Highway System and the African American Community in Birmingham, Alabama Charles E. Connerly Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 22, No. 2, 99-114 (2002)
24. ^ Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California Laura Pulido Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Mar., 2000), pp. 12-40
25. ^ Anderson, Elijah (1990). Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. The University of Chicago Press. pp. 2. ISBN 0-226-01816-4. 
26. ^ Wilson, William Julius (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. The University of Chicago Press. pp. 49. ISBN 0-226-90131-9. 
27. ^ Wilson, William Julius (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. The University of Chicago Press. pp. 7–8. ISBN 0-226-90131-9. 
28. ^ Smitherman, Geneva. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.
29. ^ Browne, Anthony (May 5, 2004). "We cant run away from it white flight is here too". The Times (London). http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article851104.ece. Retrieved May 3, 2010. 
30. ^ Kerr, J., Gibson, A. and Seaborne, M. (2003) London from punk to Blair. Reaktion Books.
31. ^ www.london.gov.uk/gla/publications/factsandfigures/dmag-briefing-2005-38.rtf
32. ^ www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BSPS/ppt/May06_BB.ppt
33. ^ http://www.kirklees-pct.nhs.uk/fileadmin/documents/meetings/march_07/KPCT-07-42%20Report%20estate%20strategy.doc paragraph 4.3
34. ^ http://www.kirklees.gov.uk/community/statistics/census-by-settlement/KS06settle2003.xls

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - ghetto
v. tr. - samles i ghetto

Nederlands (Dutch)
getto, achterbuurt, gescheiden gehouden groep/gebied, in een getto stoppen/houden

Français (French)
n. - ghetto
v. tr. - mettre dans des ghettos, (fig) reléguer au second plan

Deutsch (German)
n. - Ghetto, Judenviertel, Armenviertel
v. - in ein Ghetto beschränken

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - (ιστ.) (εβραϊκό) γκέτο, (μτφ.) γκέτο, υποβαθμισμένη αστική περιοχή κατοικούμενη από μειονότητα

Italiano (Italian)
ghetto

Português (Portuguese)
n. - gueto (m)

Русский (Russian)
гетто

Español (Spanish)
n. - barrio bajo, barrio pobre, ghetto, judería
v. tr. - marginar

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - getto

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
犹太人区, 将...隔离在聚居区, 使集中居住

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 猶太人區
v. tr. - 將...隔離在聚居區, 使集中居住

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 유대인 강제 거주 지구, 빈민가
v. tr. - 강제 거주 지구에 넣다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - ユダヤ人強制居住区域, ユダヤ人街

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) حي اليهود‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮גטו‬
v. tr. - ‮הכניס אנשים לגטו או החזיק אותם בתוכו‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.