In their effort to communicate complex thoughts, social scientists have borrowed lay terms with impunity. At times, the practice helps to clarify a difficult theory. Perhaps as often, it muddies the conceptual waters.
Few terms better show the dangers of this practice than “ghetto.” Used variously in popular culture as a noun, an adjective, an adverb, an insult, a lifestyle signal, a racial slur, a source of pride, a political trope, and a marketing tool, “ghetto” has repeatedly caused controversy. Yet for more than seven decades, the term has been appropriated by social scientists to capture the experiences of segregated Jews and urban African-Americans.
Mitchell Duneier’s Ghetto carefully examines the history of this concept. (Duneier and I were colleagues at Princeton, and he lists me in the acknowledgments.) This beautifully written tome is really two books in one: an intellectual history of how “ghetto” has been used by social scientists and others, and a socioeconomic history of black neighborhoods. The first book is a small masterpiece; the second, something altogether less compelling.
As a case-based history of the idea of the ghetto, the book is subtle, refreshing, and deeply informative. “Ghetto” was first used to designate the section of medieval Venice in which Jews were required by law to live. The Nazis appropriated the term to describe something more sinister, “a site of slave labor, torture, disease, and death” designed “with the express purpose of destroying its inhabitants.” Duneier contends that in spite of this difference, social scientists wrongly assumed that the Warsaw and Venice ghettos were two manifestations of the same sociopolitical condition. This fusion, in turn, shaped how American sociologists interpreted black urban segregation, which, beginning in the 1940s, they increasingly described as parallel to the Jewish ghetto.
The heart of Ghetto is three detailed studies of black scholars who in the 1940s, ’60s, and ’80s wrote definitive texts on urban conditions among African-Americans: Horace Cayton, Kenneth Clark, and William Julius Wilson, respectively. (A subsequent chapter, on Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone, brings the discussion to the ’00s.)
The accounts of the political and intellectual environments in which these men wrote are exemplary, especially those of Cayton and Clark. Duneier either unearths or reintroduces important aspects of the lives of these men that show why they wrote about the ghetto as they did. His discussion of Cayton is centered on the circumstances preceding publication of his 1945 book, written with St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis, a sociological tour de force that examined the economic, social, and political history of the formation of Chicago’s Black Belt. Cayton, a graduate student at the University of Chicago — which over its history supported racially restrictive covenants to limit the presence of blacks in its surrounding neighborhood — was politically active. Over many years, he had collected copious data on blacks in Chicago, data which Gunnar Myrdal, the much more senior, and white, author of the 1944 book An American Dilemma, wanted access to for his own book. Duneier details how Cayton’s complicated relationship with Myrdal, including Cayton’s own serious financial difficulties as a graduate student, gave shape to Black Metropolis.
Ghetto treats with similar sensitivity the discussion of Kenneth Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1965) and William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) — two books that became essential reading for anyone concerned with the condition of African-Americans. In each case study, Duneier recovers the political and cultural environments of their periods well, explaining why Clark conceived of the ghetto as a place of pathology and disempowerment, while Wilson regarded it as the product of structural economic and political forces. For these three case studies alone, the book is an important, original contribution, and quite obviously essential reading.
But Duneier’s aim is not merely to offer a history of “ghetto” as a concept; he also hopes, as the reader eventually realizes, to offer a history of black ghettos themselves. Believing that his analysis “allows us to describe how black ghettos have changed over the past century,” Duneier proposes that it has shifted from a place where “cultural and human flourishing” was possible — a place like Drake and Cayton’s black Chicago — to “a place of social control by outside forces.”
Unfortunately, making that case requires a different kind of account, one less suited to the historian of ideas than to the historical demographer. To conduct a 70-year history of an actual place called “the ghetto,” one must be clear about what a ghetto is, and the book is ambiguous on this matter. For example, how many African-Americans live in such places? The closest the book gets is the statement that “the most notable black-white segregation continues within the major Midwestern and Northeastern metropolitan areas.” These places, the book explains, “house about one in six African-Americans today.” That would seem a satisfactory answer. But does that mean that poor black neighborhoods in Los Angeles or Houston are not ghettos? If so, why not? After all, restrictive covenants were in place in Los Angeles, Houston, and many other cities. Furthermore, the presence of “social control by outside forces” like the police are by no means exclusive to cities in the Midwest and Northeast.
The argument about how ghettos have changed invites a similarly skeptical eye. If today there is no “cultural flourishing” in poor black neighborhoods, then what do we make of the rise of hip-hop, which, like jazz before it, is among the most creative and influential cultural products American society has ever produced? And if ghettos are places of state-sanctioned segregation that breed poverty, substance abuse, and unemployment, then why are American Indian reservations not part of Duneier’s story, the way Jewish ghettos were — is it just that we call them by a different name?
A proper answer to these questions requires a focus not on the ideas of a few seminal thinkers but on the actual experiences of large populations — a different kind of book, with evidence of the kind sociologists and demographers have been marshalling for decades. Ghetto has skillfully traced how three or four important thinkers, in addition to Nazis and others, conceived of ghettos. To suggest it has also traced the actual history of African-Americans in segregated neighborhoods is to stretch the account far beyond its limits.
Duneier deals with this incongruity by offering, in the final chapter, an extensive and often careful list of qualifiers. For example, he explains that differences between cities probably matter, and that black ghettos and Jewish ghettos should not be used to understand the respective difficulties of the other group. While each of these and other qualifiers makes sense in their own right, they leave the reader not quite knowing what to make of them.
Perhaps Duneier, inspired by the extraordinary people who over decades wrestled with new theories of the ghetto, felt compelled to offer his own. If so, a loaded term with a complicated past may have bested even our most acute observer of its history.
