A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure: A Sociological Specification of the Ghetto

Abstract

In the historiography of the Jewish diaspora in early modern Europe and under Nazism, the sociology of the black American experience in the twentieth-century metropolis, and the anthropology of ethnic outcasts in East Asia and Africa, the term ghetto, among other things, variously denotes a bounded urban ward. A brief recapitulation of the strange career of "the ghetto" in American society and social science, which has dominated inquiry into the topic both quantitatively and thematically, suffices to illustrate its semantic instability and dependency on the whims and worries of urban rulers. African Americans were forcibly funneled into reserved districts that quickly turned homogeneously black as they expanded and consolidated. They had to seek refuge inside the bounded perimeter of the Black Belt and to endeavor to develop in it a network of separate institutions to procure the basic needs of the castaway community. Indeed, in the case of African Americans, ghettoization, class differentiation, and collective enrichment proceeded apace.

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