Ghetto summary

By the early twentieth century, a “ghetto” no longer meant a formalized legal separation of peoples. It instead became associated with voluntary Jewish neighborhoods in general. These ghettos, however, were still located in crowded, impoverished, urban areas, like New York's Lower East Side or around Leopoldstadt in Vienna.

German-Jewish author Louis Wirth, in his 1928 book, The Ghetto, noted that these neighborhoods were not instated by government officials. Instead, they were ethnic enclaves and self-segregated slums, where immigrants grouped themselves.

Cayton and Drake’s study on racism is well worth a closer look.

Of the many discriminatory maneuvers they drew attention to, one in particular stands out: white people made pacts with each other which specified that they wouldn’t let their properties be occupied, leased, sold or given to black people. These pacts were called restrictive covenants, and they effectively kept black people from living in white neighborhoods (a fixed quota restricted non-white residency to two percent).

The work of Cayton and Drake, however, was soon overshadowed by that of a white foreigner named Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist and sociologist. Myrdal’s 1944 book, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, became the definitive statement on racial problems in the United States – the mid-twentieth century’s race-relations bible. Immensely influential, the book was even cited in the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate schools, in 1954.

Myrdal was hired by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Corporation, which thought Myrdal could bring a foreigner’s impartial eye to America’s race issues. Myrdal was well-intentioned and used a world-class research team that included many high-level black academics.

Have you heard of the doll experiments? Conducted by Columbia-educated psychologist and black intellectual Kenneth Clark in the 1940s, the experiments produced an unsettling finding: black children preferred white dolls to black dolls. Clark used this finding to bolster his argument that segregation had resulted in internalized feelings of inferiority in the black community in the United States.

This bleak vision was further developed and contextualized in Clark’s 1965 book, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power.

In the 1960s, in keeping with America’s long history of paying little heed to the voices of the black community, black experts had little impact on the government when it came to understanding and forming policies on black ghettos.

Instead, an Irish-American White House policy adviser, Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, took the stage.

There have been some occasions when ideas of black sociologists have been listened to. But this hasn’t always brought about positive change.

The African-American sociologist William Julius Wilson advocated that economic inequality, rather than race, was the largest social problem facing America, even in the ghettos.