<p>Who is the author of Ghetto?</p>

<p>Mitchell Duneier is the author of Ghetto.</p>

Society & Culture

Ghetto Book Summary - Ghetto Book explained in key points

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Ghetto summary

Name: Ghetto
Rating: 4.3 (13 reviews)
Author: Mitchell Duneier

Mitchell Duneier

The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea

4.3 (13 ratings)

17 mins

Brief summary

"Ghetto" by Mitchell Duneier portrays the lives of inner-city black residents, particularly women, living in slum-like conditions in a Chicago neighborhood. It reveals the daily realities of racial and urban inequality and the struggle for survival in the ghetto.

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Race Black Lives Matter

Table of Contents

Ghetto
Summary of 7 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 7

What’s in it for me? Understand the origin, history and logic of the ghetto.

What do you think of when you hear the word “ghetto”? Elvis’s classic song, “In the Ghetto”? Jewish ghettos run by Nazis? Or do you think of impoverished, predominantly black, inner-city neighborhoods?

Today, the word “ghetto” usually evokes thoughts of black ghettos in America, even though the notion of American urban black ghettos has existed for less than 10 percent of the term’s 500-year history.

In these blinks, we’ll look at how the ghettos came to exist in the first place, and especially what they mean in the American context.

You will also find out

that the ghetto got its name in the sixteenth century;
how a Swede made an everlasting impression on the debate about race issues in American; and
how views on the ghetto from black academics have been repeatedly suppressed.

The Italian Jews were the first ghettoized people.

The term “ghetto” probably makes you feel a bit uncomfortable. Today, the word seems not quite politically correct, a slur directed at inner-city neighborhoods in the United States that, usually, are predominantly black.

But the word itself has some surprising origins.

In fact, the Jews were the first ghettoized people.

In sixteenth-century Italy, city rulers and the Catholic Church perceived Judaism as a threat to Christianity. In 1516, Venice issued a decree confining Venetian Jews to the Ghetto Nuovo, a high-walled district in the city. The word itself comes from the Venetian word for its copper foundry, the ghèto. Following Venice’s example, the city of Rome soon formed a ghetto of its own.

The Jews were forced to live separately in these ghettos, away from the rest of the population. Though they were still free to interact with other residents, their separation had consequences. It resulted in a strong culture and community, but the ghettos were also overcrowded, had high mortality rates and were rife with disease.

When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy in the early nineteenth century, he tried to bring ghettoization policies to an end. However, official and state-sanctioned ghettos persisted into the late 1800s.

The ghetto’s origins established a circular logic that continues to this day. The argument goes like this:

The Jews in the ghettos lived in worse conditions, and were less affluent, than the Christian citizens living outside the ghettos. Thus, generations of Christian Europeans concluded that the ghettoization of the Jews was natural and God-sanctioned – a physical manifestation of a moral order.

In reality, the poor conditions in the ghettos were due to the policy of forced separation. Consequently, a circular “justification” arose. Christians saw the ghettos as necessary to contain “innate” and “natural” Jewish squalor.

After World War II, the word “ghetto” was used to describe African-American neighbourhoods.

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.

Structural racism against black people went hand in hand with housing discrimination.

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).

Gunnar Myrdal wrote the standard, but flawed, text on American race relations.

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.

Kenneth Clark saw government policy as contributing to the continued existence of black ghettos.

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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s assessment of the ghetto became the accepted view in the 1960s.

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.

The misapplication and misinterpretation of sociological studies continue to this day.

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.

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What is Ghetto about?

Ghetto (2016) traces the socio-ideological development of the word “ghetto” – particularly how it’s been applied to black neighborhoods in America – and takes an unflinching look at the complex ways in which race, prejudice, policy and sociology interact. When it comes to fighting for racial equality, there are no easy answers.

Ghetto Review

Ghetto (2016) by Mitchell Duneier is an intriguing exploration of American urban poverty and the struggles faced by its residents. Here are three reasons why this book is worth reading:

With meticulous research and interviews, Duneier provides a nuanced and intimate portrait of the individuals and communities living in the inner city.
By delving into the daily realities and challenges faced by those living in the ghetto, the book offers deep insights into the complex social issues of poverty and inequality.
The author's compassion and empathy shine through the pages, capturing the resilience and strength of the individuals who call the ghetto home.

Who should read Ghetto?

Activists and policy makers
Sociology and political science students
People interested in American studies

About the Author

Mitchell Duneier is Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He also wrote the award-winning urban ethnographies Sidewalk and Slim’s Table.

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