But the outrage was misplaced. The problem isn’t Sanders’s intended use of “ghetto” as a place where many poor black people live, police brutality reigns and, as he later went on to say, “institutional racism” persists in 2016 — a reality shaped by the past. The problem is the pervasive use of “ghetto” as an ahistoric cultural signifier of all things bad, broke and black: ghetto schools, ghetto jobs, ghetto names, ghetto music.
Although others have talked about the ghetto as a term of endearment, kinship and empowerment — Langston Hughes’s 1931 poem “Negro Ghetto,” or Pras’s 1998 hip-hop anthem “Ghetto Supastar” — the tally of negative uses divorced from historical context has grown so commonplace that some big-city politicians and leading academics have called for removing it from official use.
That would be a mistake, argues Mitchell Duneier, a Princeton sociologist of the black urban experience, in “Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea,” a stunningly detailed and timely survey of scholarly work on the topic. Contrary to contemporary understanding, Jews — not African-Americans — are the original “ghettoized people,” he writes, noting that most of his students these days have no clue. “The link between blacks and the ghetto has been around for less than 10 percent of the term’s 500-year history.” Recovering this forgotten history is critical because the “troubled legacy” of the old ghetto endures.
‘Ghetto,’ by Mitchell Duneier - The New York Times
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