How Has American Segregation Changed The Meaning Of Ghetto

“The term powerfully conveys the intractable, prison-like nature of black segregation, the reality that residence in inner-city neighborhoods remains involuntary for most, practically if not legally” (Schwartz How American segregation changed the meaning of 'ghetto'). A ghetto is an area in which minorities are barred from opportunities that non-minorities may get. They often have terrible living conditions and are filled with poverty and rampant disease. They are usually formed by racism and fear, when one race thinks of itself above others, and when a leader uses that fear to gain support in constructing the ghettos. In the modern day, the definition of ghetto has changed, but the core idea has not. They are used to trap a group of people,

Ghettos persist because racist policies are kept in place by a morally corrupt government. This can be seen clearly in Los Angeles, where historical racism was the foundation for the ghettos that can be seen everywhere. This racism still exists in the form of a lack of government assistance and mass incarceration. Parallels between the ghettos of the Holocaust and modern ghettos can be drawn, such as the physical separations between the perceived higher class and the perceived lower class, as well as similarities between the foundations for the formation of various ghettos throughout history. Ghettos can be eradicated if the people who hold power choose to actively help the situation by providing resources for rehabilitation and support, and working towards solving the problem of mass incarceration and racial profiling leading to death and

The modern definition of a ghetto says that ghettos are formed as a result of racism, and the persistence of racism implies the persistence of ghettos. One way ghettos have persisted in modern society is because of the butterfly effect. When housing ordinances were first introduced, African American families were unable to buy houses, meaning that they were not able to reap the benefits of owning a home: “African American families that were prohibited from buying homes in the suburbs in the 1940s and ‘50s and even into the ‘60s, by the Federal Housing Administration, gained none of the equity appreciation that whites gained” (NPR). Because of this lost equity, the financial gap between the segregated people grew extremely large over time. With the financial gap came financial hardships, so real estate agents were unwilling to buy the low-value land, and perceived the areas where black people lived to be too dangerous to insure. This snowballed, and the ghettos got less and less support from the government, and it was harder to find work as industry left cities: “industry was leaving the cities, African Americans were becoming poorer in those areas, the projects became projects for poor people, not for working class people. They became subsidized … they became vertical slums that we came to associate with public housing” (NPR). The quote explains