Ghetto Formation - Essay Example

In metropolitan centers, where technology and population growth combine to produce a way of life novel in history, people confront the social problems of a mass society in a new context. In this environment of the huge and exciting technical city, citizens
again face the historic problem of racism, whose menacing shadow has stalked our democracy throughout the life of the country. Racial difficulties have plagued the nation as a tragic doubt corrodes a great hope. The modern metropolis has gathered together people from a bewildering variety of cultures and backgrounds. Its sheer size has induced a constant exchange and migration of people who move to facilitate employment, education, achievement of social status, or family improvement. Thesis Formation of ghettoes is a cause of the problems of racial discrimination and segregation that persisted despite the upheavals of war and the changes brought by social progress.

The formation of ghettoes is caused by racial differences and racism, racial discrimination, and oppression. Historically, the formation of the ghettoes was a response of newly arrived immigrants to the confusion and strangeness of the nineteenth-century city. Originally these "ghettos" were merely ethnic enclaves on par with a series of other ethnic concentrations. This ethnic enclave based upon language differences or foreign origin became a fixture of urban areas. It was a form of social protection and expression and a testimony to the pluralist character of national life (Edwardson 339). During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, dozens of such immigrant clusters dotted the cities. These neighborhoods provided the setting for the drama of ethnic group life (Purdy 457).

Today, critics underline the emergence of a new type of ghetto, the ‘outcast ghetto’ “as a result of industrial decentralization and globalization. [It is] composed only of the poorest segments of subjugated racialized groups (mostly blacks and Hispanics) who are marginal to current production needs” (Walks and Bourne 29). It is important to note that seclusion can be voluntary or involuntary. In modern cities, seclusion is voluntarily used as a protective measure against racial segregation and racial oppression. In ghettoes, people condition the common attitude and expectations with regard to the family and residential life of ethnic groups within the larger urban society. Ethnic neighborhoods almost always establish a picture in the public mind of poor living conditions and social disorganization (Fay 217). For over a century, this picture was transmitted to a nation dominated by rural, native-born citizens, who prided themselves on their isolation from "foreign" influences and whose virtues of self-reliance and stability contrasted with the disorders of the struggling urban immigrant groups. Today, the fluidity of urban society creates a great hunger for social status. Distinctions based on ethnic and racial characteristics become important instruments in status-seeking. Following Thabit (2003, 56) rising educational levels have reduced the crudity of the prejudices and stereotypes inherited from the immigration experience, that experience is too sustained and significant not to leave lasting impressions. The Negro areas have become something unique in their size and persistence (Winant 34). They are striking testimonies to the extension of racism right into the most advanced and active portions of society. The concentration of people of color in the "black belts" or urban centers has made a full-scale national phenomenon of a system of racial attitudes and restrictions which is formerly a regional condition.

 The greatest motivating force behind the movement of minority families in the urban centers, however, is the desire to overcome the housing problems. The desire for family improvement has been the positive element of this drive and has led to strenuous efforts to escape the old areas for newer ones (Chekki 585; Glazier 78). The movement of minority groups in relation to physical boundaries and demarcation lines is also conditioned by housing quality and the real estate market. It has also meant that areas of obsolescent dwellings, exploited properties, and dwellings next to undesirable land uses have been consigned or have gravitated to Negro occupancy. These facts have been the chief determinants of Negro residential distribution. “Kazemipur and Halli (2000) have found that the visible minority immigrants, who are overrepresented in ghetto neighborhoods, also tend to show a lower level of intergenerational mobility in terms of education and occupation” (cited Kazemipur and Halli 217). Stripped of many of the protective affiliations of pre-industrial days, the urban man moves in an impersonal world. The formation of ghettoes is caused by the growth of population and of the cities themselves, but although this has been an important factor, the role of foreign immigration has been even more decisive in determining the relationships between population groups (Yeager 216).

In sum, massive segregation in urban centers is one of the characteristics of this mass society. In a social system where populations are vast and social movements huge and widespread, it is hardly possible to have segregation here and there on a small scale. Popular phenomena with roots deep in time simply do not occur in this manner in a mass society. Ghetto is such a phenomenon, and its dimensions have been proportionate to the breadth of the urbanized mass society. Hence when the residential area is challenged by racial change, the last community bastion of personalized white sentiment is assaulted. In the ghetto and its surroundings, the city-dweller retains some emotional ties and intimate personal affiliations. The formation of a ghetto can be characterized as an escape from social inequalities, poverty, and discrimination. The extension of segregation reflects the kind of change experienced since World War II; it is massive and steady.