In the article The Construction of the Ghetto by Massey and Denton, there are several policies and practices that still has its effect on racial structure today. Among the several practices and policies are the Government Issue (GI) Bill for veterans and housing loans. At a political view, the GI Bill for veterans helped them buy houses at a lower price due to their contribution in the war. Since White veterans have the GI Bill, they moved out to the suburbs during 1940-1970, which was during the time of suburbanization. Because Black veterans did not receive the GI Bill, they were unable to move out and buy houses. This effect is still present today, considering that in the statistics, Blacks are less likely than Whites to own houses.
Political forces, which are controlled by the government, can majorly influence and change the way people live their life. From the Federal Housing Administration, which enabled citizens to become homeowners by underwriting mortgages, to the Interstate Highway Act, that change the route of expressways, political forces can dramatically change the way a city runs and functions. Wilson (2011) states, “In short, public housing became a federally funded institution that isolated families by race and class, resulting in high concentrations of poor black families in inner-city ghettos” (pg. 14). Wilson describes political forces as
Lipsitz uses practices of the housing market to illustrate how the diverse practices provide the privilege to white people in the current institutional arrangements. The capital resides in suburban houses has proven many white families’ economic mobility, although few white Americans recognize that segregation has historically been the guarantee of suburban real estate values. Housing policy and real estate practices, banking and finance, education, tax codes and subsidies, the behavior of the courts, and the norms of urban policing are all heavily inflected by a racialist logic or tend toward racialized consequences. Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. Lipsitz describes the centrality of whiteness to American culture, and explains how the whites have used identity politics to forward their collective interests at the expense of racialized groups, including African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos.
In American Dilemma (1944), Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish sociologist, writes about the economic conditions that plagued the Negro race in 1944 during World War II. According to Myrdal, “except for a small minority enjoying upper or middle-class status, the masses of American Negroes, in the rural South and in segregated slum quarters in Southern and Northern cities, are destitute. They own little property; even their household goods are mostly inadequate and dilapidate. Their incomes are not only low, but irregular. They live from day to day and have scant security for the future” (Katznelson 29).
In order to eliminate the racist perception that Black poverty derives from laziness, the government should allocate public resources to restoring the predominantly African American communities by providing cheaper housing and resources for children. By restoring the communities, Blacks will have more opportunities and be seen more positively, both of which counteract the racist presumption that all African Americans are poor and lazy. Additionally, by making Black communities just as desirable as their white counterparts, the direct correspondence between race and affluence will no longer be as prevalent. As part of a new housing act in 1949, Chicago received funding for new housing projects – 98 percent of which were built in Black neighborhoods.
In Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the G.I. Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Americans (NBER Working Paper No. 9044), authors Sarah Turner and John Bound conclude that the G.I. Bill had a markedly different effect on educational attainment for black and white veterans after the war. While the introduction of generous student aid through the G.I. Bill held the promise of significantly reducing black-white gaps in educational opportunity and long-run economic outcomes, the G.I. Bill exacerbated rather than narrowed the economic and educational differences between blacks and whites among men from the South.
In another ethnographic work, Jonathan Rieder specifies on provocative and poignant responses to racial busing by Jews and Italians living in Canarsie. In a similar class discussion, Professor Wilson points out the facts of the elimination of racial barriers helped united and destroy issues in different economic sectors. Interracial unionization eliminate split labor market between blacks and whites where blacks were granted a lower wage and thus forced to depress the wages of Caucasian workers in a competitive labor workforce. With this malfunction of racial conflicts over job opportunities, Wilson argued, racial differences shifted from the sociopolitical sectors to the economic sector, due to access to resources such as prime neighborhoods, housing, and education. Canarsie served a prime example of such shifts in the racial conflict over the politics of education and real estate.
During the mid-20th century there was much racial discrimination, specifically in home ownership. During this period there was mass immigration of Southern blacks to the north. In Lawndale Chicago, there was adverse reactions to this. As the
Contrary to popular belief, the use of ghettos began long before Hitler came to power in the early 1930s. On March 29th, 1516, the Republic of Venice ordered the Jewish population to live in the confined area of Ghetto Nuova. Ghetto Nuova was a filthy, crowded island that confined the Jewish population by closing the island off at night and surrounding it with patrols. During this era, Jewish people also faced discrimination, as they were ordered to wear a sign of identification such as a yellow hat or badge (“The Ghetto”). Furthermore, this discrimination and persecution of the Jewish people dispersed to other areas. In 1555, Pope Paul IV established Cum nimis absurdum, a papal law, that led to the creation of the Roman Ghetto. In the
A large influx of colored people created many problems. First, there was a major problem in the availability in housing, of which was responded to with racism. This is the root for the hatred between the black and white communities. There wasn’t enough housing in the “black belt” community, so Negroes began to spill into white neighborhoods. The very existence of a colored person in a neighborhood would lower the property values. When a house was sold to a colored person, the rent for the house would be higher than the previous, white owner’s rent. Real Estate companies believed that “it is a matter of common knowledge that house after house…whether under white or black agents, comes to the Negro at an increased rental” (Sandburg 46). They sold housing despite the fact that “the Negro in Chicago, paid a lower wage than the white workman” (47), and that black people would have
Rough Draft & Thesis Statement Minorities are faced with housing discrimination on levels much higher than that of white people which is considered white privilege. Residential segregation has been strategically planned and carried out by multiple parties throughout history and persists today ultimately inhibiting minorities from making any of the social or economic advances that come from living in affluent neighborhoods and communities. From our research, the scholarly sources have depicted multiple causes of racial disparity. Housing segregation perpetuates negative circumstances for people of color, as looked at through history, laws, segregation, real estate, and ... The end of the Civil War and the start of the Industrial Revolution and
Wilson (2011) research proves that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), contributed to the early decay of inner city neighborhoods by withholding mortgage capital and making it difficult for these areas to retain or attract families who were able to purchase their own homes. As the federal government created this program it excluded certain inner city neighborhoods. This exclusion created “redlining” which assessed primarily on racial composition. People who wanted to get out of public housing and purchase a home in a redlined neighborhood were denied proper mortgages, even if they had sufficient funds. Wilson (2011) says that such restrictions such redlining restricted many opportunities for building or even maintaining quality housing in the inner city, which in many ways set the stage for urban blight that many Americans now associate with black neighborhoods. Policies like this one were created to make blacks stay in the inner city
The author explained how the government established policies and initiatives that created ghettos and suburbs. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is a program that helped citizens become homeowners by lending loans. However, only certain neighborhoods qualified for those loans. Research and data were used to prove that certain areas were considered a loss of investment. The
Despite increased diversity across the country, America’s neighborhoods remain highly segregated along racial and ethnic lines. Residential segregation, particularly between African-Americans and whites, persists in metropolitan areas where minorities make up a large share of the population. This paper will examine residential segregation imposed upon African-Americans and the enormous costs it bears. Furthermore, the role of government will be discussed as having an important role in carrying out efforts towards residential desegregation. By developing an understanding of residential segregation and its destructive effects, parallels may be drawn between efforts aimed at combating
I really enjoyed your post. The word ghetto stems from when European cities in which the Jews were restricted, and later used to describe a slum section of an American city, predominantly occupied by a minority group who live under social and economic pressures. The word represents an institutional and historical basis of racial exclusion. The word ghetto also has a particular racial component, and defines those associated with the word as being represented by social isolation, residential segregation, gross inequality, consistent poverty, and crime.
It was a way to constraint African Americans to areas that were far away from those with status, class, and power. Segregation led to discrimination in economic opportunities, housing, and education. The black culture has suffered from the barriers that were placed through segregation. However, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 tried to limit some of the discrimination associated with segregation. It was discovered that even a “rising economic status had little or no effect on the level of segregation that blacks experience” (Massey and Denton 87). The authors imply that “black segregation would remain a universal high” (Massey and Denton 88). The problem with the continuing causes in Segregation is that even though the Fair Housing act was placed, many realtors still discriminate against blacks “through a series of ruses, lies, and deceptions, makes it hard for them to learn about, inspect, rent, or purchase homes in white neighborhoods” (Massey and Denton 97). Segregation and discrimination have a cumulative effect over time. Massey and Denton argued that the “act of discrimination may be small and subtle, together they have a powerful cumulative effect in lowering the probability of black entry into white neighborhood” (98). William Julius Wilson had