21. Reflection: Black Ghettoization and Marginalization – The Recent U.S. Experience

U.S. cities in 2016 continue to be haunted by the specter of isolated and disadvantaged African American ghettos. These spaces today exhibit deepened poverty and physical decay, struggling public schools, and heightened stigma. This current trend is exemplified in the likes of Cleveland’s Hough and Kinsman, Chicago’s sprawling South Side Black Belt, Los Angeles’s Watts, and New York’s Bedford Stuyvesant. Set in the shadows of spruced up downtowns and gentrified neighborhoods, these communities feel the ills of systematic neglect. While a new spit-and-polish uneven development provides shiny new “creative-class” residential and play zones, poor black communities are pushed to the margins as undeserving and culturally problematic. As I have suggested elsewhere, we can now think of a new kind of low-income terrain having formed in these cities, what I describe shortly as “glocal ghettos”.