the ghetto

It may be useful to think of blacks as just another immigrant group-- just that they're internal immigrants, moving from the South to the North. In that sense, 'the ghetto' could be thought of as just another 'immigrant neighborhood,' like the Lower East Side of New York, the North End of Boston, etc.

These neighborhoods typically were populated by people of the same ethnicity or nationality. As the immigrants moved into the second and third generations the more talented and energetic moved 'up and out.' What remained was a kind of 'left-behind' subculture. The South End of Boston, if you've ever been there, is a fairly depressing area. It's odd to see white people living in housing projects and youth loitering on streetcorners, but there it is.

Now there is an educated, somewhat affluent black middle class, although my sense is that it's somewhat smaller than that of other groups (and consists almost entirely of public-sector employees). Yet this population seems dwarfed by the 'left-behinds,' and what gets me about this latter group, compared with other immigrant groups, has been their stubborn unwillingness or inability to assimilate into the larger culture.

Granted-- and I shouldn't underestimate this-- blacks have faced unique obstacles in this country, right from the beginning, and those obstacles persist today. Yet I find myself increasingly of the feeling that 'That was then and this is now.' Why don't these people just get with the program?

I'll be blunt. I think of 'ghettoes'-- meaning the non-middle-class, welfare/underclass areas as basically third-world enclaves in a first-world nation. I'll go further than that: I think of them as cancers that shouldn't be allowed to metastasize.

What are the things that set 'the ghetto' off from the rest of society, or even from other traditional immigrant neighborhoods? The most obvious thing is the level of crime, and of violent crime in particular. And there are two other factors, directly related to crime but only slightly less obvious. The first is the near universal illegitimacy of the children, which is to say the nearly universal unwillingness of black men in these areas to accept the responsibilities of fatherhood. The second is the inability to use the public schools as a means of getting 'up and out.' Not only is the dropout rate extremely high compared to that of other groups (with the exception of Hispanics), but the performance of those who do remain in school is extremely low.

Add to this the Hip-Hop youth culture, which, again, I view as espousing a basically third-world set of values. First-world nations are created by first-world people, people who are civilized, educated, and responsible. Many, if not most, denizens of this underclass ghetto are none of these things, and that is why ghettos appear to me to be third-world enclaves in a first-world country.