Second Ghetto From the First Term Paper

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" With this onslaught of blacks into their communities, there was an "exodus of Jews" (apparently no pun intended vis-a-vis the book Exodus about the Jews seeking a homeland) which created a "vacuum" that was immediately filled by a "housing-starved black population."

On page 415-16, Hirsch writes that the "real tragedy surrounding the emergence of the modern ghetto" is not that it has been "inherited" but that it has been "renewed and strengthened... with government sanction and support."

Finally, on page 416, Hirsch gets down to the bare bones, bottom line social dynamic of the problem that has been allowed to fester in Chicago (at least up to 1983 when he published this essay). When, he writes, the racial lines began to "harden" after the post-WWII influx of blacks into the second ghetto, "it was apparent that white hostility was of paramount importance in shaping the pattern of black settlement." Blacks were blackballed, so to speak, from moving into white communities. It was apparent from the first page of his essay, but on page 416 he begins to related to that fact. "White hostility" could have been the title of his essay. But meantime, he describes the federally-mandated "urban renewal" (which many skeptical people including African-American activists called "urban removal") program went into decaying neighborhoods, evicted the people (who, Hirsch writes, were "shunted off to other quarters"), tore down the buildings, and built housing for middle class citizens and institutional structures for bureaucracies.

Where did a lot of the black folks get "shunted off" to? "High-rise public housing projects, created, in large part, to re-house fugitives..." from those "urban removal" areas. Those "projects" (high rises) lined State Street for "miles as a new, vertical ghetto supplemented the old." Soon though, all the positive feelings for the new tall projects went sour as there were segregationist powers behind the federal agencies that operated the housing units.

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The flight of the white population to the suburbs was in fact encouraged by the FHA company; Hirsch writes on 416 that of 374 FHA-guaranteed mortgages in metropolitan Chicago, only 3 of those mortgages were approved for the central city, where blacks lived and sought a better lives for their families.

The pattern of the federal government with regards to encouraging and rewarding segregation was like a Jim Crow law being re-written in different language in the north; for those who thought blatant racial bias only occurred in the south, this may come as a shock but in fact racism and segregated communities (call them "colonies" if you will) were plentiful in the big urban areas of the north.

But because there already had been an original ghetto, the fact of a new one wasn't such a shock, and that is what Hirsch is saying; basically an institutionalized ghetto was the work of a government and power structure in Chicago and elsewhere that, behind the mask of "urban renewal," just wanted to upgrade the ghetto, not really give the black middle class a chance to move out to the suburbs where the air was fresher and the lawns sparkled in the morning dew.

This essay by Hirsch could have been structured a little differently, and could have made a more dramatic impact and immediate impression, if the facts of racially segregated Chicago had been brought out at the outset of the essay. He could have laid it out like this: here is the problem, here is why is so ugly today, and now let's go back and follow the pattern of this problem from its origins. Instead he began by discussing race riots and linking those to the ghetto's proximity to the white community; the heart of the problem lies….....

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