“The ghetto, defined by the 1968 Kerner Commission as ‘an area within a city characterized by poverty and acute social disorganization and inhabited by members of a racial or ethnic group under conditions of involuntary segregation.'”
This is a quote from David Fleming’s book City of Rhetoric. This is the first time I have read an actual definition of the term “ghetto.” Growing up in a primarily white middle class neighborhood I knew what a ghetto was, but I never truly understood or was taught the circumstances behind how they formed. Just by reading this simple definition I realize how the stigma surrounding these communities is insensitive and counter productive.