Distinguished socialist mitch duneier. I am a former professor at the John Hopkins University up the street. My baltimore connection. As a school i take delight in books which were painstakingly researched and keen interpretation, help me understand a complex continue or phenomenon with greater clarity. The book ghetto is just such a book. I had the opportunity to teach get to in my last semester at hopkins in 2016 with the professor of history and director of jewish studies. Ken and i were impressed with the manner which the professor discussed the conflict of the ghetto. And i dont mean the context of jewish and black communes, and also how the concept itself and its application has shifted over time and n both the poplar . Scholarly imagination. Were not alone in our admiration for ghetto. Wrote an important review recently in New York Times that the professor has provided a, quote, stunningly detailed and timely survey of the ghetto as concept and phenomenon. Other reviews have echoed this judgment. Professor duneier insists we do ghetto how living in a selfcontained space largely of their own choosing. Instead he reveals how institutional racism and structures domination have limited the opportunity for success both inside and outside the get ghetto and helping produce the cons inequality that scholars and observers mistakenly for get to inhabitantses. This book is a departure books like sidewalk. In ghetto he examines the institutional context in which sis subjects in books like sidewalk and monumental black metropolis which is mentioned in this book. He demonstrates time and again the interplay between macro and microinstitutional racism, local covenants, restrictions limiting housing, educational, economic, social, and cultural opportunities, thats spawned each historical formation in the get ghetto, in the nazi onslaught in 1930s and spanning world war ii, and post world war ii period in the United States when the shifted from the jewish ghetto in the blacks to crumbling urban paces. Ghetto is a story about black intellectual contribution, specifically in sociology. Blame the victims and place misdidded optimism on white guilt and ail an thrown philanthropy. The black intel legal talk to history highlighted represents not only ultimate abhorrence of scholarship by but also policy implying indications and recommendations of their work that were largely ignored. A comparative work of scholarship across space and time, ghetto provides a conceptual framework that is generaltive, further analysis, examines the conditions of isolation, segregation, and institutional racism, in countries like france, belgium, and britain. We dont have to look too far for resonance of his argument in daily life. Rampant police brutality, dysfunction and corruption, high crime and murder rates, poor education, underemployment on display, for generations in the city of baltimore, provide few real opportunities for poor people, black, brown, and even working class whites to eek out living with dignity and respect. Presentday baltimore is part of the story. Particularly when we consider how its black residents involved in the uprising last april were described by the citys mayor and by baltimore residents insulated from the life as thugs and animals, people without respect for their own communities. Mitchs book, and provides an opportunity for baltimore and other walked life and backgrounds that broaden conversations about ghettos, poverty, unequal, and institutional racism in this city, other cities across the country, if not the globe. Finally, with pride that i introduce the professor as a dear friend and colleague, someone who is not only devoted a good portion of this scholarly career mining the complexities of the black urban life in United States and just as importantly, someone who is quit committed to equality in his practice and his daily life. Hope after you hear what will be an engaging provocative talk the discussion will encourage you to buy his earlier works, and begin to think individually and collectively about how people in baltimore, particularly the white elite establishment, have cheated the black and poor, rather than the source of its solutions. Thanks. [applause] anyone who knows moral gravity embodied in the work of the professor knows that there could be no greater honor for a scholar than an introduction like the one that he just gave me. I just want to thank you for that. Should also add that professor chart was a visiting professor at the institute for advanced study in princeton in the year i was finishing this book, and without his friendship and support, and encouragement, dont really know whether or not i would have been able to make the final push to get the book finished. Sometimes it takes a good friend to be able to get your work done, and i want to thank you for that as well. Im not going to present a lot of the data here today. Statistics, but i would like to begin with a bit of data, which was produced in collaboration of a colleague of mine at prince continue named Brandon Stewart who works with computational social science and text analysis, and what this is it a graph that shows the use of the word get to in all of the books that are cataloged by google, going back to 1920, through the 1970s, and im going refer back to this graph a couple of times during the talk, but to begin with i want to focus your attention on 1961 where that line is there. That is the year in which i was born. Im 55 years old. And that you can see that the black ghetto, which is where i have my pointer here, in 1961, is referenced far less still than the jewish ghetto in the catalogue by google, and thats a significant piece of data because in 1961, when i was born, in my house on long island where i was growing up, largely white suburb and largely jewish suburb, when i heard the word ghetto it was associated mainly with the nazi ghettos. And thats not completely surprising, knowing about the intellectual context of the way that natz eu si ghettos game to be talk about. 1961 was the year after the book night. It was the year that Adolph Eichman went to trial in jerusalem and a couple of years before hannah would publish her book, eichman in jerusalem and the same area, 1961, in which raul hillberg, the greatest scholar of the holocaust, leading up to the current era, a person that helped create the fields of holocaust history, one of the greatest fields and greatest accomplishments in history, wrote his book the destruction of the European Jews. This is a moment in which the books that my father is reading at home were books like these, and although he himself didnt go to college for more than a couple of years, where he had before he had to into into his familys been he devoured history all of the time and these are the kind of conversations we would have about jewish history in those years and in my first six or seven years of my life i heard a lot about ghettos and the nazi ghettos. And its really interesting to think that by the time i was in grad school at the university of chicago, in the Sociology Department, that you could look at i was in graduate school in 80s. You could look at the grass here the graph here and you can see that the black ghetto had become hegemonic, and the jewish ghetto had been basically oplate obliterated in books cataloged by google. When i was in graduate school at the university of chicago, if somebody mentioned the word ghetto in a sociology class it was automatically assumed we were talking about the africanamerican ghetto, and ive always had it in the back of my mind, even is a was doing work in the traditions of contemporary urban sociology, on urban inequality and racism . City and focusing on the black community, and what was happening on the south site of chicago, and then in new york, i always had it in my mind to wonder what the connections were between these experiences, and part of what my book is about is focusing in different ways on that turk question. Now, its interesting that i grew up thinking of the ghetto early in my life as associated with the nazi ghettos, because all around me you could see the transformation was taking place early in my childhood. By 1965, in fact, it crossed over. Black ghetto was actually more significant, but actually but by the time i was seven or eight years old, i was living in a segue degree getted White Community and a Jewish Community so the reality for me is what my parents were talking about. There were many jews involved with the Civil Rights Movement, but my parents were not among them, and i grew up thinking more about the jewish ghettos and that is what it meant to me also to be a jew, the education i received had a lot to do with the holocaust during the years in which i was growing up. In fact when i was 13 years old and you had to good for a meeting with the rabbi and discuss the book night. So, its interesting that the it was in the nazi ghetto that was the main ghetto that was on my mind growing up, because in fact for most of history, if you referred to the ghetto, you werent referring to anything that the nazis did. You were referring to the ghetto in venice, in 1516, which was the first ghetto that was created for the jews, and it was the first time that the word ghetto was used to refer to a copper foundary that the jews were actually placed in. It was the copper foundary known as the ghetto, the jews were placed there, and i rely here in talking about this upon another sort of monumental field of history, the field of the early modern historians, who have done painstaking work on this topic, including professor benjamin ran yesterday, whose work i relied on heavily in this account. One interesting thing about the accomplishments of the early modern historians is that they have shown that when the house of the dodge decided to place the jews in a ghetto, they were really not trying to create a whole framework for how jews whoa be treated. They were really trying to solve a very particular problem at a very particular moment, and the problem they were trying to solve was that they needed people to loan money to their lower middle classes and working class people, and they couldnt have these their working classes in order to get loans have to get on a boat and travel 30 or 40 minutes or an hour away to get small loans. They needed them right there in the city so they created a space for. The right there in this most catholic city. They were not trying to create a framework, for example, for how jews should be treated everywhere, but they created a solution for their own problem, and then that word came to be known as this place where the jews were living. And as i see it, the crucial moment was not venice, which is now celebrating its 500th 500th anniversary, and in which the jews, bill the way, at the very least, semi flourished. They had great accomplishments in the production of books and philosophy and drama and family life. It was not the ghetto oven is in, really of seven is in, really, that was the crucial get to to but it was the ghetto of rome which was forged in 1555 by pope paul, and according to Kenneth Stowe and another monumental work on this topic, was really created in an effort to try to get the jews to convert, and also at a moment in history when the reformation was leading to a certain need on the part of the vatican to make rome into a more attractive space, and to create an environment in which the jews could be shown as an example, even, of what happens when you dont convert. But when the pope created this ghetto, he wrote it up in his papal bull and that papal bull was contributed around the world, and i see that as a very crucial moment in those years because now the ghetto becomes a cognitive framework that becomes an example of how jews should be and can be segue grate gaited around the world. Segregated around the world. It wasnt until the early 1800s that napoleon using a current phrase exporter of democracy, went around europe and liberated the jews from their ghettos, and it was in that period, from the early 1800s to the beginnings of the 20th century, that the jews began to live in places around europe, and then in places like new york and chicago, on the lower east side. In neighborhoods that we might call semi voluntary. I wont go so far as to call them voluntary because they were clear restrictions on where jews could live, but this was a far cry from the forced ghettoization that had existed in previous eras. This was exactly the situation that jewish life was in when the word ghetto was introduced into the social sciences by a jewish sociologist at the university of chicago, one of the first sociologists at the university, named louis worth, and he wrote his ph. D in the Sociology Department at chicago, and in the 1920s his dissertation about the ghetto was published and became an instant classic of american sociology, and what work who would late be reappointed as a professor in the department and would spend decades there, mentoring many Generation Office students. He argued the ghetto was a generalizable concept. You could actually take the ghettos of venice and rome and frankfurt and you could see continuity between those get toes and the ghettos that came later in chicago, the ghettos where the jews were living. He said very little about asian communities in part because by 1928, the restrict strucktive covenants starting to form the black ghetto, just going into effect. But he still argued that the experience of the jews could explain all of the other groups as well, we could take this as the exemplar, essentially. And he was at the time that he published the book, not fully aware of the fact that at that very moment in time, the situation of africanamericans was about to be transformed radically by restrictive covenants on where they could live in the city. How is it that the word ghetto end up moving from a word that was associated with the jews in the early modern era to a word that came to be was really associated with a certain amount of flourishing or semi flourishing, even under conditions of serious restriction, which must be acknowledged. How its that it moved from a word that came to be associated with the life of the jews over centuries, to a word that would be associated with a place that the jews would be put and in which they would be destroyed. And in the book in the first chapter of the book, which i entitle a nazi deception i argue that Adolph Hitler essentially deceived the world, and that the deception is in some sense still with news ways we need to recognize today, and part of my goal in the book, in bringing us into a dialogue about he holocaust, is so argue we have to be much more cognizant of the fact that hitlers deception is the reason we have that word today and use it. So, when hitler when the nazis when hitler came to power, theres pretty much strong consensus among the historians of the hole cao, and i refer here to people like christopher browning, an example, that at the time that hitler came to power, that there was probably no real conceptual understanding of what the ghetto was going to be later on. And there was certainly no idea of what the final solution was going to be at the very beginning. This is something that evolved over time in response to conditions as they emerged. And but that shouldnt sort of that insight, which is very important, should not either blind us to the fact that early in his time as chancellor, hitler even said he would actually like to see the jews living in the ghettos where they could be displayed as wild animals. And but when he went to speak to his to officials of the Catholic Church and they were asking him what are you doing . Segregating the jews like this . Whats going on here . He basically told them that he was really recreating the ghettos that had been created by the church in earlier centuries, and i have two quotes here which i think are very telling. The first is an unsigned note in the embassy of the holy see from 1933, and it says in his statements hitler spoke with the highest regard of the Catholic Church and then brought up the jewish question in justification of his hostility to the jews he referred to the Catholic Church, which had likewise always regarded the jews as undesirables, in which on account of the moral dangers involved had forbidding the christians to work with jews. For these reasons the church had banished the jews into the ghetto, and then a second record of that meeting says hitler said, quote, have been attacked because of my handling of the jewish question. The catholics considered the jews put them in gets to because it recognized the jews for what they were. So hitler was deceive thing world which the Catholic Church and the catholic officials and making the case that he was recreating something that they had done. What is important about that is that it was this cognitive framework, a framework that came out oven is in, unintentionally, but picked up in rome, and by the time it leaves rome, its a framework that has been circulated around the world, and by the time now that centuries have again on this is the way that jews have lived for centuries it actually was natural to some people, including many jews, that they would live in ghettos, so if you say, oh, im putting them back in ghetto, its not complete my inconceivable that that is what he means, especially given that they later outcome is something that was haroldly imaginable. Now, the classic ghetto to run through very quickly very different than anything hitler would undertake. The function of the classic ghetto was protective in many ways. I mean, i dont want to overemphasize this point and take it too far, but the jews, in certainly in italy, and in many other places, were sometimes felt protected from the Wider Society in ghettos and they also the Wider Society felt protected from the juves as from the jews as well. The principle of discrimination was belief, and that means that jews could actually leave the ghettos if they changed their beliefs, if they converted, and the kind of segregation is what i call pourous, meaning they could come and good in some ghettos they had to be like venice they had to be back at night, for example, but they could leave during the day. The economic basis of the ghetto was enter dough pen dent so the jew dependent so the jews were regularly exchanging with the outside world. The physical space was usually overcrowded in all ghettos. I usually call the ghetto or sometimes call the ghetto a differentiating machine in that it starks out to take people who are somewhat different and it makes them even more different, in the case of the jews, the basis that differentiation is they were not saved. And the ghetto the logic of the ghetto 0, all ghettos, is a vicious cycle, so that you start out with people that are somewhat different, the fact that they are segregated, makes people believe that they are even more different and that creates a belief in the need to segregate them even further, and the mechanism for that in the case of the classic ghetto was segregation, and the effect of the ghettoization on the Broader Society is usually one of limited effect. In fact thats one of the principles of ghettoization in general, that it should affect the people inside the ghetto without necessarily affecting those on the outside too much. And for the jews, in the classic ghetto framework, the ghetto, as was pointed out in the book he destruction of the European Jews was a way of life. The economic basis of the ghetto is rescued by labor. In other words, its not only that theres not interdependence, but you have to make enough money as a ghetto in order to support your own existence. The nazis were not interested in any way in sending any money into the get foes ghettos for those ghettos to support themselves. The physical space was not just overcrowding, but it was territorial starvation. You could have dozens of, a dozen family in one small apartment with one bathroom. It wasnt that they were just not saved, but they were being viewed as wild animals. So the next question that i take up in the book is how is it that the ghetto actually made a transformation and a move from being an idea that would be used to talk about jews during the holocaust to an idea that would, in a certain kind of hegemonic way, be used to talk about africanamericans in the United States. And i argue that the key person that we have to begin to understand in order to see that transformation is this figure whose name is mirdal. He was a swedish economist who was picked by the Carnegie Corporation which was one of the largest foundations in the United States to come to america from sweden and to be what they hoped would be a modern de tocqueville, somebody who could look objectively at the race situation in the United States and analyze it and perhaps bring to the attention of the country what the conditions were that africanamericans were living in and what some of the solutions might be. And they actually looked around the world for a person that could come from outside the United States, hopefully they thought from a country without traditions of imperialism, and who could actually really gain the respect and the respectability necessary in order to have his work and book accepted. And they searched the world, and they found this young economist who they were told was extremely charismatic and brilliant and was capable of undertaking the massive organizational project that this would entail. And they just wrote him a letter, basically, and they said, look, were willing to give you as much money as you need. This is going to be the most wellendowed study in the history of social sciences, and we want you to come over here with your family and do this study for us x. He got the study he got the letter with his wife, they looked at it. His wife, alma, who would herself go on to win a nobel prize, the peace prize. Mirdal would later win the nobel in economics a as an older man in part because of the work he was brought to new york to do. This was quite a power couple living there in stockholm, and they sit there and they go, you know, this is just ridiculous. We have little children, we have to raise them here, well just write them back and say were not going to do it. But the Carnegie Corporation refused to take no for an answer, and they persevered, and finally they got mirdal to move to princeton, actually. And he had offices in new york, a house in princeton, and they told him that he could hire a staff of as many people as he basically needed. And the more that he spent, the first few months he spent in the states, the more time he was there, the more he came to feel that he actually was not on firm ground as a swede and as a white man to try to write about the racial situation in the United States. And so he asked for a committee, and he asked if he could have a, quoteunquote, negro and a southerner and a northerner on the committee with him to produce the book. And the Carnegie Corporation said, no, you will not have a committee. You will write this book yourself. We do not want you making side glances to anyone elses opinion, but we will allow you to hire as many distinguished academics or people as you would like to have. And he went around the country, and he literally hired full professors from some of the most eminent Sociology Departments and psychology departments and history departments and some of the most eminent scholars. And he, from around the country. And he had all of them working as his research assistants. I dont think that theres ever been a study thats ever been produced with that kind of support since. Most of the people that worked for mirdal, and they were paid to work for him, they produced large reports. Some of their reports were published as monographs as their own, but he was able to assimilate the material that is they wrote more him into the book that would become known as an american dilemma. One of the people he tried to hire on the study and one of the few people that he tried to hire who was a graduate student was a man namedhorse caton. And horace was a graduate student at the university of chicago x be he was a student in now were talking about caton arrived there in the 1930s, and he was there from the the 30s into the 40s. And he, caton, you can see him here in his office at a Community Center which he was running while he was a graduate student. Caton was the grandson of the first black senator in the United States. He was from seattle. His own father ran a very important newspaper in seattle, and he grew up with a lot of selfconfidence. And at the time that you see him in this picture, he is running a study of his own which started out as a study of juvenile delinquency and is, has morphed into a study of the entire south side of chicago. In the era during which, after which the city had put into effect or realtors and local real estate organizations and working with local Property Owners had, essentially, put into effect restrictive covenants. Because this was really something that was done privately with the help of real estate organizations. And these covenants essential liquor donned off essentially cordoned off whole sections of the city and said that people, Certain Properties unless you could demonstrate a certain amount of racial purity which was a pretty significant amount, that you would, you could not live in these sections of the city. And, thus was created the black ghetto that caton and drake caton was writing about at this particular point and researching. And here you could see many of the books and many of the reports, and there are many, many, many boxes that had been collected. And he was hoping to produce some kind of a work of his own. He is approached by mirdal, and mirdal had heard of this study, and he wants these materials, essentially, for an american dilemma. And he says to caton, i would like you to join the study. And hes one of the only graduate students whos asked to join. There was one other one that ill tell you about many in a little while in a little while who himself ended up also becoming quite famous. But caton essentially thoughting to himself, wait a second. I dont really understand whats going on here. Why is he canning me to join this study asking me to join this study . And it occurred to him that mirdal was really trying to get hold of his materials. And i want to just read to you a little bit from the book where i show you some of the archival findings on this relationship that made me see how this relationship emerged, and then ill tell you why i think its important. So in 1939 mirdal offered caton a six month position in the projects new york office. Mirdals had two types of positions, staff devoted full time to the project and experts enlisted to write reports on specific fields. Caton said he was puzzled because he was assigned to neither of these categories and wouldnt have any clear responsibilities. Obviously, he told mirdal, they just wanted him for his massive documents, Interview Transcripts and field notes. He could not practically give up his apartment in chicago as well as his own project to come to new york for six months. He would, however, be willing to come for a full year, provided that mirdal paid him to write his own book. Mirdal had entered this arrangement with other, more senior black scholars, including charles johnson. How badly caton needed the money and how to well mirdal understood this. All the same, caton had deep reservations. During the negotiations, he made clear that his own priority was to turn the materials he had collected into a publication that would fulfill his intellectual vision and allow him to receive full credit. Shortly after mirdals offer, he received a threepage letter from the new york office requesting various types of day a that from his wpa study. Reluctant to turn the material over, he wrote to mirdal repeating that he would have to receive money to write a book of his own, and if any of the materials were used, full credit should go to him as the Program Director and to the Works Project Administration as its sponsor. Between the summer of 1939 and the winter of 1940, mirdal made several trips to chicago during which he tried to talk caton into an arrangement. Mirdal even got his wife, alva, to socialize with catons wife, bonnie, but he could not talk him into budgeting from the demand that he also be given money to write his own book. Now, i mean, its hard to im not going to read you any more from the correspondence, but its really, its hard to put ourselves, perhaps, exactly in catons place because although it may seem obvious that someone wouldnt give up their materials, its important to recognize that were talking about a powerless graduate student at the university of chicago who did not know what his future was going to be talking to one of the most eminent social scientists in the world who was a person with great power x. Caton basically stood his ground, and mirdal ended up not making the deal with caton and went on to publish an american dilemma which would become the most important work of social science of the era. It was published in 1945, and it was published to massive acclaim. And what mirdal argued in the book was that he documented in over a thousand pages of material that the racial inequality in the United States had created an inferior life for black citizens. And he documented this in extraordinary detail, in chapter after chapter. As part of his analysis, he had an overall framework in which he argued that there was a kind of, there was a dilemma in White America and that this dilemma was a kind of cognitive dissonance between the ideals of the country on the one hand and, on the other hand, the actual way in which americans lived. And he argued that White America felt this cognitive dissonance strongly and that they would end up resolving it in the direction of equality. And this book was really taken up as a great be work, because it made americans feel good about who they were. It got taken up by liberals. This was the book you could find in the homes of educated people around the United States. And as you can imagine, the Carnegie Corporation was quite happy when, in brown v. Board of education, this was, this book was cited for the example, as the evidence for, for the inferiority that segregation leads to. In my book i have a chapter on the other graduate student that mirdal worked closely with and developed a different kind of relationship with x that was Kenneth Clark. Im not going to talk today about clark, but clark was cited in the exact same footnote as mirdal in brown v. Board of education for his experiment that many of you know about, his famous doll experiment. So what happened to caton . Well, i said that mirdals book was published in 45, but i meant it was published in 44. The book that was published in 1945 was the book that caton wrote with this collaborator named Sinclair Drake. And that was another graduate student at the university of chicago. You know, caton was really an operator. He was a brilliant man, but he was also somebody that was always busy making deals, trying to get the Research Project to work. Drake, Sinclair Drake who came to the university of chicago from new orleans he was a worker. He would sit there at his desk and get the chapters written. And in the end, he produced in a short time about twothirds of the book, and caton wrote about onethird of it. And together they produced what is arguably even still today one of the two or three greatest works in the history of american sociology. This, this book, black me p drop lis, metropolis, when it came out a year after at american dilemma which was a study of simply the life on the south side of chicago, introduced the word ghetto in a high profile way into social science to talk about the situation of africanamericans in the city. And when they used the word ghetto, they had a very particular meaning in mind. And i want to just read you a little bit from the book. Briefly on that point. They used the ghetto to, one, highlight the difference between black neighborhoods and other neighborhoods; two, to ascribe the conditions in the black community to a vicious cycle of outside repression and inside decay; three, to argue that the separate institutions brought about by the ghetto were inherently inferior to those outside while still serving as a source of pride and a rounded life; four, to show that the life trajectories of ghetto residents were mainly due to the Community Context in which they lived, rather than the characteristics of the people who moved there; and, five, to emphasize that understanding the ghetto and it was not a magic bullet that explained all problems of black people. In fact, be blacks were moved out of the ghetto, drake and caton argued, they would still have to deal with their massive employment problems as well. What they showed when they talked about the ghetto was, on the one hand, a place that was being produced where the behaviors and the life was being produced by these restrictive covenants which were supported by large real estate organizations as well as local Property Owners, but they also showed a ghetto that they referred to as bronzeville. And the reason the that they referred to it by that name was because they needed a name other than ghetto when they wanted to talk about the semiflourishing that also existed on the south side. They saw this south Side Community as like a coin with both heads and tails, and the heads was the semiflourishing, and the tails was the ghetto. By the 1970s, people were wondering what had happened . How was it that mirdal had been so wrong . The Civil Rights Movement essentially proved that northern whites were not willing to give up so much x they wondered how was it and they wondered how was it that mirdal could have made the mistake that he made with all of the help that he had from so many Great American scholars. And this was epitomized in an article published in the New York Times magazine by carl degler who asked the negro in america where mirdal went wrong. And he was the one really who framed that question of how it was that he could have possibly missed the boat. And what i argue in my book is that had mirdal made the deal with caton, that he would have actually gained is access to materials accessed to materials that would have made it possible for him to understand the white racism. And why do i say that . Because although black metropolis is seen today as a book about the black community, one of the pioneering things that drake and caton did in their book was they sent out white interviewers to do interviews with the White Community, and they have chapters in their book that describe the virulent racism of the whites in chicago. And, essentially, their intransigence. And so i argue in the book that had mirdal gained access to those communities, had he made a deal with caton that would have made it possible for caton to also publish his own booking and fund his ability to do that, he would have had access to materials that would have given him a more nuanced view of the south. We dont really know why he didnt make that deal with caton. He made deals with other black scholars. Was it because caton was a graduate student, and he didnt think he needed to take him seriously . Maybe. Another possibility is just that were talking about an era in which 75 of blacks are still living in the south, and he just may not have thought it was worth it or that important to develop an understanding of the north. He could not have predicted the migration that was going to take place and that those proportions would actually reverse themselves. Part of what i argue in ghetto is that the significance to have the nazi era cannot be underestimated in the decision of africanamerican intellectuals and blacks in general to begin using the word ghetto to describe the situation in cities like chicago, that that came into being in part because of the nazi ghettos. And i want to just sort of illustrate my point by going back to this graph again. You see that the rise in black ghetto occurs right around the use of black ghetto right around 1945, the use. The restrictive covenants went into effect in chicago around 1928. Thats when ghettoization became a truly forced measure in cities like chicago or st. Louis or baltimore. And if, be those restrictive if those restrictive covenants had been the cause, you would have expected the rise to be right here, right . But it does happen though. It ebbs and flows, stays basically where it was, and then all of a sudden you have this massive rise. Caton and drake are not trying to make explicit comparisons to the jews, theyre not trying to say our situation is like the jews. What theyre really trying to do is to say we are americas jews. This is a situation that we these to Pay Attention to need to Pay Attention to in this country. Our sons are over there liberating concentration camps in a war against notions of racial purity, and thousand we are being segregated and now we are being segregated in our own cities on the basis of notions of racial purity. Their goal was to sort of highlight the hypocrisy of it. And you see it in black metropolis when they use the word barbed wire to describe the restrictive covenants. Barbed wire was a phrase that was used to describe the ghettos that hitler created. It was not a technology that existed during the early modern era. So i want to this is a book that talks about ghetto in many different eras, and i focus in here on the nazi era. I have a chapter after this on Kenneth Clark and the way the vision of the ghetto that he had during the Civil Rights Movement, a chapter on William Julius wilson and the vision of the ghetto that he had beginning during the reagan years and going through the clinton years, and then i end with a chapter on jeffrey canada and his harlem childrens zone and the kind of ways in which his vision of the ghetto befit what is sometimes referred to as the neoliberal moment. But i want to begin, i want to end here by just asking a basic question which has been on my mind as i was bringing the book to closure which is what kind of focal point should the holocaust be for us today at this particular moment in history . And as i think about the jewish ghettos and i think about the black ghettos, i think i have very different answers. On the one hand, the jewish ghettos were ghettos that had a long history of nourishing. As hillburg said, they were a way of life. And one of the impacts of the nazi ghettos and of the holocaust in general was to, essentially, blot out our consciousness of that flourishing. Here are two pictures of poland, of warsaw. This is a family in the years leading up to the holocaust in a park in warsaw, and this is a jewish, a group of jewish actors, yiddish actors that were part of the semiflour bishing life semiflourishing life in poland, and im using the word semiflourishing very deliberately here because i know there was a lot of antisemitism in poland in the years prior to the holocaust. But this life also existed. And one of the problems, one of the intellectual problems that we have today is that thousand years has been blotted out, essentially, by the nazis. That was one of hitlers greatest accomplishments besides the, his achieving so many of his goals, he actually was able to make us forget about those years. And thats why the new history, the new museum for the history of polish jews in warsaw is not a holocaust museum. As director of the core exhibition, barbara gimlet, has emphasized, the goal of the museum is to bring to life that thousand years. And so i feel as though when it comes to the jewish ghettos, i think that perhaps in terms of what kind of a focal point the holocaust should be, i think maybe we need less holocaust rather than more holocaust. But part of what hitler did was he created a word, he took a word in his desense that had once deception that had once been a representation of what jewish life had been under the church, essentially, and he took that word, and he transformed it, right, into a word that was really about control and about destruction. And in a sense, you have these different endpoints on a continuum. You have venice with his flourishing, and you have the warsaw ghetto under the nazis with its complete destruction of the jews. And the word ghetto encompasses both of those things. It always does. Now and it always will. And i think thats what needs to be remembered. And so i have a picture on the bottom here taken by your own baltimore photographer devon allen, a young man in the city who has done a great deal to bring world attention to whats been going on in baltimore and around the United States. And this is a period in which the ghetto is not just about housing inequality, right . Its not its partly about that. Its not simply about segregation. But the ghetto is also a phenomenon of control. And this is by no means to make comparisons and to say, oh, well, you know, the black ghettos of today are like the nazi ghettos. To the contrary. They are not. But the word encompasses both flourishing and control, and were at a moment in history, in American History where we need to recognize the significance of the word ghetto for understanding the times of control in which were living today. So for the black ghetto today, i feel as though more holocaust and more recognition of the intellectual context in which, and the Historical Context in which africanamerican intellectuals and africanamericans in general took up that word in the 1940s. Thank you. [applause] thank you very much, mitch. Thank you all for being here. We have time for about three questions, so if you being very specific. So if you stand up and state your questions, then we can do it that way. And after the questions we also have the ivy book shop which has ghetto for sale tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Yes. Yes. My question is the experience of the jews in the ghetto, did they experience the same kind of crimes against each other as blacks do in the ghetto, blackonblack crime . Did jews also have that effect of terror going on in their community, their ghettos . Hes asking whether or not the jews experienced same kind of [inaudible] crime within the ghettos as blacks have experienced. Well, certainly, you know, during the era of the nazi ghettos under conditions of terrible forced segregation, jews did things to each other that they might not have imagined doing to one another during earlier eras. Yes. Your classic ghetto tool makes me think of a current, today, ghetto in the middle east with the gaza strip. And i lived there for about nine months, and im wondering what your thoughts might be about the gaza strip as a modernday ghetto. Well, i think it is clearly a modernday ghetto. Theres to [laughter] it is a [inaudible] first, i would like to say that i really appreciate your big points. And in particular about the uprising that we have we had here in baltimore last year and the statement that you made is very important, and it points up to the kind of Political Climate that we all live in today and how were all affected by that