The Ethnic Enclaves of Harlem Essay
The word ghetto (from Venetian gheto, ghet – ‘slag’ and Italian borghetto, borgo – ‘borough’) stands for a part of a city intentionally separated from the rest of the locality by some social, racial, ethnic, religious or economical attributes. The residents of a ghetto represent some kind of minority who occupy this detached territory. Initially, the word was used to identify the surroundings of Venice where Jews were forced to live. Further, the term became widely spread and well-known during holocaust when the Nazi isolated the Jews in their historical sections before their transportation to death camps or concentration (1939 – 1944). In this way the urban areas identified as ‘ghettos’ received their negative connotation from the historical background.
In general, ghettos are formed either by illegal immigrants themselves from inside or by compulsion from outside. The last usually includes violence and hostility from the majority, often resulting in economic or even legal barriers.
As for the United States, the first ethnic enclaves (districts or suburbs differing in some way form surrounding area) were formed by the Germans and the Irish. At the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a strong immigration wave from Southern and Eastern Europe. It is significant to remark that in a couple of generations their families managed to overcome boundaries of enclaves and find better living as equal members of the society. And the word ghetto became more attached to specific neighborhoods of African Americans who were in this or that way persecuted by white Anglo-Saxon population. Black ghettos began to form after the abolition of slavery and civil tights movement in the middle of the 20th century. Such ghettos became wide spread in the northern urban areas as a lot of African Americans moved there during 1914 – 1950 to escape the racism of the Southern states. In this way, ghettos have become areas with homogenous racial population.
Now, despite all the legal, economical and cultural measures taken countrywide, the United States of America still stay distinctly a “residentially segregated society”. And, as Walter Thabit states, “segregation was a product of collective actions taken by non-blacks to exclude blacks from outside neighborhoods” (42). African Americans had hardly any chance to integrate in the white society because they were isolated in all the spheres, from poetry to politics and from sports to social working. Each attempt to wrest was severely persecuted. And it is traced in most of the modern ghettos of the USA. Kenneth Bancroft Clark repeats in his revealing study Dark ghetto: dilemmas of social power:
Although the problems of joblessness, teenage pregnancy, family dissolution, educational failure, violent crime, exploitative sexual relations, drug addiction, and alcoholism are not unique to black ghettos, they are more heavily concentrated there because of a unique combination of economic marginality and rigid racial segregation. (x)
One of such well-known segregated areas is Harlem, the New York City neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan. As it is noticeably described by Clark, “Harlem is a philanthropic, economic, business, and industrial colony of New York City” (Clark 174). In West Harlem, beginning with west of St. Nicholas Avenue and stretching to north of the 123rd Street, dominating is population of Hispanic origin. East Harlem, lying between the east of the Fifth Avenue and the East 96th Street, was widely settled by the Puerto Ricans in 1950s and now it is called Spanish Harlem (or El Barrio). But generally, when it is going about Harlem, Central Harlem is usually implied. This territory, inhabited by the African Americans, goes from the 110th Street in the South to the Harlem River in the northeast; from the Third Avenue in the east to the parks between Manhattan, Morningside and St. Nicholas avenues in the west (Clark 26). These three ethnical enclaves have to survive side by side in specific circumstances of dissolution between ethnically homogeneous enclaves.
As almost every ghetto, Harlem is crowded, overpopulated and generally poor. Harlem is also more racially and economically diverse than many pockets of poverty in the United States (Tough 35). According to the New York Census, there lived 232,792 people while its area is 3,5 square miles; hence density of population is more than 100 people per acre; the average income in Harlem is $3,480 while in New York City it counts $5,103; after all, about 15 % of adults are unemployed.
History behaved in that way, that Harlem was to become the very heart of Negro culture, to concentrate its best talents and intellect; it became the center of most gifted and inspired representatives of the community, but all of them had to face racial discrimination and prejudice and to pay more for worse and for less through their entire lives. Therefore, it also gave stimulus to the most revolutionary activists of the group. “Today, Harlem, no longer the mecca for white bohemia, is a center both of trouble and potential talent, the fountainhead of Negro protest movements,” Clark (26) states.
Nevertheless, each ghetto is a system, which is obliged to supply itself. It gives birth to the prevalence of communitarism and solidarity on the one hand, and desperate isolation on the other hand, together determining the principles of organization of the community. As the system seeks for stability, each element of the system is destined to get used to status quo and to parish under the ruins of it, or struggle for life despite this rule. The matter is, ghetto is perpetuating itself; loyalty is encouraged and changes are not encouraged neither from inside by the members of the community nor from outside by the Whites. Clark presents a bright metaphor here: “a ghetto can be a cocoon as well as a cage” (Clark 154). In this way, all the activities are organized in the way to “protect society-as-it-is”. Social inertia in any event leads to social regression. That is why it is rather difficult to do something with you life the way you want to see it. Of course, there are not only miserable slums in Harlem, but rich and wealthy people are not many. The situation is that African Americans from upper class try their best to get out of ghetto. They tend to arrange their children to privileged private schools. And if they do stay in Harlem, they try to isolate from community problems.
Relationally, Paul Tough investigates the problem of schooling in Harlem in his inspirational book Whatever It Takes. Thanks to the Harlem Children’s Zone, families of children arranged there managed to improve their conditions of health care facilities, raise the quality of preschool education and expand summer programs (Tough 14). Paul Tough praises Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) for having worked out a very successful formula effective with most of students. But in reality, children from ghetto (“all of Harlem’s most disadvantaged – the children not only of impoverished-but-earnest strivers but of disaffected gang-bangers, dysfunctional drug addicts, and the like”) went on doing essentially worse than other students on citywide exams. Practice has shown that good school can’t succeed on its own, and social programs are also vitally needed to support their efforts in overcoming ignorance and apathy (Tough 33).
The system makes it hard to bring changes into the educational culture of the whole community and entire neighborhood. If cognitive abilities are not developed in time, the moment can be missed; it is not an inherited wealth; and for children, home environment is crucial, most of all in early years. And future achievements take their roots at school; if school doesn’t give a seed for progress, regress will devour. It is shown in manifold details by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh in his sociological study Off the Books. This is how Venkatesh reflects class diversity in black ghettos:
A beautiful stretch of rehabbed homes filled with bourgeois families would look across the street at a low-income housing complex, where families lived on less than $10,000 per year, and nearby there could be an entire block of empty, litter-strewn lots where homeless people built small shanties. (ix)
However, if to compare today situation with the past years, a wide range of positive changes is difficult to miss. In late 1990s Harlem together with the entire New York City experienced wide gentrification expressed in a range of city and state policies. In effort to get rid of segregation and decentralize racism, prices for acquiring realty in white surroundings were raised for the White. “The neighborhood is home to a prodigious amount of philanthropic money and talent,” Tough (38) shows. High-rises were demolished in order to get rid of poverty and revitalize living conditions in inner urban areas. The flow of finance improved economical conditions and level of life; a lot of crime-fighting measures were taken as well which contributed to relative pacification of social environment. Harlem has become “an island of security” – a medal with two sides. Life has become quieter, but the neighborhood still stays a cage, a prison for its residents in “a vibrant, exciting and, all too frequently, a turbulent community” (Clark 26).
As for security, it also differs from standards we are used to, and system of social regulation and control is not conventional. “In urban ghettos, where underground activity is publicly prominent, there may still be “eyes on the street” approaches where passerby, hustlers, and other local inhabitants police each other’s activities,” Venkatesh notes (“Off the Books” 207). It means that responsibility for security is distributed to different groups of population who unite into public order squads and not on the police. The residents become responsible for their own family members and take efforts to make the life better for others. Venkatesh tells about the theory of “sidewalk” proposed by Jane Jacobs, according to which “vibrant thoroughfares, which combine commerce and pedestrian fellowship, are an ideal type of informal social control” (207). Still, the majority of Harlem residents are not able to afford insurance to prevent burglary and to protect themselves and their apartments. Gangsters still go on reigning, and the system is not able to abolish it, because gang is also a cog in the machine the later won’t work without. Sudhir A. Venkatesh admits that:
for gang members, the wider community can be a field of antagonistic social interaction, colored by the persistent need to respond to altercations with storeowners, law enforcement and truancy officers, family members, and so on, all of which shape the individual’s tolerance for gang activity. (“American project” 163)
In their own flats and in their own lives most residents of Harlem feel trapped. As for the alternative, “there is little to draw on for an appreciation of in-group lending, credit and loan-shark services, informal and unreported hiring, and so on among black ghetto merchants” (“Off the Books” 98). Poverty and ghetto cage are like epidemic one can easily get infected or – try to recover. To succeed in the latter, strong inner force is needed, but the reward is worse. The way out is to decide what you really want from this life and what you personally can offer to the society. Confidence, intelligence, patience and passion are needed strongly. The rule that circle of your contacts defines who you are, is decisive here.
So, a lot has been done for the representatives of Harlem ethnic minorities to become equal members of the society, both from the side of the residents and from the state. But all in all, despite great advances, discrimination still exists. As Gina Philogene sums up, “the progress toward racial equality notwithstanding, race continues to define the culture of the United States, keeping its citizens from developing the just society” (111). The first and foremost way out is to overcome a habit of third-rate life and to change milieu, as it is not a field for a team game, but for an individual struggle only.
