ABSTRACT
America's first three “peculiar institutions,” slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghetto, have this in common that they were all instruments for the conjoint extraction of labor and social ostracization of an outcast group deemed unassimilable by virtue of the indelible threefold stigma it carries. African- Americans arrived under bondage in the land of freedom. They were accordingly deprived of the right to vote in the self-appointed cradle of democracy (until 1965 for residents of the southern states). And, for lack of a recognizable national affiliation, they were shorn of ethnic honor, which implies that, rather than simply standing at the bottom of the rank ordering of group prestige in American society, they were barred from it ab initio. 1
