ABSTRACT
The word “ghetto” means different things to different people. The word originated in sixteenth-century Venice and referred to the neighborhood where Jews were compelled to live. Later the word was generalized to refer to any city area in which Jews were isolated, and in the United States it eventually came to refer to a black residential area (see Wirth 1928). To many observers today the term still means a predominantly black neighborhood. To others it connotes not only a black area but one that is very poor and plagued by a host of social and economic problems. Because race and class are independent dimensions of social variation that interact in characteristic ways to determine a group’s social environment, I have argued elsewhere that the two factors should not be confused when defining the black ghetto (Massey and Denton 1993). Hence, I generally define a ghetto solely on the basis of race. For my purposes here, a ghetto is a set of neighborhoods inhabited exclusively by members of one group and within which virtually all members of that group live.
