Sanders in the Ghetto

I first heard the word in an Elvis Presley song, “In the Ghetto,” released not long after the Billy Joe Royal song “Down in the Boondocks.” I remember comparing the lyrics. “And his hunger burns,” Presley crooned of his “hungry little boy,”

so he starts to roam the streets at night
and he learns how to steal and he learns how to fight
In the ghetto

Billy Joe Royal’s boy was no less poor but more hopeful, counting on love and hard work to move him from the “boondocks” to a place “on the hill.”

I think I understood, then, that Presley’s boy was black. Presley spoke of him in the third person and exhorted “you and me” to give him a “helping hand.” Royal’s boy was speaking for himself, complaining that “people put me down ’cause that’s the side of town I was born in.”

Last week, in a Democratic debate in Flint, Mich., Bernie Sanders lit up the Twittersphere by confessing, “When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you are walking down a street or dragged out of a car.” As plenty of media outlets noted, the remark “suggests that there are not poor whites and nonpoor African-Americans,” that race and class are identical. Both blacks and whites raised their voices to object.

I have not used the word ghetto for many years. I suspect I stopped using it, without any conscious effort, when it underwent an anthimerical shift from noun to adjective. As a blogger at Stuff White People Do notes, when clothing, actions, or cars are tagged as ghetto, “although the speaker is conjuring up and basically uttering racist stereotypes, that’s supposed to be OK because there’s something hip about saying ‘ghetto’ like that.”

I also suspect I stopped using the word when the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 put the practice of redlining mostly out of business. When African-Americans had been directly barred from buying or renting housing in white neighborhoods, the urban areas where they lived fit what I understood about the ghetto: that its geographical boundary was enforced by the dominant society around it, creating a de facto prison for its inhabitants.

That meaning, of course, applies to the famous Warsaw Ghetto and other restricted Jewish quarters of European cities, a history that makes Sanders’s dilemma in the current situation ironic. Though the origin of the word is disputed, most believe that it derives from the Italian getto, or foundry, since indeed the first ghetto, in Venice, was founded upon a foundry site. Jews were compelled to live there, not because they were poor but because they were Jewish. And most early mentions in the Oxford English Dictionary are of Jewish ghettos; only in the late 19^th century do we start to hear of working-class ghettos. When Sanders, in his response to the kerfuffle created by his debate remark, explained, “What I meant to say is when you talk about ghettos, traditionally what you’re talking about is African-American communities,” the tradition he speaks of dates back not to communities barred by law from leaving a particular part of town, but to the racist reaction, primarily in northern cities, to the influx of black people during the Great Northward Migration. That reaction, and dozens of policies over the last century, have indeed combined to consign millions of African-Americans to substandard housing in undesirable sections of cities.

So why not use ghetto, not as an adjective, but as a noun, to refer to those sections? Evidently Sanders, despite or perhaps because of his Jewish heritage, has no problem with it. I do, and others do as well, and I think our problem is not that white people can also be found in substandard housing, or even that plenty of black families live in wealthy suburbs. I think we object because we do not wish to believe that the forces, however prevalent, that keep minorities in slums are sanctioned and immutable, as they were for the ghettos of Europe. We hope — with some evidence, not enough, but some — that Billy Joe Royal’s somewhat more sanguine option, rather than Presley’s patronizing pity, is available to the boy (we’ll figure him as black, since that’s Sanders’s idea) born in the dilapidated projects of the Bronx:

Every night I watch the light of the house up on the hill
I love a little girl that lives up there and I guess I always will
But I don’t dare knock on her door ’cause her daddy is my boss man
So I’ll just have to be content to see her whenever I can

Down in the projects, down in the projects
People put me down ’cause that’s the side of town I was born in
I love her, she loves me but I don’t fit her society
Lord have mercy on the boy from down in the projects.

One fine day I’ll find a way to move from this old shack
I’ll hold my head up like a king and I never, never will look back
Until that morning I’ll work and slave and I’ll save every dime
But tonight she’ll have to steal away to see me one more time

Down in the projects, down in the projects …