Ghettos
If it is true that the poor will always be with us, then, by extension, one can argue that ghettos, "the huts where poor men lie," to quote the poet Wordsworth, are equally eternal, a seemingly insoluble social problem with a long past. The word ghetto carries dark and distressing historical resonance for the Jews of Russia and Europe who, for centuries, culminating in the Nazi atrocities of World War II, were segregated into particular areas by governmental decree. The appalling living conditions that characterized these ghettos carried over to the modern United States, whose cities contain areas that exemplify the dictionary definition of a ghetto as "a densely populated area of a city inhabited by a socially and economically deprived minority." The existence of American ghettos, determined by specific social and economic contingencies, are also too often dictated by ethnicity, providing a disturbing echo of disadvantage based on race or color for those whose fate has confined them to ghetto conditions.
The ghettos of America began as virtual warehouses for cheap immigrant labor in the late nineteenth century, and evolved into holding pens for disadvantaged humanity, a lost and forgotten segment of the populace. Between 1970 and 1990, the number of persons living in ghettos grew by 92 percent, a figure that continued to rise throughout the 1990s.
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