Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea by Mitchell Duneier

Author:Mitchell Duneier
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781429942751
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016-04-19T06:00:00+00:00

5

HARLEM, 2004: GEOFFREY CANADA

Unsurprisingly, this encapsulated history of the idea of the ghetto has not been uplifting. All the programs, projects, and approaches have proven discouraging or problematic, whatever their intellectual source—from Myrdal onward. But some individuals will always care deeply about their communities and refuse to throw up their hands in despair. Seeing their own ghetto as a possible site of reform, some of these individuals will deal with people in the places where they live because moving them elsewhere is hardly an option.

One particular such effort garnered attention, support, and celebrity: the Harlem Children’s Zone, founded by Geoffrey Canada. Canada is not a social scientist, and he came on the scene at a moment that was ripe for a new and compelling vision—the neoliberal moment. At this time, even many people who sympathized with the need for social reform came to believe that the free market and privatization, as well as public-private partnerships, had the potential to alleviate problems of the ghetto. With the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, Canada became the most visible symbol of a new set of ideas about the ghetto and how to fix it. Rather than focusing on macroeconomic change or moving people out of ghettos, he believed that the solution was to improve communities from the ground up. On this premise, in the 2000s he founded the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), built on the assumption that schools, counseling, family supports, and job placement services should be tightly integrated and directed at residents of a particular neighborhood.

When Canada came to public attention, social science in the United States was utterly absorbed by the question of whether the ghetto was a problem of unemployment, welfare dependency, or racial segregation. Canada broke through this debate. He advanced the idea that whereas single-focus efforts did not succeed, a full-court press would.

Whereas Wilson’s analysis of the ghetto was vacillating between the internal dynamics of impoverished neighborhoods and the larger macropolitical conditions that determined them, Canada asserted that the ghetto was a self-contained entity that could be addressed in and of itself. His initial intervention was to look at the ghetto from the standpoint of its youth and to argue that its most crucial problems were violence and fear. Like many others living in the ghetto, he saw that harsh drug laws and gun accessibility had coalesced to create an atmosphere of fear and of physical injury. This atmosphere defined the relationships among ghetto dwellers and between them and the police.

Canada’s outlook reflected his coming-of-age in the South Bronx during the civil rights movement. As he explains in his 1995 memoir, Fist Stick Knife Gun, he had grown up in a ghetto that was full of violence but very different from the ghetto that succeeded it. His earliest memories were of his mother, a single parent, teaching him and his three brothers about the importance of self-defense. In their neighborhood, institutions could not be counted on to protect children, and even parents felt powerless to protect their kids from the laws of the jungle.

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