As a scholar who painstakingly served the interpretation helped me understand the complex topic or phenomena in greater clarity. The invention of a place and idea is just such a book. I had the opportunity in 2016 with the professor of history and studies. Both were impressed with the manner of which bottle me the context of the black communities ranging to the southside of chicago after world war ii but also how the concept itself in its application has shifted over time in the popular and scholarly imagination. We are not alone in our affirmation for ghetto. Here the director for research. The professor has provided a detailed and timely survey in the phenomena. The professor insists we need a consequence of people specifically blacks and jews with their own choosing for the structure for success both inside or outside the ghetto while at the same time helping produce the inequality for the everyday observers. They solidify earlier the care career. They examined the institutional context in books like sidewalk. Its inhabited in the urban spaces who demonstrates time and again the interplay between the micro institutional racism and restrictions in the economic cultural opportunities that spawned each historical formation in 1516 beginning in the 1930s and spanning world war ii when a shifted from the jewish ghetto to the black ghetto crumbling urban spaces. Specifically the discipline neglected by scholars and policymakers and filled with scholarship and policy recommendations which blamed the victims and placed on philanthropy. The fertile plains of the book philanthropy is no substitute for the policy. The black intellectual history that he highlights represents not only the ultimate scholarship such as Sinclair Drake but also policy implications that will largely ignore. Berger scholarship provides a framework that is generous of the analysis to examine conditions of isolation and segregation and institutional racism in countries like france, belgium and britain. But we dont have to look too far for the residents in daily life. The rampant police brutality, dysfunction and corruption, high crime and poor education and underemployment for generations in the city of baltimore provide opportunities for poor people. Black, brown and working class whites for dignity and respect. Particularly when we consider the residents involved in the uprising last april described by the citys mayor and by the baltimore residents from the realities. People without respect for their own communities. They provided an opportunity for baltimore and for all walks of life and backgrounds so poverty and other cities across the country if not the globe. Finally, it is with pride by dear friend and colleague who devoted a good portion to the complexities black urban life in the United States but just as importantly someone that is personally committed to the quality of the purpose in his daily life. I hope it will be an engaging and provocative talk into tonights discussion will encourage you to buy his works and begin to think individually and collectively how people in the establishment have treated the source of the problems rather than the source of the solutions. [applause] anyone who knows the moral gravity into the work goes there can be no greater honor for a scholar than an introduction like the one he just gave me and i want to thank you for that and i should also add the professor is a visiting professor at princeton in the year that i was finishing this book and without his friendship and support and encouragement, i dont know whether or not i would have been able to make the final push to get the best book. Sometimes it takes great friends to get your work done and i want to thank you for that as well. Im not going to present a lot of the data and statistics, but i would like to begin with a bit of data which was produced in collaboration with a call league of mine at princeton named brandon steward who works on applications of computational social science and test analys analysis. This is a graph that is called a gram with shows the use of the word ghetto and all the books that are catalogued by google going back to 1920 through the 1970s and im going to refer back to this couple times but to begin with i want to focus on 1961 where that line is. Thats the year i was born. Im 55yearsold and that dot you can see a black ghetto where i have my pointer here is referenced far left still than the jewish ghetto in books that are catalogued and thats a significant piece to me because when i was born in my house in long island growing up in a largely white suburb are actually jewish suburb when i heard the word ghetto it was associated mainly with the nazi ghettos into that isnt completely surprising knowing the intellectual context in the way they came to be talked about. 1961 is after they published the book and it was the year i commend wind to trial and the same year in which ronald hilberg perhaps the greatest scholar of the holocaust, the person that helps create the field, one of the greatest fields and accomplishments in history wrote this book and the destruction of the european jews. This is a moment in which the books my father was reading at home were books like these and although he himself didnt go to college for more than a couple of years, before he had to go to his familys business he discovered history over time and v. Is for the kind of conversations that we would have for jewish history in those years and in my first six or seven years of my life, i heard a lot about the ghetto and nazi ghettos. Its interesting to think by the time i was in graduate school at the university of chicago in the Sociology Department that you can look at the graph. You can see that the black ghetto have become hegemonic and had been basically obliterated in books that are catalogued today. When i was in graduate school of somebody mentioned the word in a sociology class, it was automatically assumed of course that we were talking about the africanamerican ghetto. Ive always had it in the back of my eye and eve mind even as s doing work in the traditions of contemporary sociology on and inequality and racism in the city and focusing on the black community, and what was happening on the south side of chicago and new york i handed in my mind to wonder what the connections were between these experiences. Experiences. In the part of the plaintiff is about is focusing on that particular question. Now its interesting that i grew up thinking of it early in my life as associated with the nazi ghetto because right around me you could see the transformation is taking place early in my childhood in fact a crossover and was more significant. The reality for me is what my parents were talking about. There were many involved in the Civil Rights Movement but my parents were not among them and i grew up thinking about the jewish ghettos and that is part of what it meant to me even to be a jew with the education that i have received have a lot to do with the holocaust during the years i was growing up and in fact when i was 13yearsold the requirement for the bar mitzvah in addition you had to go to a meeting with the rabbi to discuss the book night. Its interesting that it was the nazi ghetto that was on my mind growing up because for most of history if you referred to to the ghetto you were referring to venice was the first and it was the first time that the word was used to refer to the coffers of jews were placed in. It was known as the ghetto and the jews were placed there and i realize talking about another monumental field of history that there was some modern historians who have done painstaking work on this topic including the professor benjamin, whose work i relied upon heavily in this particular account. Now, one of the interesting things about the accomplishments of the historians is that they have shown that when they decide to place the jews in the ghetto were not trying to create a framework that solves a particular problem at a particular moment and the into e problem that they were trying to solve is the needed people to loan money to their for middle classes and they couldnt have the working is good to get on a boat and travel. They needed them right there in the city so they created a space for them. They were not trying to create a framework how they should be treated everywhere but they created a solution for their own problem and then that word came to be known as the place where they were living and as i see at the crucial moment wasnt venice which is celebrating its anniversary at which by the way one could say they flourished as they have demonstrated great accomplishments in the productionproduction of books ad philosophy and drama and family life. It wasnt the crucial ghetto in my up and the ghetto of rome which was forged in 1555 by pope paul and according to Kenneth Stowe created an effort to try to get them to convert into a moment in history when the counter reformation was leading to a certain lead on the part of the vatican to make from it into a more attractive space and to create an environment which they could be shown as an example of what happens when you dont convert. But, when the pope created this, he wrote it in the palpable, and i see that as a crucial moment in those years because now it becomes a cognitive framework that becomes an example of how jews should be and can be segregated around the world. It wasnt until the early 18 hundreds that napoleon the great exporter of democracy went around europe and liberated the jews, and it was in the period from the early 18 hundreds to the beginnings of the 20th century that they began to live in the places around europe on the Lower East Side in the neighborhoods that we might call semivoluntary. I wont go as far as to call them voluntary because there were restrictions on where they could live but this was a far cry from that which existed. And this was the situation when the word ghetto was introduced into the social sciences by a jewish sociologist at the university of chicago, one of the first sociologist at the university. He wrote his phd in the Sociology Department in chicago and in the 1920s his dissertation was published and became an instant classic of american sociology. He had five would later be appointed as a professor in the department and spend decades mentoring many generations of students. You could actually take the ghettos of rome, venice and frankfurt and those that came later in chicago where the jews were living. He said very little about the black ghettos and asian communities in part because by 1828 restricted covenants that were starting to form were just going into effect. But he still argued could explain the others as well be good to take these as the exemplar and at the time he published the book not fully aware of the fact that at that very moment in time, the situation was about to be transformed radically theyve got in the city. How is it that the word ghetto ended up moving from a word that was associated with the jews in the early modern era to a word that was associated with a certain amount of flourishing or semiflourishing even under conditions of serious restriction. How can it be to a word i would be associated with a place that they would be put into which they could be destroyed . In the book in the first chapter that is titled a nazi deception, i argued that adolf hitler do seem to the world and that it is with us and ways that we need to recognize today. It was bringing us into a dialogue with the holocaust as a way to argue we should be more cognizant of the fact. When hitler came to power, its pretty much a strong consensus among the historians of the holocaust and i refer here to people like Christopher Browning was an example of the time hitler came to power there was probably no real conceptual understanding of what the ghetto was going to be later on. And there was certainly no idea what the final solution was going to be at the very beginning. This was something that evolved over time in response to the conditions as they emerged. But that insight shouldnt blind us to the fact that early in his time he would like to see them displayed as wild animals. And when he went to speak to officials at the Catholic Church and they were asking him what are you doing segregating them like this, whats going on here, he basically told them that he was recreating the ghettos that have been created by the church in earlier centuries. First is an unsigned note in the embassy from 1933 and hitler said in a statemen the statemene with the highest regard and then brought up the jewish question and justification of the hostility to jews he referred to the Catholic Church which had always regarded them as undesirable and which on account of dangers involved had forbidden them to work the jews. For this reason he banished them into the ghetto. And then a second record of the meeting says ive been attacked because of my handling of the jewish question and they considered them for 1500 years as a recognized them for what they were. So hitler essentially was deceiving the Catholic Church and the catholic officials and he was making the case that he was recreating something that they have done. Whats important about that is that there was a cognitive framework that came out of venice unintentionally and got picked up in rome and by the time it leaves rome it is a framework that has been circulated around the world and by the time now that centuries have gone on and this is the way theyve lived for a century it actually was natural to some people including many that they would live in ghettos so if you say im putting them back and get those its not completely inconceivable that thats what he means especially given that the leader outcome is something that was hardly imaginable. Now, the ghetto of the classic just to run through this relatively quickly very, very different obviously than anything hitler would undertake. The function was protected in many ways. I dont want to over emphasize this point and take it too far. But the jews certainly in italy and many other places were sometimes protected from the society they also felt protected from the jews as well. The principle of discrimination once believed and that meant they could leave the ghettos if they changed their beliefs and converted. And the kind of segregation i mean is when they can come and go. And somebody had to be like venice they had to be back at night they could leave during the day. The economic basis was interdependent so that they were regularly exchanging with the outside world. The physical space was usually overcrowded and all the ghettos. I sometimes call it a differentiating regime in that it starts out and it takes people somewhat different and makes them even more different and in the case of the jews they based the differentiation. You start out with people that are somewhat different and the fact that they are segregated makes people believe they are even more different and that creates a belief in the need to segregate them even further. And the mechanism for that in the case of the classic ghetto with segregation. The effect on the border is usually one of limited effects and that is one of the principles in general it should affect the people inside without necessarily affecting those on the outside too much. For those in the classic framework as pointed out the destruction was a way of life. The toolkit was basically the opposite where the earlier one might be said to be protected and the later one is destructi destructive. The principle of discrimination was once it his belief and now s race. The kind of segregation is porous and sealed. If you tried to get out, you were shot as Christopher Browning shows that if you got out of all it was being marched out in columns to do work and being brought back at night. The economic basis is rescued by a lever. In other words, its not that there isnt inter dependence, but you have to make enough money to support your own existence. They were not interested in any way sending money to the ghettos for them to separate themselves. The physical space wasnt just overcrowding the territorial starvation. You could have a dozen families with one set of keys and a bathroom. The ghetto as a differentiating machine and it its not that te not saved but they were being viewed as wild animals. The neck is question i take up in the book is an idea that would be used to talk about jews during the holocaust to an idea about what he used to talk about africanamericans in the United States and they argue the key person that would have to begin to understand and in order to see the transformation is this figure who was a swedish economist who was picked by the Carnegie Corporation who was one of the largest foundations in the United States to come to america from sweden and be what they hoped would be a modern digital so good to look objectively at the race situation in the United States and analyze it and bring to the attention the conditions they were living in and took some of the solutions might be. They looked around the world for a person that could come from outside the United States and hopefully they thought without the traditions of imperialism who could actually gain the respect necessary to have his work accepted. They searched the world and found this young economist who they were told was extremely charismatic and brilliant and was capable of undertaking the projects this would entail and they wrote him a letter and said we are willing to give you as much money as you need. This will be the most well endowed study and we want you to come over here with your family and do this study for us. His wife who would go on to win a nobel prize in peace prize would later win in economics as an older man in perth for the work he was going to be brought to chicago to do so this is quite a power couple. They sit there like this is ridiculous we are not going to do this. We have children we have to raise. But the Carnegie Corporation refused to take no for an answer and persevered and eventually got him to move to princeton. He had offices in new york, a house in princeton and they told him he coul could hire as many e as he needed. The first few months he spent in the states the more he came to feel he actually was not on firm ground to try to write about the situation in the United States if he asked for a committee and asked if he could have a quote on quote me grow and southerner and northerner to produce the book and the Carnegie Corporation said you will not have a committee. You will write the book yourself. We dont want you making side glances to anyones opinion but we will all of you to hire as many academics or people as you would like to have. He went around the country and hired professors from some of the most eminent sociology and psychology and history departments into some of the most eminent scholars and he had all of them working as his research assistants. I dont think that there has never been a study produced with that kind of support since. Most of the people were paid to work for him and they produced large reports he was able to simulate the books tha have bece known as the dilemma. One of the few people that was a graduate student who is a man who is a graduate student in chicago and he was a student that arrived in the 1930s and was there from the 30s and 40s. You can see the office at the Community Center he was running while he does graduate student. He was the grandson of the first black senator in the United States. He was from seattle. His father ran a very important newspaper in seattle and he grew up with a lot of selfconfidence and time you see him in this picture, hes running a study of his own that started out as juvenile delinquency and has morphed into a study itself in chicago. The era in which after the city had put into effect the local real estate organizations and local Property Owners essentially had put into effect restrictive covenants because this is something that was done privately with the help of these organizations and debate said that unless you could demonstrate a certain amount of racial purity you couldnt live in peace sections they were writing about at this particular point in researching. Here you coulhughes could see me books reports and that they had many boxes that had been and he was hoping to produce a some kind of a work on his own. He had heard of the study and once the materials for an american dilemma. He says i would like you to join the study and hes one of the only graduate students that is asked to join. Theres another one i will tell you about an all about about inf ended up also becoming quite famous. But essentially he thought to himself wait a second i dont understand. Why is he asking me to join this study. It occurred to him that he was trying to get a hold of his materials. I want to read a little bit from the book where i show you some of the archival findings on this relationship that made me see how this emerged and why i think its important. In 1939 he offered a sixmonth position and the new york office and he raised a concern immediately. They have staff devoted fulltime to the project and experts enlisted on specific fields. He said he was puzzled because he was assigned to neither category. Obviously they wanted him for the massive documents and field notes. He couldnt give up his apartment in chicago as well as his own projects to come to new york for six months. He would be coming for a full year provided they pay him to write his own book while preparing the nose for the project. He entered into this arrangement with other scholars including charles john said. Evidence between the two men is how badly he needed the money and how well he understood this all the same he had to keep reservations about working on his team. He made clear his own priority was to turn the materials he collected in the project to a publication that would fulfill his intellectual vision. Shortly after the offer he received a threepage letter from the office requesting various data from the study. Reluctant to turn the material over he repeated he would have to receive money to a book of his own and if any materials from the study were used for credit should go to heaven as the Program Director into the project administration sponsored. Between the summer of 1939 and the winter of 1940 he made several trips to chicago. He even got his wife to socialize but he couldnt talk them into budging on the demand to be given money to write his own book. I wont read any mor anymore fre correspondence but its hard to put ourselves perhaps exactly in his place because it seems its important to recognize we are talking about a graduate student at the university of chicago who didnt know what his future was going to be talking to one of the most eminent social scientists in the world of great power and he basically stood his ground and they ended up not making video. He went on to publish an american dilemma which would become the most important work of social science at the year er published in 1945 and published to massive acclaim. But he argued in the book is that he documented over a thousand pages of material that racial inequality in the United States have created in an inferior life for black citizens. He documented this in extraordinary detail after chapter after chapter. As a part of his analysis he had an overall frame work in which he argued that there was a dilemma and White America and that it was a kind of cognitive dissidents and on the other hand the actual way that americans lived and he argued White America felt this strongly and would end up resolving it in the direction of the quality. This book was taken up as a great work because it was taken up by liberals and this is a book you could find in the homes of educated people around the United States. As you can imagine the Carnegie Corporation was quite happy when brown v. Board of education, when the book was cited for the example is the evidence of vm inferiority segregation needs to. In my book i have a chapter on the other graduate student he worked closely with and thats Kenneth Clark and im not going to talk about him today that he was cited in the same quick note as brown v. Board of education. I said that the book was published in 45 and 44. The book published in 45 was the book he wrote with this collaborator drake that was another graduate student at the university of chicago. He was an operator and a brilliant man bubrilliantman bus always busy making deals to get the Research Project to work. Drake who came from new orleans was a worker. He would sit there at his desk and get the chapters within and in the end he produced in a short time of two thirds of the book. Together they produced what is s arguably even still today one of the two or three greatest works in american sociology. This book black metropolis when it came out a year after american dilemma which is a study of the life of the south side of chicago eventually introduced the word ghetto in a social science way to talk about the situation of africanamericans in the city and when he used the word ghetto they had a particular meaning in mind and i want to read you a little bit from the book. The one to highlight the difference between black neighborhoods and others and to describe the conditions in the community this vicious cycle and to argue the separate institutions broughthat separate an inherently inferior to those outside while serving as a source of pride. To show the trajectories was mainly due to the Community Contact which they lived rather than the characteristics of the people that move lived there and number five to emphasize why zero it was crucial it was in a magiand amagic bullet that expll problems and effectively removed out of the ghetto be argued they would still have to deal with their massive employment problems as well. What they showed when he talked about the ghetto was on the one hand a place to post produced by these restrictive covenants that were supported by large real estate organizations and local Property Owners it was also referred to as bombs bomb bee they wanted to talk about the semiflourishing that existed they sold this as a claim with heads and tails. Heads it was flourishing and tails it was ghetto. Preventing 70s people were wondering what had happened. How was it that it was so wrong. The Civil Rights Movement is and should be proved they were not going to give up so much and they wondered how he could have made the mistake he made with all the hopes he had from so many Great American scholars and this is epitomized in new York Magazine who asked the negro in america where it went wrong and he was the one that framed the question how he could have possibly missed and what i argue in my book is that the had he made the video he would have gained access to material that would have made it impossible to understand. Although black metropolis is seen today as a book about the black community, one of the things they did in their book is they sent out interviewers and they have chapters in the book that described the racism and essentially their intransigence so i argue in the book had he gained access to the communities and made a deal that would have made it possible for him to publish his own book and fund him to do that he would have had access to materials to give a more nuanced view. We dont know why he didnt make the deal. He made deals with other black scholars. Was it because he was a graduate student and he didnt think he needed to taken seriously . 75 of blacks are still living in the south and he may not have thought that it was that important to develop an understanding of the north. He couldnt have predicted the migration that was going to take place and those proportions would actually reversed themselves. A part of what i argue is the source advocates cannot be underestimated in the decision of africanamerican intellectuals and blacks in general to begin using the word ghetto to describe the situation in cities like chicago but that came into being in part because the nazi ghettos and i want to illustrate my point for going bg back to this graphic. You see that it occurs right around 1945. The restrictive covenants went into effect in 1928. Thats when it became a force measure in cities likes chicago or st. Louis or baltimore. If those had been the cause you would have expected the rights to be right here but it doesnt happen. It stains basically where it was and all of a sudden you have a massive rise. They are not trying to make comparisons to the jews. What they are trying to do is say we are americas jews into this is a situation we need to Pay Attention to the. Our sons are over there liberating the concentration camps in a war against notions of racial purity and now we are being segregated cities on the basis of notions of racial purity. The goal was to highlight the hypocrisy of it and you see when they use the word fo required to describe the restrictive covenants barbed wire was a phrase used. It wasnt a technology that existed in the modern era. This is a book that focuses on the nazi era into every chapter afteand to everychapter after th clark and the vision he had been the Civil Rights Movement and the fish and he had during the reagan years going to the clinton years and then i end with a chapter on Geoffrey Canada and of the kind of ways in which his vision is referred to as the neoliberal movement. But i want to end here by just asking a key basic question that has been on my mind which is what kind of a focal point should the holocaust be for us today at this particular moment in history and as i think about the jewish ghettos and the black ghettos i think i have very different answers. On the one hand, the jewish ghettos were ghettos that had a long history of flourishing. They were a way of life. One of the impacts of the nazi ghettos was t to blot out our consciousness of the flourishi flourishing. Here are two pictures of poland in warsaw. This is a family in the years leading up to the holocaust and warsaw and this is a group of yiddish actors that were part of the flourishing life. And im using the word semiflourishing. Deliberately because i know theres a lot of antisemitism in poland in the years prior. But this life also existed and one of the intellectual problems that we have today is that the thousand years has been blotted out besides achieving so many of his goals he was able to make us forget about those years and thats where the new history in warsaw isnt a Holocaust Museum as the Director Court exhibition has emphasized the goal of the museum is to bring to life the thousand years so i think perhaps maybe we need wes costs and more holocaust. He took a third in his deception that had once been a representation of what jewish wife had been under the church essentially. He took that word and transformed it into a word that was about control and destruction and you have these different endpoints. You have dennis and the warsaw ghetto with complete destruction and the word ghetto encompasses both of those things and always does and always will and i think that is what needs to be remembered so i have a picture on the bottom taken by your own baltimore photographer whos done a great job to bring attention to whats going on in baltimore and around the United States. This is a period which its not just about housing inequality. Its partly about that. Its also a phenomena by control and in no means to make comparison to say they are like the nazi ghettos. To the contrary they are not. But the word encompasses both flourishing and control and we are at a moment in history where we need to recognize the significance understanding where wwere at today. It is as though more holocaust and the recognition of the context in which africanamerican intellectuals in general took up that word in the 1940s. Thank you. thank you all for being here. We have time for about three questions. So if you stand up and state your question then we can do it that way and after the question we also have the bookshop that has ghetto for soup tonight. Duty of thdo they have the sf crimes against each other [inaudible] is asking whether they experience the same kind of crime. During the era under conditions of terrible forced segregation they did things to each other that they might not have imagined doing during the earlier years. It makes me think of today with the gaza strip. I wonder what your thoughts might be