Distinguished socialist mitch duneier. I am a former professor at the John Hopkins University up the street. My baltimore connection. As a school i take delight in books which were painstakingly researched and keen interpretation, help me understand a complex continue or phenomenon with greater clarity. The book ghetto is just such a book. I had the opportunity to teach get to in my last semester at hopkins in 2016 with the professor of history and director of jewish studies. Ken and i were impressed with the manner which the professor discussed the conflict of the ghetto. And i dont mean the context of jewish and black communes, and also how the concept itself and its application has shifted over time and n both the poplar . Scholarly imagination. Were not alone in our admiration for ghetto. Wrote an important review recently in New York Times that the professor has provided a, quote, stunningly detailed and timely survey of the ghetto as concept and phenomenon. Other reviews have echoed this judgment. Professor duneier insists we do ghetto how living in a selfcontained space largely of their own choosing. Instead he reveals how institutional racism and structures domination have limited the opportunity for success both inside and outside the get ghetto and helping produce the cons inequality that scholars and observers mistakenly for get to inhabitantses. This book is a departure books like sidewalk. In ghetto he examines the institutional context in which sis subjects in books like sidewalk and monumental black metropolis which is mentioned in this book. He demonstrates time and again the interplay between macro and microinstitutional racism, local covenants, restrictions limiting housing, educational, economic, social, and cultural opportunities, thats spawned each historical formation in the get ghetto, in the nazi onslaught in 1930s and spanning world war ii, and post world war ii period in the United States when the shifted from the jewish ghetto in the blacks to crumbling urban paces. Ghetto is a story about black intellectual contribution, specifically in sociology. Blame the victims and place misdidded optimism on white guilt and ail an thrown philanthropy. The black intel legal talk to history highlighted represents not only ultimate abhorrence of scholarship by but also policy implying indications and recommendations of their work that were largely ignored. A comparative work of scholarship across space and time, ghetto provides a conceptual framework that is generaltive, further analysis, examines the conditions of isolation, segregation, and institutional racism, in countries like france, belgium, and britain. We dont have to look too far for resonance of his argument in daily life. Rampant police brutality, dysfunction and corruption, high crime and murder rates, poor education, underemployment on display, for generations in the city of baltimore, provide few real opportunities for poor people, black, brown, and even working class whites to eek out living with dignity and respect. Presentday baltimore is part of the story. Particularly when we consider how its black residents involved in the uprising last april were described by the citys mayor and by baltimore residents insulated from the life as thugs and animals, people without respect for their own communities. Mitchs book, and provides an opportunity for baltimore and other walked life and backgrounds that broaden conversations about ghettos, poverty, unequal, and institutional racism in this city, other cities across the country, if not the globe. Finally, with pride that i introduce the professor as a dear friend and colleague, someone who is not only devoted a good portion of this scholarly career mining the complexities of the black urban life in United States and just as importantly, someone who is quit committed to equality in his practice and his daily life. Hope after you hear what will be an engaging provocative talk the discussion will encourage you to buy his earlier works, and begin to think individually and collectively about how people in baltimore, particularly the white elite establishment, have cheated the black and poor, rather than the source of its solutions. Thanks. [applause] anyone who knows moral gravity embodied in the work of the professor knows that there could be no greater honor for a scholar than an introduction like the one that he just gave me. I just want to thank you for that. Should also add that professor chart was a visiting professor at the institute for advanced study in princeton in the year i was finishing this book, and without his friendship and support, and encouragement, dont really know whether or not i would have been able to make the final push to get the book finished. Sometimes it takes a good friend to be able 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 here today. Statistics, but i would like to begin with a bit of data, which was produced in collaboration of a colleague of mine at prince continue named Brandon Stewart who works with computational social science and text analysis, and what this is it a graph that shows the use of the word get to in all of the books that are cataloged by google, going back to 1920, through the 1970s, and im going refer back to this graph a couple of times during the talk, but to begin with i want to focus your attention on 1961 where that line is there. That is the year in which i was born. Im 55 years old. And that you can see that the black ghetto, which is where i have my pointer here, in 1961, is referenced far less still than the jewish ghetto in the catalogue by google, and thats a significant piece of data because in 1961, when i was born, in my house on long island where i was growing up, largely white suburb and largely jewish suburb, when i heard the word ghetto it was associated mainly with the nazi ghettos. And thats not completely surprising, knowing about the intellectual context of the way that natz eu si ghettos game to be talk about. 1961 was the year after the book night. It was the year that Adolph Eichman went to trial in jerusalem and a couple of years before hannah would publish her book, eichman in jerusalem and the same area, 1961, in which raul hillberg, the greatest scholar of the holocaust, leading up to the current era, a person that helped create the fields of holocaust history, one of the greatest fields and greatest accomplishments in history, wrote his book the destruction of the European Jews. This is a moment in which the books that my father is reading at home were books like these, and although he himself didnt go to college for more than a couple of years, where he had before he had to into into his familys been he devoured history all of the time and these are the kind of conversations we would have about jewish history in those years and in my first six or seven years of my life i heard a lot about ghettos and the nazi ghettos. And its really interesting to think that by the time i was in grad school at the university of chicago, in the Sociology Department, that you could look at i was in graduate school in 80s. You could look at the grass here the graph here and you can see that the black ghetto had become hegemonic, and the jewish ghetto had been basically oplate obliterated in books cataloged by google. When i was in graduate school at the university of chicago, if somebody mentioned the word ghetto in a sociology class it was automatically assumed we were talking about the africanamerican ghetto, and ive always had it in the back of my mind, even is a was doing work in the traditions of contemporary urban sociology, on urban inequality and racism . City and focusing on the black community, and what was happening on the south site of chicago, and then in new york, i always had it in my mind to wonder what the connections were between these experiences, and part of what my book is about is focusing in different ways on that turk question. Now, its interesting that i grew up thinking of the ghetto early in my life as associated with the nazi ghettos, because all around me you could see the transformation was taking place early in my childhood. By 1965, in fact, it crossed over. Black ghetto was actually more significant, but actually but by the time i was seven or eight years old, i was living in a segue degree getted White Community and a Jewish Community so the reality for me is what my parents were talking about. There were many jews involved with the Civil Rights Movement, but my parents were not among them, and i grew up thinking more about the jewish ghettos and that is what it meant to me also to be a jew, the education i received had a lot to do with the holocaust during the years in which i was growing up. In fact when i was 13 years old and you had to good for a meeting with the rabbi and discuss the book night. So, its interesting that the it was in the nazi ghetto that was the main ghetto that was on my mind growing up, because in fact for most of history, if you referred to the ghetto, you werent referring to anything that the nazis did. You were referring to the ghetto in venice, in 1516, which was the first ghetto that was created for the jews, and it was the first time that the word ghetto was used to refer to a copper foundary that the jews were actually placed in. It was the copper foundary known as the ghetto, the jews were placed there, and i rely here in talking about this upon another sort of monumental field of history, the field of the early modern historians, who have done painstaking work on this topic, including professor benjamin ran yesterday, whose work i relied on heavily in this account. One interesting thing about the accomplishments of the early modern historians is that they have shown that when the house of the dodge decided to place the jews in a ghetto, they were really not trying to create a whole framework for how jews whoa be treated. They were really trying to solve a very particular problem at a very particular moment, and the problem they were trying to solve was that they needed people to loan money to their lower middle classes and working class people, and they couldnt have these their working classes in order to get loans have to get on a boat and travel 30 or 40 minutes or an hour away to get small loans. They needed them right there in the city so they created a space for. The right there in this most catholic city. They were not trying to create a framework, for example, for how jews should be treated everywhere, but they created a solution for their own problem, and then that word came to be known as this place where the jews were living. And as i see it, the crucial moment was not venice, which is now celebrating its 500th 500th anniversary, and in which the jews, bill the way, at the very least, semi flourished. They had great accomplishments in the production of books and philosophy and drama and family life. It was not the ghetto oven is in, really of seven is in, really, that was the crucial get to to but it was the ghetto of rome which was forged in 1555 by pope paul, and according to Kenneth Stowe and another monumental work on this topic, was really created in an effort to try to get the jews to convert, and also at a moment in history when the reformation was leading to a certain need on the part of the vatican to make rome into a more attractive space, and to create an environment in which the jews could be shown as an example, even, of what happens when you dont convert. But when the pope created this ghetto, he wrote it up in his papal bull and that papal bull was contributed around the world, and i see that as a very crucial moment in those years because now the ghetto becomes a cognitive framework that becomes an example of how jews should be and can be segue grate gaited around the world. Segregated around the world. It wasnt until the early 1800s that napoleon using a current phrase exporter of democracy, went around europe and liberated the jews from their ghettos, and it was in that period, from the early 1800s to the beginnings of the 20th century, that the jews began to live in places around europe, and then in places like new york and chicago, on the lower east side. In neighborhoods that we might call semi voluntary. I wont go so far as to call them voluntary because they were clear restrictions on where jews could live, but this was a far cry from the forced ghettoization that had existed in previous eras. This was exactly the situation that jewish life was in when the word ghetto was introduced into the social sciences by a jewish sociologist at the university of chicago, one of the first sociologists at the university, named louis worth, and he wrote his ph. D in the Sociology Department at chicago, and in the 1920s his dissertation about the ghetto was published and became an instant classic of american sociology, and what work who would late be reappointed as a professor in the department and would spend decades there, mentoring many Generation Office students. He argued the ghetto was a generalizable concept. You could actually take the ghettos of venice and rome and frankfurt and you could see continuity between those get toes and the ghettos that came later in chicago, the ghettos where the jews were living. He said very little about asian communities in part because by 1928, the restrict strucktive covenants starting to form the black ghetto, just going into effect. But he still argued that the experience of the jews could explain all of the other groups as well, we could take this as the exemplar, essentially. And he was at the time that he published the book, not fully aware of the fact that at that very moment in time, the situation of africanamericans was about to be transformed radically by restrictive covenants on where they could live in the city. How is it that the word ghetto end up moving from a word that was associated with the jews in the early modern era to a word that came to be was really associated with a certain amount of flourishing or semi flourishing, even under conditions of serious restriction, which must be acknowledged. How its that it moved from a word that came to be associated with the life of the jews over centuries, to a word that would be associated with a place that the jews would be put and in which they would be destroyed. And in the book in the first chapter of the book, which i entitle a nazi deception i argue that Adolph Hitler essentially deceived the world, and that the deception is in some sense still with news ways we need to recognize today, and part of my goal in the book, in bringing us into a dialogue about he holocaust, is so argue we have to be much more cognizant of the fact that hitlers deception is the reason we have that word today and use it. So, when hitler when the nazis when hitler came to power, theres pretty much strong consensus among the historians of the hole cao, and i refer here to people like christopher browning, an example, that at the time that hitler came to power, that there was probably no real conceptual understanding of what the ghetto was going to be later on. And there was certainly no idea of what the final solution was going to be at the very beginning. This is something that evolved over time in response to conditions as they emerged. And but that shouldnt sort of that insight, which is very important, should not either blind us to the fact that early in his time as chancellor, hitler even said he would actually like to see the jews living in the ghettos where they could be displayed as wild animals. And but when he went to speak to his to officials of the Catholic Church and they were asking him what are you doing . Segregating the jews like this . Whats going on here . He basically told them that he was really recreating the ghettos that had been created by the church in earlier centuries, and i have two quotes here which i think are very telling. The first is an unsigned note in the embassy of the holy see from 1933, and it says in his statements hitler spoke with the highest regard of the Catholic Church and then brought up the jewish question in justification of his hostility to the jews he referred to the Catholic Church, which had likewise always regarded the jews as undesirables, in which on account of the moral dangers involved had forbidding the christians to work with jews. For these reasons the church had banished the jews into the ghetto, and then a second record of that meeting says hitler said, quote, have been attacked because of my handling of the jewish question. The catholics considered the jews put them in gets to because it recognized the jews for what they were. So hitler was deceive thing world which the Catholic Church and the catholic officials and making the case that he was recreating something that they had done. What is important about that is that it was this cognitive framework, a framework that came out oven is in, unintentionally, but picked up in rome, and by the time it leaves rome, its a framework that has been circulated around the world, and by the time now that centuries have again on this is the way that jews have lived for centuries it actually was natural to some people, including many jews, that they would live in ghettos, so if you say, oh, im putting them back in ghetto, its not complete my inconceivable that that is what he means, especially given that they later outcome is something that was haroldly imaginable. Now, the classic ghetto to run through very quickly very different than anything hitler would undertake. The function of the classic ghetto was protective in many ways. I mean, i dont want to overemphasize this point and take it too far, but the jews, in certainly in italy, and in many other places, were sometimes felt protected from the Wider Society in ghettos and they also the Wider Society felt protected from the juves as from the jews as well. The principle of discrimination was belief, and that means that jews could actually leave the ghettos if they changed their beliefs, if they converted, and the kind of segregation is what i call pourous, meaning they could come and good in some ghettos they had to be like venice they had to be back at night, for example, but they could leave during the day. The economic basis of the ghetto was enter dough pen dent so the jew dependent so the jews were regularly exchanging with the outside world. The physical space was usually overcrowded in all ghettos. I usually call the ghetto or sometimes call the ghetto a differentiating machine in that it starks out to take people who are somewhat different and it makes them even mo