An anecdote regarding the encounter of racism against blacks and Jews:
In 1893, while finishing his studies at the University of Berlin, the Afroamerican scholar W.E.B. DeBois decided to make a brief european tour to catch up on the state of racism in the old continent. Until then DeBois—the first black man to earn a doctorate in the US—had assumed that racism was related exclusively to skin color and was unique to his country. He traveled to Italy, Switzerland, and Poland and saw firsthand the treatment that Jews received on a daily basis. The problem, he realized, was in every country he visited. Back in Germany, while visiting a village with a fellow student, Duneier says,
Dubois noticed that people were acting strangely toward the two of them. He assumed this was due to his being black until his friend quietly told him, “they think I may be a Jew. It is not you they object, it’s me.”1
DuBois did not use the word ghetto to refer to the black neighborhoods that began to emerge on the second decade of the 20th century in many American cities, but he did draw a parallel between the black and Jewish neighborhoods: “Russia has abolished the ghetto—shall we restore it?” And while the socioeconomic processes that led to the emergence of the American ghettos were clearly distinct from those of the Jewish ghettos, they undoubtedly shared many similarities:
Like Jews in Nazi Europe, blacks were stigmatized outcasts. Like Jews who were forced to wear yellow stars of David, blacks could not hide their identity. Jewish ghettoes were overcrowded, crammed with many more people than the space were built to house. Likewise, Harlem and the South Side of Chicago were packed with black families living doubled up and even tripled up. Jews did not choose to live in a ghetto; they were confined there by walls and the barrels of guns. Blacks, too, were confined to the black belts through the use of restrictive covenants, terror and discrimination.2
Beyond these similarities, the American and European ghettos are products of the same topology that underlies not only modern cities (0.28, 7.10, 7.11) but also gives an urbanistic expression to the treatment of alterity in the West. The other, if not openly enclosed and denied, must be hidden and relegated to the periphery of social activity. It must, in short, be made to disappear.
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