A ghetto is essentially a sociospatial device that enables a dominant status group in an urban setting simultaneously to ostracize and exploit a subordinate group endowed with negative symbolic capital, that is, an incarnate property perceived to make its contact degrading by virtue of what Max Weber calls negative social estimation of honour. Put differently, it is a relation of ethnoracial control and closure built out of four elements: (i) stigma; (ii) constraint; (iii) territorial confinement; and (iv) institutional encasement. The resulting formation is a distinct space, containing an ethnically homogenous population, which finds itself forced to develop with it a set of interlinked institutions that duplicates the organizational framework of the broader society from which that group is banished and supplies the scaffoldings for the constructions of its specific style of life and social strategies. This parralel institutional nexus affords the subordinate group a measure of protection, autonomy and dignity, but at the cost of locking it in a relationship of structural subordination and dependency. in Loic Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the race question in the US, New Left Review, January/February 2002, pp. 50-51. The thing is, this incisive analysis of the ghetto is the detail of how south Afrika is run. The assimilation of blacks into parliament, ceiling positions within government, the police and all other social (governmental, legal, educational, etc) institutions gives a measure and an illusion of autonomy, dignity and arguably some sense of protection but at what cost? I think we all know it. However, the incredible thing for me is that although this is supposed to be US ghetto specific, it is astonishingly uniform in structure, content and outcomes with the ghettos of occupied Azania in the southern tip of Afrika. Perhaps the isomorphic relationality between the ghetto, the kasi and the favela, can and should be extended throughout all three sociospatial entities since it produces the same man and woman who is respectively, not a man and woman at all. It constructs the same biographies, which have narrative arcs that are no narrative arcs at all. It produces institutions of failure that are propped up by myths of white innate intellectual superiority. It is overcrowded with taverns and time wasting sports facilies that get us nowhere. The schools are in ICU and so is our intellectual farm, the young ones. I do not even want to engage the already open box of Pandora that is us supplying white supremacy with the scaffoldings for the construction and maintainance of the specific style of life it has prescribed for us in the township since it began taxing us for our land and later totally annexed it before confining it where it pleased, taking for itself all the arable an mineral-filled lands.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 06:37:37 +0000
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