Having read all three pieces because I will be leading the classroom discussion on Immigrant Neighborhoods in Global Cities, I decided to reflect here on my reaction to the piece that I found most fascinating: “The Enclave, the Citadel, and the Ghetto: What has Changed in the Post-Fordist US City.” As neither a minority nor an immigrant nor an upscale elitist, it seems odd that this piece would speak to me. Yet as I read it, I understood that such spatial clusterings reflected stagnation, or worse, regression, in our society. Marcuse accurately describes how the black ghetto causes the inhabitants to be outcasts in society, how the immigrants in their enclave are more of a congregation, and how the upscale arrogantly choose to dwell in citadels. One would expect that such social confinement and inflexibility were archaic and a thing of the past, and yet here Marcuse highlights how it is very much present in our society.

One piece that particularly stood out was the reference to the Jewish ghettos. Marcuse quotes a bishop’s explanation that the rationale was to makes Jews feel special once outside of the ghetto. This explanation is severely misleading and highlights the terrible nature of the ghetto. The placement of Jews in their own ghettos, or quarters as they are sometimes called, stemmed not from special treatment, but from unadulterated Anti-Semitism. To apply the bishop’s logic to the ghetto inhabitants nowadays: blacks are placed together because when they leave, they will feel special once they enter an all white town. The problem nowadays is even worse, because the blacks in the ghetto are considered outcasts and are practically shunned from general interaction. The truth is that placing blacks in their own ghettos stems from racism. And nearly every time Jews were placed in ghettos, they were tormented or killed; any marginalized people are vulnerable to this exact fate. The notion that a ghetto still exists in a country that prides itself on every citizen having personal rights is frightening; Marcuse notes that the concept of having ghettos for blacks stems from the post Civil War, when they were trying to figure out what to do with former slaves. Essentially, this special enclosure is an extension of maintaining control over blacks as they were when they were slaves. The ghettos must be stopped lest history (slavery, torture, and mass killings) repeat itself.