The Replication of the Underclass

                        At first there was no such thing as segregation, there was only integration of blacks throughout the white communities. But why exactly did we go from integration to segregation just ten or twenty years later? It has turned into a problem that we continue to experience today and the ghetto and underclass has emerged from this. A hatred of blacks by whites formed in the years that voluntary segregation took place. During strikes factories brought in blacks by train as “strike breakers” to cross strike lines and continue to have the factories making goods. With whites trying to get better wages and working conditions they ultimately lost their jobs to blacks who had no knowledge of strikes and this was just one spark that ignited later segregation. All types of housing discrimination took place where realtors would only sell certain homes to blacks and the migration of whites soon took place to^th century ghettos hadn’t been created yet. During World War I and II production went up and more labor was needed so blacks were recruited from the south only creating more hostility towards them.  Eventually more and more blacks started getting attacked individually by mobs of whites and obviously they felt threatened by this so they lived where they felt the most safe, which was with other blacks. This strength in numbers mentality helped shaped the segregation and so whites and blacks lived on opposite sides of the city. Both individual whites and blacks were attacked by the opposite race and property was damaged in riots that took place in major cities and this only further enforced the strength in numbers idea.

the suburbs. Even blacks with money and high status jobs like lawyers, doctors, etc. had a hard time finding good housing other than the run down houses with extremely high prices. All classes of blacks were forced into the same areas of housing and they had no choice. Whites started fighting the integration of the wealthy blacks as well by forming communities that would enforce racial policies to keep the neighborhood all white. These “neighborhood improvement associations” claimed they stood to protect property values but by this they really meant was preventing blacks from entering the neighborhood. Even though these policies are no longer in effect today the problems that it has caused are still present in our society. The underclass is still present and they are in the ghettos that emerged despite all the regulations on discrimination and racial segregation it is a persistent problem. Not only is the problem of the underclass and ghettos still present but they are much worse than 50 years before despite government interference in attempting to solve the problem. These deeply imbedded racial ideologies and practices by institutions within society are what created the underclass and kept them poor and in ghettos. In the first two chapters of American Apartheid it is said that prior to the 19

Both whites and black took part in suburbanization, but whites moved to high income neighborhoods whereas blacks moved to other run down communities just outside the cities. The “suburbs” that blacks moved to I would not consider suburbs because they essentially were just moving from smaller ghettos to larger ghettos. With things like redlining, “blockbusting” and other racial boundary techniques becoming illegal one could think that things might get better right? As already said this isn't the case, because now the mobility of the underclass is very limited.  The ghettos have an endless cycle of poverty within them that limit the mobility to move out of ghettos. The unevenness, isolated, concentrated, and centralized clusters of black neighborhoods create this sense of hypersegregation that is present in all of the major cities in the United States. Detroit is the perfect example of hypersegregation as the city is literally cut in two halves with one side for blacks and one for whites. Eminem was not kidding when he talked about 8 mile road in his movies and music. The blacks who live in hypersegregation, packed in small communities away from other populations are the people who suffer the most from poverty and isolation. As whites started using tactics to maintain racial boundaries this reproduced the ghetto and continued its existence today. Whites did not want to live anywhere near these black ghettos or even walk through them so their avoidance of them was high so obviously this kept segregation going and it’s racial boundaries. Thanks to these practices and discriminations that took place many years ago we have to deal with problems of the underclass and the ghetto, which seem only to be growing.