The Oppressed Community In The Ghetto, A Janus-Gated Community

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According to Loic Wacquant, Ghetto was a Janus-Faced Institution, that is, an institution that on one hand benefit the people who control the ghetto and on the other hand also protect the people in it from contact with outside. However, it has transformed to hyper ghetto that benefit more for the control party than as a protection for the oppressed. Gated community is another spatial institution in America that makes race, both within and outside. By comparing the characteristic of ghetto and gated community, it’s obvious that these two spatial institutions are in two extreme location of racial domination: gated community is the oppressor and ghetto is the oppressed. Moreover, the state also plays a role in defining make and the making of spatial …show more content…

Social stigma meaning that people who live in the ghetto or the ghetto itself were seen by the mainstream public to be something negative and often time that negative feeling will apply to everyone living in the ghetto. For example, people in mainstream use the term as if it is representing crime and associated with ghetto. In America, ghetto have been racialized and stigmatized, that is, blacks were seen as criminal. The second characteristic is physical constraint. The mainstream society used institutions like police to control and establish boundaries of ghetto. The next characteristic is that ghetto became spatial confinement of people living in ghetto. It is hard for stigmatized black and Hispanic to escape ghetto and they are forced to stay in it with little opportunity. The final characteristic of ghetto is that ghetto has parallel institutions. The institutions that you can found in the mainstream society are also available in the ghetto. For example, in ghetto, they have black churches, clinic, restaurant and newspaper that specifically for the black or Hispanic. Alongside with the requirement of ghetto, ghetto also features several problems, including poor housing conditions, high unemployment rates, rape, murder and burglary

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