Search results

AbstractThe steady growth of the post‐war suburban Black middle class has been overshadowed by the mis‐characterization of the suburbs as conformist and racially homogeneous. Until recently, race remained an ever present yet unexplored dimension of studies of suburban communities. However, new suburban histories and a growing collection of black middle‐class suburban community case studies replace the monochrome descriptions of suburban life with an analysis that places the suburb within its regional, political, economic, and ideological landscape.

Nearly a decade into the new millennium, many traditionally black ghettos like Harlem, the Fillmore, and Chicago's South Side have experienced declining population and gentrification. Now seems like a fitting time to evaluate the conceptual merits of the term and the trajectory of research on the " ghetto." Much of the research on poverty neighborhoods focuses on Chicago—but is Chicago's South Side representative of poverty neighborhoods (and ghettos) in other cities? Recently, this issue has been widely discussed on the Community and Urban Sociology listserve; as a follow–up, we invited an international group of scholars to offer their views on the subject in this Symposium on the ghetto.