The Transformation from Simple Slavery to Complex Wealth Theft
The White Construction of Black American Ghettos
It can’t be overstated that the ghettos are the creation of rich whites. It was an active, not a passive creation. It is also little misunderstood that black Americans did not end up in the “inner city” that became the “ghetto” because they wanted to, but because they were forced to by a combination of white violence and white political zoning of many cities when they are created for growth starting at the end of the 19th century.
It took decades of conditioning and violence to force the freed black Americans into those areas or black zones before redlines were drawn around them. Many, like that in St. Louis, were zoned deliberately next to industrial areas so blacks Americans could walk to the factories and sweep them or do other menial labor. Tenant housing was built by whites who took the rent out and did not re-invest it, letting the buildings degrade over the decades and decades. The lack of mortgages denied to black Americans prevented ownership, so black Americans owning and reinvesting in those apartments was not possible.
Essentially, this mortgage denial and rent remittance amounted to a system very much like the sharecropping farming system, and in truth not much different than slavery before the Civil War. The system was rent…
