I came across an interesting piece on today’s CBC News. The article asks us to rethink some words and phrases we use in our daily lingo. CBC Ottawa came up with a list of words which were submitted by readers as well as some of their journalists who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour. Seeking insights from anti-racism and language experts it turned out that a number of phrases which people use in everyday dialogue can be hurtful to various groups of people for the historical and cultural context of such terms.
Of these phrases, the term “ghetto” and “inner city” caught my attention greatly. As the article states:
[…] terms like ghetto and inner city grew out of the industrial revolution in North America. The word ghetto also has a painful historical root in Europe during the Holocaust, and was likely derived from Jewish settlements in Italy centuries ago. Meanwhile, from the late 1900s onwards, political rhetoric and media representation showed suburbs as pleasant, quiet and gentle areas, while inner city was seen as dangerous and risky (CBC Ottawa, 2021).
This enchantment of the suburbs and the tensions between city and the suburbs remind me of Paul L. Knox’s Metroburbia, USA (2008). The American Dream, as writer and historian James Truslow Adams coins in The Epic of America (1931), is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone. In depicting metroburbia—a fragmented mixtures of employment and residential settings, combining urban and suburban characteristics—Knox further notes that the entire residential fabric of metroburbia rests on the American Dream, founded on the promise of ever-increasing levels of material consumption, the expectation of single-family home ownership, the accumulation of wealth, and systematic upward social mobility through ingenuity and hard work (Knox 2008, 132).
There are numerous and various causes of suburban development; looking beyond what contribute to suburban development (the causes) Knox seeks to explore the why—why do these causes lead to the rise in suburban development. Placing human beings as the centre of the why Knox identifies self-awareness as the key force that interacts with the causes of contemporary suburban development. Self-awareness, in Knox’s words, is a state of mind as well as a commodity. With signs of new materialism appearing everywhere, people want nice things—things that act as symbols of style and distinctiveness; things that range from imported mineral water, designer clothes, expensive makeovers, to houses and cottages. With the emergence of the new economy that is based on digital technologies, economic, and cultural globalisation, new bourgeoisie and new petit bourgeoisie quickly emerged and gained significant economic influence.
To the class fraction generated by the new economy, the reenchanted suburbs proves to be the enchantment; an enchanted suburbia house feels right and in Knox words, is the right “stuff”. House, in any case, is more than a place for home, it is a medium in which clear statement about the owners themselves and their lifestyles could be pronounced. Material consumption hence gains yet another role—a role in the fulfillment of dreams, images, and pleasures. With the rise of the new role of material consumption and a rising emphasis on the ideological principles of houses, suburban homes and patterns of home-related consumption become a powerful social processes in which owning suburban house and shaping the house mold people’s consciousness of place, identity, and power.
Perhaps it is this enchantment of the suburbs, embedded with the ever-rising of materialism and its implication on social status, that further contributes to the decades-long divide between suburbs and inner cities.
The CBC article says that ghettos and inner cities are typically seen to be places where less refined people live—people who aren’t up to date culturally, development-wise. Thus using the terms “ghettos” or “inner cities” implies a negative connotation toward people of a certain socio-economic class (often associated with racialised groups) — typically those who have recently immigrated and often move to large metropolis areas and not suburbs.
If the streets of the ghetto are small streets, streets of the non-ghetto parts of the city could be the big streets. If the streets of the suburbia are big streets, streets in the city could then be small streets. This complex and fluid nature perhaps signals a time for us to rethink not only the use of phrases but also to realise the social, historical, and political context that give connotations to phrases that seem evermore quotidian.