Inner City

Guidance:

Inner city and urban center are the preferred terms for an urban setting or neighborhoods where Black people or any other marginalized community reside.

The term ghetto has a complex history and its usage has transformed over time. Whether its use in NARA’s archival descriptions and authority records is potentially harmful or appropriate is highly context dependent, and it cannot not be uniformly replaced with another term. Each instance must be reviewed for context.

In archivist-supplied description, ghetto should be replaced with description that accurately reflects the contents of the records without using potentially harmful/non-preferred terminology. Because the term ghetto encompasses a constellation of ideas around religion, ethnicity, race, poverty, otherness, and socioeconomic marginalization, it is not possible to recommend a single replacement for it. Instead, describers will need to analyze the records that are described with the term to come up with alternate ways of describing them.

For example, in the case of a scope and content note that refers to certain government programs as “ghetto programs,” a describer could survey the records to determine the program(s) referred to as “ghetto programs” and replace the phrase with language describing the specific nature and characteristics of the programs. Or the describer may find that the remaining description in the scope and content note already accurately represents the records and that the phrase “ghetto programs” can be removed without any alternate description being supplied.

If ghetto or a variant appears in an original caption or title, the term should be retained, but the entire caption or title should be placed in quotation marks to indicate that it is creator-supplied, not archivist-supplied.  When possible, original titles and captions that include the term should be moved to the Catalog’s other title(s) field or the scope and content note, as appropriate, and the describer should supply a different title.

Exception:

Describers should continue to use the term ghetto to refer to the sections of cities and towns including where the Nazi regime and its allies segregated and forcibly confined Jewish people as part of the Holocaust. In the context of the Holocaust, ghetto remains the preferred term for these areas used by scholars and cultural institutions dedicated to this period. Describers should continue to use the term ghetto, where historically and/or geographically accurate, to refer to Jewish communities in Europe from the 16th to 20th centuries for Jews who emigrated to the U.S. prior to 1933.

If ghetto is used in this context in creator-supplied description, such as original titles or captions, it should not be placed in quotation marks or moved to another field.

Examples:

Example:
Title - San Diego, [California] - 157-2776-v.1 [Classification - Civil Unrest] -- Urban Center Informant Program Extremist Matters
Other Title - San Diego, [California] - 157-2776-v.1 [Classification - Civil Unrest] -- Ghetto Informant Program Extremist Matters
General Note - “San Diego, [California] - 157-2776-v.1 [Classification - Civil Unrest] -- Ghetto Informant Program Extremist Matters” was the original title of this item.
General Note - This archival description was reviewed and revised as part of the NARA reparative description initiative on [mm/dd/yyyy]. Original archival records have not been altered.

 

Example:
Scope and Content Note - This series consists of published reports, books, studies, newsletters, and other documents relating to grants and contracts. The records pertain to urban renewal programs, minority enterprises, inner city programs, and farmers and fishermen cooperatives. A few of the studies focus on Italian Americans, Harlem, the Lummi Indians, and Alaska.
General Note - This archival description was reviewed and revised as part of the NARA reparative description initiative on [mm/dd/yyyy]. Original archival records have not been altered

 

Example:
General Note - The Judenrat (Jewish Council) was a governing body of Jews charged by the Nazis with administering civil functions of the Ghetto, including the operation of the Jewish Ghetto Police.
General Note - This archival description was reviewed and not revised as part of the NARA reparative description initiative on [mm/dd/yyyy]. The term “Ghetto” is a preferred term when referring to sections of cities and towns where Jewish people were forcibly confined.

Where does this apply?

This applies to changes in descriptions and authority records. See the Appendix: Reparative Description Preferred Terms for guiding principles and general guidance.

Rationale:

The term ghetto has its origins in the compulsory segregation of Jewish people in Venice where it referred to the area of the city where the Jewish population was confined. Over time, the term came to refer to similar areas established in other European cities, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was used in the United States to refer to Jewish immigrant neighborhoods in American cities. By the mid-twentieth century, ghetto became widely-used in the United States to refer to predominantly Black neighborhoods in urban areas experiencing poverty, racism, and economic marginalization. 

The deployment of the concept of the ghetto in sociology and urban studies to describe the Black experience of segregation, economic marginalization, and systemic racism in the United States beginning in the 1940s was, and remains, contested. Outside of the realm of scholarship, the term ghetto contains strong derogatory connotations. Widespread and indiscriminate use of the term in archival descriptions may contribute to the pathologizing of Black communities and culture.

Resources:

• Final Grant and Contact Product Files, 1970 - 1978
• “Ghettos” in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia
• Schwartz, Daniel B. Ghetto: The History of a Word. Harvard University Press, 2019.
• Duneier, Mitchell. Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016
• Small, Mario Luis. “Four Reasons to Abandon the Idea of ‘The Ghetto.’” City and Community 7, no. 4 (2008): 389–98.