Taking up the "ghetto" conversation... when is an area a ghetto?

Is Stoke Newington a Turkish ghetto? Is one end of Spitalfields / Bethnal Green a Bangladeshi ghetto?
Both are known for the concentration of one ethnicity / country of origin that they contain ... but are they ghettoes?

Is an Eruv a ghetto?
It's basically a delineated area within which some of the rules about the Sabbath can be got-around.
But it's going to attract more Jews than gentiles into an area, is it therefore a de-facto ghetto?

And is a ghetto necessarily a bad thing? After all, those living there probably feel comfortable surrounded by people of similar beliefs and background.

If it is a bad thing, e.g. for the lack of integration it suggests, how do you counter it?
Should you counter it?
After all, people usually end up moving out into other areas.
Or are some ghettoes too big for that to happen now?

When I lived in Bow in the 1990's, I was given a lift home one night by a young man of Gujarati parentage who, you'd have said, was very integrated.
As we passed through Whitechapel he was bemoaning the state of it, and wrinkling his nose about it being "all Bengalis now".

Shocked?
Yes I was.
I knew that he and his parents had experienced some seriously nasty racial intolerance when he was a kid ... and yet here he was being very sniffy indeed about Bengalis.

But if they are brought up within those parameters, their own opportunities are inevitably limited by them.



Get rid of faith schools, for starters.



No.

The BNP was certainly picking up black supporters back when Derek Beacon was around in London. And there's absolutely nothing to suggest that racism is somehow exclusive to any one group.

Mintball wrote:And there's absolutely nothing to suggest that racism is somehow exclusive to any one group. It most certainly isn't. As for ghetto. The term is very misused these days. We don't have ghettos, like Venice was or the Warsaw one in WW2. They are ghettos in the true sense of the term. Prison like. Where people were locked up. We don't have people having to wear yellow badges like Jewish people were made to wear in Poland and other countries, or indeed historically in Venice in the 14th Century and in England before that (1218). I found this if anyone's interested http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... enice.html Though I find hierarchies in a ghetto somewhat strange: The German, Italian and Levantine communities were independent, yet lived side by side to one another. A hierarchy existed among them, in which the Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese)/Levantine Jews were at the top of the scale, Germans in the middle and Italians at the lowest rung.

Mintball wrote:And there's absolutely nothing to suggest that racism is somehow exclusive to any one group. It most certainly isn't. As for ghetto. The term is very misused these days. We don't have ghettos, like Venice was or the Warsaw one in WW2. They are ghettos in the true sense of the term. Prison like. Where people were locked up. We don't have people having to wear yellow badges like Jewish people were made to wear in Poland and other countries, or indeed historically in Venice in the 14th Century and in England before that (1218). I found this if anyone's interested http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... enice.html Though I find hierarchies in a ghetto somewhat strange: The German, Italian and Levantine communities were independent, yet lived side by side to one another. A hierarchy existed among them, in which the Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese)/Levantine Jews were at the top of the scale, Germans in the middle and Italians at the lowest rung.

Why? Isn't the issue not faith schools but people with different cultural backgrounds. Might not a better solution have been to have said you can live here if you convert to Christianity and fit in with our traditional ways?

It's happening in Stoke and other areas now.2nd generation Asians are complaining about Poles taking "our" jobs

Is this an attempt at a provocative post?

For children born in an almost monocultural ghetto / area, faith schools are another block across the path into the wider country, community and integration.

As for offering citizenship in return for conversion to Christianity, that smells of ethnic cleansing rather than integration.

Well the Asians should stop moaning and work harder then.

What a weird post. So many bizarre assumptions. If a person IS a Muslim, or a Jew, or Shinto, or Buddhist, or Scientologist, or Mormon, or Quaker, what on earth makes you think they would even consider "converting" to another religion? I may abhor all flavours of religion, but I still understand that (sadly) the religious are morally committed to their religion of choice (or should I say brainwashing, but that's another story).

Different cultural backgrounds? That's the opposite of the problem. The rich mix of cultural backgrounds is precisely what gives all metropolitan communities their buzz and vitality.

"Fit in with our traditional ways"? What traditional ways are those, and "fit in" how exactly? All take up Morris Dancing?

By emulating Dally's beliefs, intolerances and phobias.
Obviously.