Decivilisering en diabolisering. De transformatie van het Amerikaanse zwarte ghetto

This article analyzes the post-1960s transformation of America's dark ghetto in material reality and public discourse as the product of two interconnected processes. At the social-relational level, the ghetto has undergone a process of «decivilizing» in Elias's sense of the term, caused not by economic «mismatches», the excessive generosity of welfare, or the «culture of poverty» and «antisocial» impulses of its residents, but by the withdrawal of the State and the ensuing disintegration of public space and social relations in the urban core. This process is echoed, at the symbolic level, by the demonization of the black subproletariat via the trope of the «under-class», a scholarly myth anchored by the loathsome imagery of the fearsome «gang banger» and the dissolute «welfare mother». Decivilizing and demonization form a structural-cum-discursive couplet in which each element reinforces the other and where both serve in tandem to legitimize the State policy of urban abandonment and punitive containment responsible for the parlous State of the contemporary ghetto