Welcome to the Ghetto (of Scientific Illiteracy)

It has an ugly sound, doesn't it? Originally, I understand, it was merely the Jewish quarter of a city, and as such, not necessarily poorer or more crowded or a place of imprisonment. In other times and places, however, the word took on more sinister connotations. I suspect that most Americans first became aware of the term in World War II, when the ghettos of Eastern Europe were thrust into our consciousness as indeed places of inhuman imprisonment, overcrowding, and starvation. In the sixties, the word came to mean the impoverished inner city, with its mostly black population. As a child of the sixties, I can attest that many of us then never knew that the ghetto had ever been anything but the mean streets of winos, heroin, and welfare (and the Elvis Presley song of that name).

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