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I'm black and this country is making me sick with the race terminology. What I notice is some words that were never meant to be racial slang and sometimes derogatory are now getting that way like the words ghetto and urban.
I think the reason that "urban" is used for Black aspects in terms of culture is that as a group, Black people have a higher percentage of people that live in an urban area. So, in turn, I think many people equate black with urban, right or wrong. 58% of Black people in the US live in a metro area and I believe the percentage in urban areas is in the 80's in terms of percentage. Keep in mind that a community with 2500 people or more is considered "urban" according to the US census.
With that said, even in states like NY, you can find Black folks in rural and small towns like Lyons, Clyde, Sodus, Prattsburgh, Williamson, Fallsburg, New Paltz and marlboro, among others.
Times have changed but the language has not caught up. Most language related to cities dates from the 1950s, the great decade of "white flight" and suburbanization. "Urban" became code for everything that was dark and dangerous.
I live in the "inner-city," Greenwich Village in Manhattan, but my life is hardly what most people think of when they hear term.
When "suburban" became normative, "urban" became about being "other."
I thought "white flight" got big in the 60s. I think in the 1950s the image of "urban America" was still like The Honeymooners and West Side Story. (Okay WSS was largely about Puerto Ricans, who are Hispanic, but I think a good deal of them were fairly "white" Hispanics)
I've always found it interesting that once a neighborhood/area labeled "Inner City" is gentrified, it is subsequently marketed as an "Intown Neighborhood" or "Intown Living."
Didn't it start in the music/radio industry? I seem to recall that the music industry applied "Urban" to a category of music in the 80s to avoid using a term that would make non-black people perceive that they were excluded from listening to that type of music. The radio industry may have adopted it to make the stations that played urban music more appealing to advertisers, to make it seem as if a people of many ethnicities were listening to the station.
I've always found it interesting that once a neighborhood/area labeled "Inner City" is gentrified, it is subsequently marketed as an "Intown Neighborhood" or "Intown Living."
Code words indeed.
"Inner city" itself is a code word. Did you know that the sociologist who coined the term back in the 1920s also had a term for the "outer city"? The inner city simply referred to the residential areas of a traditional city that surround the "central business district". The outer city was the rest of the city, beyond the inner city. He observed that most social pathology was found in the inner city neighborhoods, but also in many inner cities, wealth could be found (e.g., Boston's Beacon Hill, Chicago's Gold Coast, Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, Brooklyn's Park Slope, etc.) The term has since been bastardized to mean any area within the city limts, and in some cases, suburbs where social pathology is high (e.g., Compton, CA and Irvington, NJ).
I thought "white flight" got big in the 60s. I think in the 1950s the image of "urban America" was still like The Honeymooners and West Side Story. (Okay WSS was largely about Puerto Ricans, who are Hispanic, but I think a good deal of them were fairly "white" Hispanics)
That wasn't just the image, that was the truth! American cities were much more diverse in income, race and ethnicity in the 1950s than they are today.
Ben Around, as a Twin Cities resident you might appreciate this: I was surprised once to find an informal group of mothers with young kids advertising themselves as being from the "inner city;" excited to see where these city residents were meeting I was a bit startled to find that they were mostly all living in Cottage Grove! (for the non-Minnesotans, Cottage Grove is a suburb, and certainly not considered "inner city" by an stretching of the imagination or definition...) I agree that "inner city" has long been used out of context. I can only guess that these moms (who did seem to be serious) were using it primarily to define themselves as different from the people living even farther out from the urban core, but in this case weren't using it to suggest crime or other problems that are often associated when people start talking about the "inner city". I suppose once you start looking at America's urban sprawl then "inner", even when from just a strictly geographic standpoint, starts to mean drastically different things to different people.
Ben Around, as a Twin Cities resident you might appreciate this: I was surprised once to find an informal group of mothers with young kids advertising themselves as being from the "inner city;" excited to see where these city residents were meeting I was a bit startled to find that they were mostly all living in Cottage Grove! (for the non-Minnesotans, Cottage Grove is a suburb, and certainly not considered "inner city" by an stretching of the imagination or definition...) I agree that "inner city" has long been used out of context. I can only guess that these moms (who did seem to be serious) were using it primarily to define themselves as different from the people living even farther out from the urban core, but in this case weren't using it to suggest crime or other problems that are often associated when people start talking about the "inner city". I suppose once you start looking at America's urban sprawl then "inner", even when from just a strictly geographic standpoint, starts to mean drastically different things to different people.
Cottage Grove? Amazing!
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