Word: ghettoes
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...plays fresh; it is their powerful moral undertow. The characters may be caparisoned in quattrocento raiment, but they speak to eternal situations. When Othello says, "I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation/ That chamberers have," he escapes temporal boundaries and becomes the chorus of the ghetto. Similarly, Shylock cries, "... Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" The tone of the merchant's queries seems lifted not from ancient Venice but from some current Security Council dispute...
Even if they wanted to escape responsibility to the ghetto, middle-class blacks would not be able to do so. Only a few years out of the ghetto themselves, most have left close friends and relatives behind. Beyond that, many middle-class doctors, lawyers, building contractors and storekeepers have clients in the ghetto. Says Robert Perkins, a partner in a New Orleans architectural firm that designs its largest projects for the poor: "I can't forget who I am dealing with since I have to go back to them. They are our clout...
Particularly in the South, many middle-class people continue to live in the ghetto. In Winston-Salem, N.C., Alderman Charles C. Ross, a successful businessman, elects to remain in the neat white clapboard home that he bought in 1947. "Staying here," he explains, "is my way of saying to other blacks: 'You can make it if you try hard enough...
...black underclass has scored some surprising gains in housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development reports sharp declines since 1960 in both overcrowding in black ghetto housing and in the number of houses and apartments without complete plumbing...
There are also some brighter signs in education. Though reading scores in ghetto elementary schools remain 15 to 19 points below the national norm, test scores in New York City show that the decline has been at least temporarily arrested in the past year. Since 1967 the percentage of black ghetto males who drop out of high school has fallen from 24% to 18%. To its credit, the Nixon Administration since 1969 has more than doubled federal aid to black colleges, to $242 million this year...